by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright June 2015
Meetings are love-hate for business people. This is a tip that will put more love into your meetings.
Conducting meetings is a learned skill. This means that practicing will improve the process. The question becomes: How to practice? How to practice at places other than real meetings?
One way to practice is at social clubs such as Toastmasters International. Another is to... slay dragons with your local Fantasy Roll Playing (FRP) group.
It turns out that FRP games and business meetings have a lot in common:
o There is a scenario presented that the players must navigate -- The skill practiced here is describing scenarios so that other people at the meeting understand what this meeting is about -- they know what problem they are here to solve. In FRP games this is the role of the Dungeon Master (DM). In business meetings this is the role of the person who has a problem that needs a solution, quite often the person who calls the meeting. Doing this well means the meeting will feel relevant and the participators will feel they are contributing to something meaningful. (Note: for even more scenario describing practice the DM should personally create the scenario, not use a store-bought one.)
o The players and the DM are cooperating in navigating the scenario -- The players are looking for ways to solve the problem the DM has presented, and both the DM and the players are looking for a successful conclusion. There is a lot of cooperating being learned. And no one wants to be wasting time on distractions or irrelevancies, so the participants learn how to call these out politely and quickly move on.
o There is lots of brainstorming going on -- Players, especially accomplished players, love coming up with novel solutions. When the players come up with a neat, new way of solving the problem, that adds a lot of thrill to the accomplishment. This is practicing out of the box thinking.
o FRP is low risk -- Your character just got eaten by the dragon? Ah well... time to roll up a new character, and that is the total expense.
FRP is lower risk, so this is a good place to experiment with meeting conduct innovations. This includes practicing skills such as keeping players on target, as in, not letting them spend time on irrelevant distractions, and how to handle creature comforts, such as providing a good playing space and food for the duration.
o The setting isn't the same -- FRP is a game. The setting isn't going to be the same as in a business meeting, so some "translating" in conduct skills will have to be done. But these should come quickly.
Business meetings and FRP games aren't the same, but they have a lot in common. So if you want to spend more time on practicing how to conduct meetings, look to FRP games as a way to put in the hours.
--The End--