This Framework Fixes ANY Chaotic Meeting

Key Takeaways

People hate meetings, especially if you're working in a company, meetings are something that like people mock all the time. They become a meme. They become a running joke. And there's all these statistics about how much people hate meetings, maybe this one, this one. But all of that can be true, and at the same time what's also true is that meetings are where the most important decisions and almost all of the strategy happens at companies of every size. And so, especially as the AI overlords take over and we've got all of these tools that can pretty much like do all the work for us and brainstorm, etc., there's still going to be a place in the world for humans coming together, whether it's in person or virtually, and making decisions based on their subjective opinions, based on their experience, etc., etc. And so, at AJ&Smart, what we try to teach people to do is instead of just hating meetings and instead of accepting that they suck, we teach them simple frameworks and tools to make them better. And what I'm going to show you today is a very simple framework called the 4 Cs, which I wrote about the book The Workshop Playbook, which you can get for free down below in the description. And this adds structure to a session or a meeting or whatever it is where people come together and have to make decisions and solve problems. It adds a structure so you can stay on track even within the chaos. What you're about to see is a recording of me teaching at our Full Stack Facilitator Training in California. You can also check that out down below in the description. We've got one coming up next July 2026. You should definitely come to it if you're interested in that kind of stuff. But what you're going to see is me explaining how to deal with the chaos of the meeting using a framework like the 4 Cs so that you can get through any type of meeting for any type of topic with any type of team, no matter how chaotic it gets. Let's jump into it. Well, you guys remember on day one I drew this line where it's like, you know, a meeting starts a meeting ends and there's a lot of chaos. So, if you remember some of the things that happen, we start the meeting talking about one topic. Hey, we're we're planning the company retreat, right? Then that another person starts to talk about a laptop. Another person starts to talk about well, last year we had this problem in the company retreat with this person. Oh, it's with this person was a problem. Oh, maybe we shouldn't have this person this So, what should we do about the retreat? I think we should go to Mallorca. Oh, yeah, cool. So, yeah, but last year I didn't really like that. Okay, whatever. Okay, so I think we should go to Ibiza. Okay, yeah, well, where are we going to Ibiza? I think we should go to a hotel. Okay, cool. So, when should we do it? I think we should go in like May. Okay, but what last year there was a problem with this thing in May. It could rain in Actually, this person's on paternity leave. Okay, so but what about Ibiza? I think we already said that. What about Okay, Mallorca. No, but last year that we had this problem in Mallorca where this thing Yeah, but what about the laptop? Oh, yeah, the laptop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone is going to get their laptops in 2 weeks, okay? Yeah, but last year you said we were going to get our laptops in 2 weeks. What are we going to do? Right now I'm going to Slack the head of HR and I'm going to make sure that Okay, check. We finished that one. That actually closed. We finished that loop. Yeah, but last year I still didn't get my laptop. Okay, get I I'll message the head of HR again. Okay. So, all right, all right, back back to this. What are we going to do there? I think we're going to I think the main thing we want to do is like swimming. We want to like make sure we can go out, whatever. I actually think Italy would be better for that. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Um but is Tim on paternity leave? Let's check. Let's check. Let's contact Let's Let's message him and let's let's do that in the Okay. So, what's happening in almost every session is not just that we have this divergence of ideas. What what what we talked about in the beginning of the training was that at the start of the meeting in the ideal scenario, lots of things are happening. There's lots of convergence or there's lots of divergence. There's lots of this opening of let's just talk about lots of ideas. What none of these models talk about is the fact that not only is that happening, but on a micro scale, you're opening up discussions about topics, you're ideating on them, you're closing them, opening them up again, ideating on them, closing them, opening up three more, ideating on them, closing them with no structure at all. So, within just the with while while we're in a phase where it might be good to just talk about all the things on the table, we're closing topics at the same time. So, we're actually jumping for micro topics, we're actually jumping to the end of the meeting, then back to the start, then down to the end, then back to the middle, then back to the start, then down to the end, then back to the start. So, the only way a meeting can actually end is the time runs out. There's no actual way to end a meeting because there is absolutely no agreed structure of how any of this is supposed to happen. We know that the end point of the meeting should be probably that we have like the place we want to go, the things we're going to do there, like who's coming on the retreat, whatever it is. But that actually might have all been pretty much decided here in the first 4 minutes and then the meeting went off track, but then in the last few minutes we're like, oh yeah, but Tim is on vacation, so we can't do that. And so now we're back to the start again. So, if this is the reality, what can we as facilitators do about it? Well, let me tell you what we think you should do about it or what we think you could do about it. For us at AJ&Smart, we wanted to build things for extreme robustness. So, for us it's better to assume that the chaos looks this chaotic. So, what do we suggest? Well, this is why we came up with what we call the 4 Cs. The 4 Cs is our way at AJ&Smart of building a map for the chaos so that we know how to bring our participants from the start of the meeting to the end of a meeting without it feeling like absolute complete madness. And the steps involved in the 4 Cs are the logical steps that we believe can bring them through a divergent phase, a phase where they actually need to kind of battle out ideas, a convergent phase, and then actual outcomes. So, how we do this is we break all meetings and all sessions, even if it's 5 days, 1 day, 1 hour, into four clear sections. And those four clear sections are pretty simple. We ask the we we start every section and I'll I'll redraw this nicer at some point. We start every section with a collect phase. So, instead of asking the team to just hey, let's talk about what to do on the retreat and then someone's already like, well, last year in Ibiza this thing happened and we're already immediately jumping to hey, this is what we're going to do. In this particular meeting where we're talking about the maybe retreat that we're going to run through next year, well, I would ask, okay, let's collect all of the stuff that we know so far about retreats that we did last year, the previous years, and some of the things we'd like to change, some of the things we want more of, some of the things we want less of. So, we're just getting essentially an overview, a collection of the challenges, a collection of the ideas, a collection of the things we want to potentially talk about. But it's all it's going to be a lot of stuff. By the way, including the laptop thing. Like it can be the dump. I'm asking people, hey, I'm allowing you right now in this phase to just dump all the stuff out without having to come up with any solutions. So that you don't get lost on this track. Right now we don't need to think about solutions. It's actually very calming for a group to tell them, hey, we're in this phase right now where all we're trying to do is get all the information out. We don't need to think about any solutions and we certainly don't need to have any commitment to tasks or dates or anything. Then I bring them into a next phase. Once I feel like it's out of their system, where hey, all of this stuff here is relevant and interesting. Let's choose which of this stuff we want to focus on right now. Like it could be the uh specific location, could be the time, it could be who's coming with us, but we're only bringing out of like a potentially a hundred different topics, we're only bringing a couple of them over and deciding which ones we actually want to focus on. So, now we've chosen All of these things, by the way, happen naturally in a meeting, but they don't happen one after the other in sequence. They happen all at the same time in parallel and that's what causes a lot of this chaos. So, what all I'm doing as a facilitator is saying, I'm allowing you just to let it all all out here. Now I'm allowing you to just focus on choosing the things. And by the way, you might be wondering, well, what happens if we get stuff over to here and someone realizes they want to bring that over? Well, guess what? You have a map now. You know you're actually bringing it from here to here. So, you as the facilitator, you don't have to be like, oh, like it's or we're already past that point. I like in in a normal meeting, often what happens is people say, well, we don't have time to talk about that right now. Like what we already talked about that. You as the facilitator can say, you want to bring that in here, too? Like you want to bring that into the conversation? You might not have this visual for the for the client or your team, but in your mind you know, okay, that conversation is now being brought in here and you can help them decide whether that makes sense or not. So, we've chosen we we go into this phase where we work on choosing which things are we going to talk about today? Which things do we want to solve today? In this session that we have right now in this 90 minutes that I have with you as a team, what do we want to solve today? Not what do we want to solve as a company? What do we want to solve today? Now, as the facilitator, I'm able to say, "You know that laptop thing? How about we put that to the side, put it in the parking lot, and when this meeting is finished, you and you and me can talk about that separately, um and it won't get lost. Now, you're Now, Shawn is like, "All right, the laptop thing will be talked about. We don't have to talk about it here." Whereas Shawn, in the previous version, is locked onto this problem because he knows that if he doesn't hold onto it tightly, with all of his might, that it could get lost, and he might not get his laptop. And this is the problem when you're having when when you're in an unfacilitated session, uh and and Chuck, you mentioned it like people are like people have different interests. Not only do they have different interests and their egos, they're desperately hanging onto these things for dear life, cuz they know at this company, if I don't repeat things, they'll get lost, and no one will ever it will never happen. You all know companies where it's like nothing ever gets done around here, right? That mentality leads to people feeling like the only way things get done is when they're in a meeting, even if it's about completely something different, they need to bring in their thing again that they're like campaigning for, right? Like, I had Like, if if I'm at a company and I'm campaigning for us having a 4-day work week, then god damn it, I don't care for having a meeting about separating trash. I'm bringing that in. Okay? And if I have no facilitator, and I happen to be good at speaking and eloquent, then that god damn trash separation meeting will become my 4-day work week meeting. And this is why nothing ever gets done here. It's because there is no structure. There is no Nobody is responsible for bringing a group of people from here to here. Nobody's responsibility is that in most companies. Most companies believe that they have communication issues. And so, they spend lots and lots of money on communication software, communication training, all of this kind of stuff. And then they're like, "Why the hell does still nothing ever get done here?" Uh because they don't realize that one of the key units of decision-making in a company is real-time collaboration, where multiple people are at the same time are in a room or on a Zoom call trying to make decisions. And that the only thing that that is used to make that better is like AI documentation software that shows you what is talked about in in hindsight. It doesn't matter if your AI can summarize the ac- absolute show that just happened, it was still an absolute show. So, we move the team from a collect phase, where they can get everything out of their system, including the random stuff, including my 4-day work week thing. Now, we move to a choose phase, where me as uh you as the facilitator can help me understand that probably this 4-day work week topic is not super relevant for our retreat or trash separation workshop. However, kindly let me know that it is actually being documented and held, and we're going to talk about it. And now we're going to move our chosen challenges and chosen topics into I mean, I you guys already know this, into the next phase, which is called Yeah. Which is called create. And so, now we're telling the team, "Okay, look, we know what we're working on today. We all have a We all, for the first time in our lives as a team, know what we're all now talking about. So, we all can now point to literally a wri- a written thing that says, 'This is what we're working on right now.' And all of us can now use our superpowers individually to come up with solutions, to create potential solutions for the chosen challenge that we're now going to work on. And this frees the team, who normally at this phase are still thinking about, "Hey, will my uh laptop topic be brought up here? So, I don't have space to create interesting ideas if I'm still locked onto my thing that I want to talk about, and I think it's going to be forgotten." And I also don't know You've all seen this, right? You're in a meeting, the meeting We all Like, everyone thinks they know what it is that we're working on. Then we create some solutions, and we realize everyone's talking about a different thing, right? You You know this draw a duck uh or build a duck um exercise where you can put like Lego on everyone's table, ask them to build a duck, and everyone does it completely differently. Like, even though theoretically you would imagine everyone would kind of do it the same way, everyone You think everyone knows what we're working on in a meeting, but everyone has completely different ideas. So, as the facilitator, you move them from the choose phase to the create phase, and clearly state, "This is what we are all working on. We have a shared understanding of the challenge. Do Like, and and you'll have your systems for making sure everyone actually understands it." And the beauty is, let's say you're in this create phase, and, you know, Chuck is coming up with solutions for something completely random. Now, you can instead of In- instead of some fight breaking out, now you as the facilitator can kindly say, "Oh, Chuck Chuck, these like those are actually really interesting ideas for this topic we talked about earlier. Do you mind if we focus on these ones for now? Do you mind if you come up with solutions for these particular uh things for now, just because that's what we're going to focus on in this particular session?" And Chuck might not have even realized that he's creating solutions for a different thing until that moment, and it's actually also a kind way to tell help a team discover, "This is what we're focusing on today." The first time you go through this with a team, they're going to be annoyed because they're like, "I want to just do my usual way of chaos." However, when you get them to the end, the commit phase, where we say, "We're going to bring these solutions forward, and here's how we're going to execute them, and here's who's going to execute them." When they get to the end of the loop and realize that another meeting didn't need to be generated, and we actually, for once, in a rare moment, closed a task, like we checked a box of something that normally would have stayed open for months, they start to realize that the trade-off There is There is a trade-off to running it like this. The trade-off is it feels more rigid, and the trade-off is it's not as like explosive, and the people who like to to debate might get less debate than usual. But the trade-off is that for losing some of the fluidity and chaos, they gained actual progress. And the other cool thing is, the more of a like powerful facilitator you become, and the more like the the better you get, they won't even notice that they're going through these phases at all. They won't feel that they're going from here to here, and they won't feel that they're going from here to here. And you, cuz you'll have the map of this in your mind, this is the beauty, you'll be able to jump them between these things. You'll be able to be in the create phase, realize we didn't collect enough, bring them back here for a little bit, and then jump back again, without them even noticing, without anything on their side feeling rigid or we're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this. But in the beginning, it might feel a little bit like, "Now we're done with this. Now we're going here. Now we're going here. Now we're going here." It's still fine in the beginning, but eventually, they will not notice that this is happening. They'll just feel like, "Weird. When this person's in the room with us, stuff seems to really just kind of get done." And that's the sensation you want to give them. And that's the what we call the four C's, which is essentially a very simple way a very, very simple way to map out sessions. So, we've got our collect, next, commit. Um and it's very, very simple now, if you're consultant, to tell your client what the agenda is, because now you don't have to tell them these are the exercises and these are the times. It's day one will be collect and choose, day two will be create and commit, or if it's a 3-hour session, first hour, second hour, whatever. And within you can basically describe those and what happens in those sessions and you can say we might use exercises like this this this. Here we might use techniques like this this this. We don't want people to be locked into what exercises and stuff we're doing. Exactly. This is what's happening around this time. This is what's happening around this time. And depending on the client, you know, for some of our clients, especially our Silicon Valley clients, the create phase might be exponentially longer than all the other phases because they want to actually focus on coming up with novel ideas. For many of our corporate clients, it's the collect and choose phase which gives them the most value because they are sometimes unaligned with each other and it's a it's a bit more about politically aligning the members of the team on what are we focusing on? And so for us, the four C's is like a mental Well, it's a literal but also mental map and a mental model uh for understanding structurally what we would like to have happen in an in in a real-time collaborative session. Sometimes even literally showing the client that this is what's happening. Rarely though, it's usually just for for ourselves. And it's a way to also design workshops and design work sessions without having a blank page because you know, this is what I want to have first broadly cuz it's rare that you don't want to have a session where there's an outcome and it's rare that you don't have a session where you're going to have multiple people's ideas of what we should focus on. But sometimes of course in the in the amazing case scenario where a company is just so focused and they really know what they want to focus on and everyone's aligned, sure, you could start at create and go straight to create and commit but it's rare. In most cases, you're starting here. You're ending here. And that gives you a clean and clear structure to go through almost any interactive session. Hey, you made it to the end of the video. So, if you want to learn more about the four C's, there's this book which I wrote which is down below in the description. There's going to be a link. You can get it for free. And if you want to learn more about facilitation, collaboration, all that stuff in general, you can go to facilitator.com. That's our website dedicated to all things facilitation where you can come to our in-person events if you want to come to those. You can take our different courses. We've also got a ton of free stuff on there and maybe when you're watching this video, you'll also see that we've launched a listing where you can actually hire facilitators directly from our website which is going to be super cool. And so, yeah, if you're interested in any of these things, you can also hit the subscribe button on this video and we'll show you more videos when we get them out. Thank you so much for being part of this. That's a weird thing to say and have a great day. Bye. People hate meetings but meet Hey, Jonathan here. Okay, wait. Sneeze. Okay, if you got to the end of this video, hey, you got to the end of the video. Hey, you got Hey, you got to the end of the video. Hey, if you like this, make sure to hit the subscribe. All right. I have a meeting today. Meetings suck. And that's what this video is about. Nah, forget it. Put that at the end as a blooper or something. I don't know.