How to run better meetings with paint

At Yarno we have an unofficial rule where internal meetings are concerned – if you send the meeting invite, you have to run the meeting. As you can imagine, this can sometimes turn into a playful standoff of who will give in first and send the invite. While I of course still enjoy participating in this Yarno rite of passage, I rather like running meetings (although don’t let that fact slip to the rest of the team). The reason why is because of PAINT.

PAINT is a method for structuring and controlling meetings. You start the meeting with Purpose, where you define and share the reason for the meeting. This is great; not only for getting attendees on the same page but during preparation, you might even find that you don’t need the meeting after all – win!

Moving on to Agenda, the outline for what you’re going to be talking about and the general structure of the meeting discussion – this is a life saver for keeping things on track.

Then ask for INput, to see if everyone agrees with the agenda or if anyone has anything they’d like to add or discuss. Or, as I like to think of it, the time in the meeting where you should “speak now or forever hold your peace”.

Finally, there’s Time. Clarifying the amount of time set aside for the meeting eliminates the chances of needing to cut the session short, or going over. It's a great way to respect everyone's time.

We'd like to give a big shoutout to Simon Harrop from Straight Ahead Sales who developed the PAINT methodology and introduced this to Yarno during his coaching sessions with our team.