Organising Information for Meetings
to Significantly Improve Meeting Outcomes

What is the biggest obstacle to effective communication in meetings?

[Focus] Memory Limits Results

Two classic psychology studies say MEMORY.

This month we look at one of these. It shows how our limited memory severely restricts our ability to produce long term impact and results from meetings, conferences and workshops.

Some classic findings in psychology show how important it is to consider peoples’ memory limitations when you want to communicate ideas, reach agreements, and drive behavioural change from meetings.  Every effective meeting drives behavioural change. Ineffective meetings, sadly, don't produce any measurable result at all.

These memory limitations also influence behaviour in conversations with co-workers, managers and subordinates, as well as in meetings.

[Awareness] Psychological Studies Provide Insight

John, a business development executive, recently went to a conference where he hoped to gain new insights and improve his productivity and performance. He came away impressed but overwhelmed by the amount of information that had been presented. He took a lot of notes, but didn't have a particular focal point or plan to apply this new knowledge. Two months on, his notes were still sitting in his drawer. Some of the knowledge had come out in conversations in the first few weeks back, and he had a pleasant memory of the conference. But he didn't know how he would justify his attendance to his boss next year. So what was it that limited the take-home value John achieved in the longer term?

Early studies in psychology showed that people had “roughly seven” pieces of attention, or working memory (see George Miller's seminal paper from 1956). It seemed that people can hold in mind and remember around seven different bits of information, for a fairly short period (say, a few minutes) until they were able to write them down.  For example, seven numbers in a telephone number, seven words or seven unrelated concepts.

More recent studies (Cowan, 2001, sheds new light on the issue) show that people actually have more like four “chunks” of attention available.  You can see from the graph in figure 1 that generally, as the number of things to remember increases, the overall memory score decreases.

Figure 1: As number of items to remember increases, the probability of remembering any of them correctly drastically drops off.

So what is a “chunk” of information? Well, chunks actually vary in size.  A piece of new information is likely to take up one chunk.  For example; the exact budget for this year's conference.  But if we're on more familiar territory, we can store lots of related items within one chunk.  Let’s say we have an event taking place for the third year running, and every year it brings along the same group of people.  I may remember that we’ve got marketing, communications, strategy and policy people coming along, while still having a few chunks free to deal with other info.

So if you're communicating ideas to someone, present it in a small number of bite-size chunks. And if your conference, or your strategic plan, or your presentation, has more than four overarching themes, don't expect anyone to remember or be able to apply them all.

[Awareness] Typical Problems with Meetings

These concepts are important to consider in events which are information-rich, like conferences and other types of meetings.  Common problems are:

• A meeting may cover a lot of new ground for some people, and be all old-hat for others.  Some will be swimming in the deep end before long.  This will affect the take-home value different people get.
• Without the chance to discuss how information applies, i.e. to “chunk” the information within their current knowledge, people will shortly forget what they heard, and lose the benefits of hearing it. However, when you do give people this opportunity, they can apply and remember the information much more because they have chunked it and made it relevant.
• Memory of a talk or a conversation will fade very quickly.  Structures and processes are needed to help people remember.

[Solution] Questions to Answer for Effective Meetings

If people can’t remember something, they can’t act on it.  If they can’t act on something they heard in a meeting because they can’t remember it, what was the point of the meeting?  These questions must be asked, along with the following:

• How do you ensure that all the information shared in a meeting produces its intended result?
• How will people apply the information to what they already know, thereby remembering it?
• How do you limit the number of topics to drive a stronger outcome from each individual one?

[Traction] Tips on Improving Your Meetings

These questions which should be always answered in the design and running of effective and productive meetings.

Key principles to work with in the design of effective meetings are:

1. Finding common themes to build the meeting around, so that people have a simple framework to make sense of it all.
2. Helping people discuss not just what the information is, but how it applies to them. There are many different methods to support this, for example, pair off and have short 2-minute conversations standing up, or group discussions of 5 or less people per group. Ask people: what stood out from what you have heard? How will you apply that knowledge when you get back to work?

Even with the best intentions, many meetings are self-defeating because of the sheer amount of information covered.  Would you rather people remembered four crucial messages well enough to act on them, or fragments of many different messages, well enough to say, “I think it went well, but it was so long ago now…”

FAST Meetings Co. use these principles to design, facilitate and coach in the implementation of effective meetings; conferences, strategic processes and in-house meetings.

References

Cowan N. The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity.  Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 2000, 24, 87-185.
George A. Miller. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
Murdock, B. B. The serial position curve in free recall.  Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1962, 64, 482-488.