meeting-design

Design the meeting before you run it.

Most bad meetings were bad before anyone walked in. The agenda named topics rather than a decision, nobody said how the decision would get made, and the one person who could actually make it was not in the room.

This is a skill for Claude that fixes that at the design stage. You describe the meeting, it gives you back a ready-to-send agenda with the decision named, the decision rule stated, the attendee list cut, and a plan for what happens if the room deadlocks.

It ships fill-in templates rather than advice, because advice does not survive contact with a calendar invite.

The skill is skills/meeting-design. SKILL.md is the method, references/ holds the decision rules and agenda shapes, and assets/ holds the two templates you can paste straight into an invite.

What it actually does

Step What you get
Should this be a meeting A straight answer, and what replaces it if not
The decision sentence One line you can finish, or the honest admission that this is not a decision meeting
The decision rule Directive, consult, consent, consensus or delegate, phrased for the invite
The room Deciders, contributors, and everyone you can safely leave off
The agenda Minutes per item, and which item gets cut if you overrun
The deadlock plan What happens if you do not decide, agreed before you need it
The close Decision, owner, date, who gets told, filled in while people are still in the room

Who this is for

People who chair things without the word "facilitator" anywhere in their job title. Ops leads, account managers, project managers, HR partners, agency leads, founders, community organisers, anyone who called a meeting this week and is not sure it needed to happen.

You do not need to be technical. Nothing here needs a terminal, a workspace, a connector or an API key. It works from what you type into a chat window.

Install

In the Claude app (no terminal needed)

  1. Download this repository as a ZIP, or clone it
  2. Zip the skills/meeting-design folder on its own
  3. In Claude, go to Customize, then Skills, then Create skill, then Upload skill
  4. Upload the ZIP

As a plugin, in Claude Code or Cowork

/plugin marketplace add theAnirudhKumar/meeting-design
/plugin install meeting-design@meeting-design-marketplace

Or just read it. The skill is plain markdown. skills/meeting-design/SKILL.md is the method, and the two files in assets/ are templates you can copy into a calendar invite without Claude involved at all.

Where this comes from

The method is assembled from practice that is already well established, and it is worth naming rather than presenting as original:

  • Silent reading at the top of the meeting is Amazon's narrative memo practice, replacing presentations with a document everyone reads in the room
  • Consent as distinct from consensus, where the test is a reasoned objection rather than a preference, comes from sociocracy
  • Divergence before convergence is the core of the Double Diamond, from the British Design Council
  • The pre-mortem, imagining the failure before it happens, is Gary Klein's, published in Harvard Business Review in 2007
  • Recording the dissent and moving anyway is Amazon's "disagree and commit"

What this skill adds is the sequencing and the templates, not the ideas.

The two rules behind everything published here

Nothing may be a prerequisite. A skill that errors because you lack a file, a connector or a workspace gets uninstalled. This one states the least you can give it and still get something useful.

Every skill names the failure it exists to prevent. If it cannot say what goes wrong without it, it is a template rather than a skill. This one prevents the meeting that ends in "let's take this offline" and reconvenes three weeks later having lost the thread.

Contribute

If you run meetings for a living and something here is wrong, that is the most useful thing you can tell me. Open an issue with what happens in reality and what the skill assumed instead.

CONTRIBUTING.md has the standard this repository holds itself to. Before opening a pull request, run python3 validate-skills.py. The same script runs on every pull request, so anything it catches locally is anything that would fail there.

Elsewhere

  • Hustlyst - twice a week on AI and automation tools for people who don't code
  • CS Pulse - community and newsletter for customer success practitioners
  • work-design - the rest of the set: vetting a tool before you sign up, carrying context between sessions, catching an expensive request

MIT licensed. Fork it, change it, ship it.