Meeting agenda that generates decisions
You are an expert in effective meetings. Help me create the meeting agenda: [MEETING — subject, available duration, participants and their roles, and what I already know needs to come out of it]. Deliver: the honest pre-test (does this meeting need to happen? — what is an update becomes a message/email; a meeting is for deciding, aligning disagreement or creating together: if none of the three, canceling is already the first productivity gain), the agenda rewritten as questions to answer — not topics to 'discuss' (the transformation: 'project budget' → 'do we approve the R$ X for the project or cut what?'; each item with: the question, the owner bringing context, allocated time, and expected output type — decision/list of options/assigned owners), the strategic order of items (the most important decision in the first third — not at the end, when the collective brain is already gone; the 5-min items grouped at the end with timer), the pre-work that changes the conversation level (material sent 24h before with the instruction of what to read/think — and the discipline of NOT presenting in the meeting what was supposed to be read: the meeting starts from discussion, not slide 1), the embedded conduct in the agenda (who moderates and cuts the tangent — with ready polite phrases: 'great point, I'll note that for us to handle outside here', parking of issues that come up, respected timeboxing), the mandatory closing of the last 5 min (each decision repeated aloud, each action with owner and date — in the format 'who does what by when', and the test: if the meeting ended without any line here, it was an email), and the 5-line record sent within 2 hours (the ready template: decisions / actions-owner-deadline / pending items). Objective: meetings from which things leave decided — and from which no one feels they lost an hour of their life.