Business across cultures

MEETING TYPES OF MEETING
Brainstorming meetings tap into the creativity and expertise of a group to come up with ideas or solve a problem. By involving folks with different backgrounds, skills, and perspectives, these meetings help you find solutions you can’t come up with by yourself.
Examples of topics a brainstorming session can cover:
Coming up with new feature ideas for your product.
Ideating concepts for an upcoming marketing campaign.
Finding solutions for improving an inefficient internal process.
💡 Tips for brainstorming meetings:
Define a clear goal or problem statement. You need to make sure every attendee has the same understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. “Increase revenue” isn’t clear. “Find new sales approaches for our student persona” is.
Let people first generate ideas alone. As Teresa Torres writes in Continuous Discovery Habits, many studies have found that individuals generate more diverse and original ideas than groups. Let folks write out ideas by themselves first, then use the group to refine, combine, and select the best ones.
Encourage ‘terrible ideas’. Wild suggestions often lead to unexpected yet viable follow-up ideas. Make people comfortable sharing such thoughts by not assessing their feasibility early in the meeting and encouraging senior folks to go first with some wacky ideas; others will then follow.  Consider an agile approach. Project planning sessions are a staple of the waterfall model, in which every project phase and task moves sequentially. Such a method works well when the project is predictable–these days, few are. Agile thrives in complex and unpredictable circumstances because of its short, iterative cycles.
 Include a premortem. Dedicate some meeting time–or a separate event–to a premortem to identify the most significant risks of your project. (“Imagine we’re at the end of the project, and it’s a failure. What went wrong?”) Then create contingency plans for everything you think could go wrong, so it doesn’t.
The kickoff meeting marks the start of a project. Its purpose is to bring the entire team together, highlight milestones and other agreements from the planning process, and ensure everyone is clear on their responsibilities and objectives.
💡 Tips for Kickoff meetings:
Don’t conflate project planning and kickoff. Unless you’re doing a small project, it’s most effective to keep the two meetings separate. Otherwise, the kickoff meeting becomes a draining and confusing event instead of an energizing and clear start to your project.
📚️ Further reading
Project Kickoff Meeting (Adobe)
How To Run Project Kickoff Meetings: The Ultimate Guide (The Digital Project Manager)
4. Check-in meetings
👯‍♀️ Synonyms and similar meeting types: Status update meeting, progress reviews, product reviews
🎯 Goals: Accountability, information gathering and sharing
Managers hold check-in meetings to monitor a team’s or individual’s progress against earlier-agreed objectives – say, during project planning. Sometimes such events are for information gathering. But their underlying function is usually to enforce accountability so people stay on track.
Check-in meetings are often planned at recurring intervals, such as weekly or monthly, with the same attendees. You can also use these gatherings to clarify next steps or address challenges if they involve the entire group.