Better Meetings Canvas is not anything new. It is what every good facilitator knows by heart. However, it is not easy to rely on your heart all the time. Sometimes you want a straightforward structure to follow, or maybe when in doubt to rely on, or use when delegating the facilitation to someone else, or keep a secret recipe of how you run your meetings.
I have introduced the Better Meetings Canvas in “Effective Yet Effortless Meetings“. I have been using this model myself facilitate sessions, and also teach other facilitators to become better at what they do. Throughout these, I have come to update the canvas to have a very important part “Feedback Mechanism During”. I have also updated the questions and the descriptions below each section.
If this is your first time using the canvas, read it from top to down, left to right, and answer the questions in that order. And always ask yourself the first question “How important is to have a meeting really?”.
You can also find a Google Docs version of the Better Meetings Canvas V2.1.