End every meeting with the “3 Rs”: Review decisions, Record owners, Reconfirm next steps. It takes five minutes and prevents hours of follow-up chaos.
Break your meeting into attention sprints. Every 7–10 minutes, switch gears by changing speaker, invite reactions, use a poll, etc. This helps reset attention.
Create awareness for and encourage attendees to embrace different mental models. Disagreement can lead to better solutions.
Find someone neutral to facilitate your meeting if you’re deeply invested in the outcome so that your biases don’t influence the flow of the conversation.
Meet individually with key people or small groups beforehand and bring the insights from these meetings into the larger session.