PIES at your meeting

PIES. Yum. Who doesn’t like pie?

But on this occasion, I’m not talking about a tasty pastry and meat/fruit filling, oh no. I’m talking about a method of co-operative learning developed by Dr Spencer Kagan and that I learned whilst I was teaching. I recently thought that this model might be really useful to apply to modern, grown up meetings too. It works like this:

PIES

• P: Positive Interdependence
• I: Individual Accountability
• E: Equal Participation
• S: Simultaneous Interaction
  

These principles ensure that group interaction in a meeting remains structured and focused to maximise the impact and achievement and meet the goals of the meeting. Without these things, the participants are not accountable for their contributions and often results in a few doing most of the work while others do little or none…because let’s be honest, there’s nothing worse to be at a meeting where you could have just found everything out via email or phone call or where your contributions aren’t going towards anything constructive, or where some participants are just there for the free lunch. OK, there are some things worse…but in meeting terms, these are bad.

OK, so these terms were invented for working with children, but I’d far rather attend a meeting where I was required to put in work, learn something new, take something away, rather than just do the same old, same old and get no where. How might these work in practice?

Positive Interdependence

Everyone at the meeting needs to be able to depend on each other for the meeting to succeed. One can do this by having a shared goal or aim for the meeting and every attendee having a specific role required for the success of the meeting (e.g. chair, note taker, time keeper, expert, presenter, etc).  Meetings will also be able to share the success of attaining the meeting’s goal because everyone has played their part and no one was a ‘free-loader’. Ask yourself this on behalf of your meeting attendees:

“Is my gain your gain? Is help necessary to succeed/attain the aim of the meeting?”

Individually Accountable

Everyone tries harder when they know they’re going to be asked to respond or feedback to the wider group, don’t they? We’ve all been there at the group sessions when it’s two people who have worked on the task and they are the ones that feedback whilst the other six people in the group just sit back, relax and chat amongst themselves. Not good enough. Whilst being at a meeting isn’t a test, if everyone is required to respond to something in their own way, every individual will think more about the task at hand. For example, you could colour-code responses, randomly select people to respond, have colleagues paraphrase. Ask yourself in your meeting preparation:

“Is individual public performance required?”

Equal Participation

So often at a meeting or in group work, one person does the thinking, saying out loud and the writing and this somehow constitutes group or team work…no it doesn’t! Surely everyone should have to participate in team work activities. The easiest way to do this is to adopt a turn based structure when responses or work is required. Time can also be a useful way to ensure equal participation – so often there are some participants that go on and on and won’t shut up and others who say nothing. If everyone is clear that all participants in the meeting are required to give a response to a topic and they need to do so by not talking for more than one minute – everyone knows where they stand and can prepare. Thinking time is much under-estimated! Give your participants time to think of their response. I’m dreadful at responding to something off the hoof – give me a couple of minutes to jot down an idea or response first. Ask yourself in meeting prep:

“How equal is the participation?”

Simultaneous Interaction

Surely successful meetings require one person to speak at a time…don’t they?! In a team meeting of eight people, one talks, seven listen.

What if everyone in the meeting paired up and talked about the same (or different) topics? Then at least four people are responding and four are listening. Or, in other words, four times as many ideas and responses are generated to the topic than in the traditional meeting style. There may be some golden nuggets in the pair work that would otherwise be lost in the formality of one-at-a-time meetings. As yourself:

“What percentage are overtly active at once?”

If you want to know more about these ideas, search for Kagan and Co-operative Learning. There’s bound to be something, including a whole bunch of structures which will translate well to meetings. Exercises such as ‘centre piece‘ where everyone is required to jot down an idea on a piece of paper and continually swap with the paper in the middle of the table; or ‘think, pair, share‘ where participants are given time to think, then pair up and both share their ideas; or ‘rally coach‘ where individuals take turns to work out the solution to a problem with support from another and then swap over for the next problem.

Or, if all else fails, you could bring physical pie to your meetings. That would help.

Do you have any other great meeting ideas for getting people involved?