Lesson series

Magical Meetings

Learn a systematic method to better approach the before, the during, and the after of meetings to ensure they are magical. 
What you are going to learn

A Renewed Perspective on Meetings

Based on the Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings, we will introduce the skills you need to create a magical experience at every meeting. We will review meeting mantras that you can apply to your meeting culture, and we’ll go way beyond the agenda to show you frameworks to use before, during, and after your meetings. Join us to gain the tools and expertise you need to be a meeting magician.
Redesign meetings so people actually want to attend.

  • Revolutionize agendas with the use of narratives.
  • Handpick effective exercises and insert them into your meeting
  • Maintain momentum outside of your meetings.
  • Distinguish between work that should be done in a meeting and work that should happen asynchronously.
  • Unleash the potential in everyone so that you can all do your best work together, but also alone.

Course contents

Who Should Attend?

Managers

Who want to enable their teammates without getting in their way.

Executives

Who seek more alignment, trust, and productivity.

Entrepreneurs

Who want to make the most out of the collective intelligence within their company..

What People are Saying

"There are many choices for workshops, but in my mind there are very few who get it right. Douglas Ferguson and Voltage Control get it. If you are looking to learn a topic for the first time or level up your own skills or that of your team, then the virtual workshops offered by Voltage Control are a great option. Thanks to the workshops, we are now confidently moving beyond design thinking and regularly pushing prototypes into production."
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Robert T.

VP & SENIOR CORPORATE COUNSEL AT LIBERTY MUTUAL

"Anyone that can construct a sequence of conversations to lead others is a metaskill. Anyone who participates in meetings or owns an agenda would benefit from this. It is a whirlwind, but you are among others who are in charge of making an impact. This is a practical, hands-on deep dive for managers, entrepreneurs, and leaders who can change their culture by leading meetings like a pro."
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Mark T.

HEAD OF SERVICES AT MURAL

About John
John is an entrepreneur and business coach. He is Chief Product Officer of Voltage Control, where he prototypes tools to help people facilitate better meetings. He enjoys designing technology through unlearning and the generous act of sonder. Prior to Voltage Control, John was Entrepreneur in Residence at Animal Ventures where he advised Fortune 100 leadership on their prototyping practices and led distributed software teams at the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and decentralized computing. John also worked directly with Google Ventures running Design Sprints and now coaches organizations how to develop rapid prototyping practices within their culture.

John is a co-author to two books with Douglas Ferguson: How To Remix Anything and Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings and is an author of Time Off - a look at how modern society is burning us out, why time off and creativity will be a crucial component to the future of human work, and the solutions to help us all prioritize our “rest ethic.” John spends his leisure time farming, hosting dinner parties, and practicing Jiu Jitsu. He graduated from University of Texas at Austin and is a proud alumni of Seth Godin’s altMBA.
About Douglas
Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based facilitation agency that specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques. He has helped transform teams from U.S. SOCOM, the Air Force, Adobe, Dropbox, Fidelity, Vrbo, Liberty Mutual, Humana, and SAIC.

Douglas is a thought leader and master facilitator of Design Sprints, Innovation Acceleration, Team Alignment, Meeting Systems, Culture Transitions, and Change Transformations. He is also the author of three books: Beyond the Prototype, How to Remix Anything (co-authored), and Start Within (co-authored).
Motivated by a mission to rid the world of horrible meetings and offer meaningful meetings in their place, Voltage Control is calling upon fellow facilitators to transform meeting and innovation culture. From free weekly community meetups to Control the Room–the annual facilitator summit, Voltage Control is building a community of facilitators to change the world.
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