One way to have a productive meeting is to create a compelling focus by posing a question for the attendees to answer. Then we can facilitate the exploration, learning, and discussion toward answering that question in the meeting.
If the meeting is about setting a strategy or policy, we might ask something like, “What’s the best way for us to fund this project?” If it’s something operational we might ask, “What are all the things we need to do to implement this system?” And if we aren’t yet settled on what he meeting should be about, we can even ask, “What question, if we answered it well, would be the best one to answer in this meeting?”
In your corner,
Mike
PS: Of course, meetings covering more than one major topic would need a focus question for each.