It can be hard to keep regular meetings interesting, whether that’s a book club, or a community of practice such as the “PM Club” that I lead weekly with my team. 

Even with good questions as prompts, I found just bringing together the group to talk about an article or a chapter didn’t seem to be quite enough after a while. Particularly as the team grew, it became harder to have great discussions. And what came out of the discussions? Could I really be sure that everyone walked away with an understanding that they could apply to their work? Particularly when we did this week… after week… after week… for months. It got a little old, honestly. 

But what else is there to do? 

That’s what this series is about.

Other options include:

• Vote & discuss
  • Vote on your preferences or opinions based on the article/chapter, and discuss
• Try it out
  • Based on something in the article/chapter, try it out as a team
• Special guests
  • Have a special guest present at the meeting
• Metrics sharing
  • Share metrics 
• Round ups
  • After an event, conference, or just quarterly to each other, share what you’ve learned or what you’re working on
• Go real
  • Find real-world examples of something in your discipline you can share
• Split up
  • Split up into smaller groups to discuss and then re-combine

There’s nothing wrong with getting your team together and asking thoughtful questions to engage in a dialogue based on something you’ve read/watched/listened to. That’s a great tool to have in your toolbelt. However, it’s good to have other options as well. 

I’ll be writing blog articles with examples of how I’ve run some of these other types of meetings to change things up, and adding links to the above list as I go. I’m curious what others are doing to keep their meetings interesting as well!