Staying Focused

Many times when we hold meetings, we think we’re communicating, but we’re not. According to Bill Daniels, co-owner of American Consulting & Training, 80 percent of the problems with meetings revolve around three things – you don’t know or clarify the meeting’s purpose, you don’t have the correct agenda, or you have the wrong people in the room. If you get these three things defined and corrected, you can use various tools to help the meeting stay focused. One of the tools is using the OSIR presentation method. OSIR is an acronym for the following:

• Output expectation. What are you going to deliver to whom and when?

Status. Where are you in relationship to that expectation? “The O and the S have to be reviewed together,” says Daniels. “What did I intend to do and what in fact, is getting done? When there is a gap, we have what is called an issue, which is the I in OSIR.

Issue. What causes the gap? Daniels explains that there are two forms of the issue; one is, "Yes, I’m having problems and I am working on them. I have the resources and I can solve the problems." This is the type of issue we don’t bring to the meeting – we keep it to ourselves, unless we don’t know how we can solve the problems. The second category comes out of the first. "I committed to doing this and know now that given my resources; I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I can’t deliver as promised.” Now, it becomes an issue that you need to
discuss. Believe it or not, sometimes the issue is that we are exceeding expectations.

Request or Recommendation. This is why you need to call the meeting because you can’t solve it yourself. You phrase this as, "I need the following to change…the expectation, the scope, or I need more resources than I currently have."

“The understanding is – when you’re not going to meet your commitments, the problem is no longer yours – it belongs to the team,” says Daniels. “Until the team has these four pieces of information (in the form of OSIR), they are not empowered to participate in the discussion. Managers who make this a presentation template will find that the meeting comes to life; people will stop missing meetings because they will understand the importance of the meeting. Over time, you will find that your team grows in their ability to work together as a team in that sequence. Once the team is fully mature (a team that’s been together for 18 to 24 months), you can make multi-million dollar decisions in 12 minutes with this procedure.”