How to prepare for meetings that convince people - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

So let's say that you want to convince your coworkers to try a new tech or
something like a new library or whatever and you think it's a really good
idea but people aren't convinced. So what typically happens is you want to
prepare a couple of ideas and stuff and bring it to a meeting and say,okay, here's here's what I think and why I think this is a good idea.
And then people will present their reasons why they they don't think it's a
good idea. And people may come to the meeting kind of predisposed todisagree and and want to just say,No this is just extra work that you're
making me do and and so as soon as somebody gives a reasonable goodargument against you against your idea for everybody else that just is like
the thing that they can latch on to and if you're not prepared to deal with
that then then you just lose everything.So this is what I do and what I've done to convince members of my team that
my idea is a good one. And that is first you have to like that obviouslyyou have to really believe that it is a good idea and you wouldn't want to
present something that's not necessarily a good idea.
But then,What I have done is I will reach out to everybody who's going to
be coming into the meeting all the decision makers, but also just thepeople who are going to show up so even people that may not be making the
decision they just might voice a concern of some kind.And I will just ask them what are their preconceived issues that they have
with this idea? And I'm just talk a little bit about it not. We're not here
to have an argument or anything about the merits of the idea. We're just
here to gather their hang-ups with it.And do that with everybody who's coming to the meeting so that you can
prepare and bring up their arguments before they have a chance to bringthem up and and you bring it up in such a way that you can immediately
address it and say now some of you were worried about this, let me explainwhy that's not a problem.
Or you may not even need to bring that up. You can just solve that problembefore they before mentioning the problem in the first place. As part of
your presentation, this will go miles to help you convince people that youridea is a good one and help alleviate concerns and they're concerned.
The real and you need to address them But if you want to have success andconvincing people you want to avoid the mob mentality where one person
shares something that's like now this is not going to work for this reason
and everybody just latches on and they won't listen to your explanation.
And maybe you'll get caught off guard too in that situation. And so by
asking ahead of time you are made aware of things that you may not haveconsidered and you make sure you address those and it's also possible that
you can cancel a meeting because you realize that oh actually this isn't a
good idea because of these concerns.So anyway, this is something that's helped me in the past. I hope it helps
you and I hope you.

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