You already know something is wrong with your meetings.

You've felt it — the hour that could have been thirty minutes, the decision that got deferred for the third time, the room full of capable people that produced nothing actionable and reconvened the following week to have the same conversation again.

The instinct is to look at the people in the room. Better facilitation. Stronger discipline. Clearer norms. Those efforts can help at the margins. But they almost never produce lasting change — because they're working on the surface of the problem, not the structure underneath it.

The meetings on your calendar were not built. They accumulated. Inherited from the person before you, shaped by habits no one chose deliberately, held in place by invisible forces that have nothing to do with whether they're useful. And so they persist: the update that could be an email, the alignment call where nothing gets aligned, the recurring invite that everyone attends and no one can explain.

The Meeting Design Intensive gives you a different starting point. Not better habits. Not improved facilitation. A structural diagnosis — and a framework to redesign what isn't working from the ground up.

What the Meeting Design Intensive is — and isn't

This is a self-paced, text-based course built for leaders and professionals who read the way they work: with intention and without a lot of extra time. There are no video lectures to sit through, no live sessions to schedule around, and no pacing you didn't choose.

What it is: nine modules of practical, framework-driven content that builds a complete meeting design practice from the ground up. Each module is written in second person — directly to you, about your meetings and your organization — and ends with a single reflection question designed to anchor the learning in your real situation before you move on.

What this course is not: It is not a facilitation course. It will not teach you better agenda formats, stronger time-keeping techniques, or how to run a stand-up. Those are surface adjustments. This course operates at the structural level — the conditions that determine whether a meeting produces clarity or theater, regardless of who is facilitating it or how disciplined the group tries to be.

If you have tried meeting best practices before and they didn't stick, this course explains exactly why — and gives you the tools to make changes that do.

What you'll work through

The course is organized in nine modules that move in a deliberate sequence — from seeing the problem clearly, to understanding why it persists, to redesigning it with a complete structural framework, to building the daily habit that makes it sustainable.

Part 1 — Diagnosis (Modules 1–4) Seeing the system beneath the meeting

Before anything can be redesigned, it has to be seen clearly. The first four modules give you the vocabulary and the analytical tools to do that. You'll learn to recognize the five meeting archetypes that show up in almost every organization — the Update Parade, the Roundtable Drift, the Leadership Briefing, the Parking Lot, and the Calendar Legacy — and understand what each one is protecting. You'll meet the five gravity forces that keep unproductive meetings alive despite everyone's frustration: Visibility, Authority Ambiguity, Risk Diffusion, Habit, and Coordination Anxiety. And you'll learn to observe any meeting at three layers simultaneously — surface behavior, structural pattern, and systemic assumption — the way a designer reads an environment. By the end of Module 4, you will see your meetings differently than you did when you started. That shift in perception is the foundation for everything that follows.

Part 2 — Design (Module 5) The SANE framework

Module 5 is the core tool. SANE stands for Structure, Authority, Need, and Execution — four structural elements that address the root causes of meeting dysfunction rather than its symptoms. Structure prevents drift. Authority suppresses ambiguity. Need eliminates ritual. Execution prevents the illusion of progress. You'll learn each element in depth, see how they work together as a system, and apply all four to the meeting you've been carrying through the course — producing your first complete meeting redesign before the module ends.

Part 3 — Practice (Modules 6–7) From framework to habit

Understanding a framework and building it into how you work are two different things. Modules 6 and 7 close that gap. Module 6 walks you through a fully designed meeting in motion — before it starts, during the conversation, and after it ends — so you can feel what the design looks and sounds like in practice rather than just in theory. Module 7 introduces the five-minute habit: the pause before every meeting you schedule, four questions that separate meetings that deserve live human time from ones that don't, and the identity shift from someone who reacts to a calendar to someone who designs one.

Part 4 — Portfolio and Culture (Modules 8–9) Redesigning the system, not just the meeting

The final two modules zoom out from individual meetings to the full picture. Module 8 gives you a portfolio audit — a framework for evaluating every recurring meeting on your calendar against three honest questions, and sorting each one into Keep, Redesign, or End. Most leaders who complete it reclaim two to four hours a week without losing a single ounce of organizational value. Module 9 addresses the longer game: how a personal design practice becomes a team standard, and how a team standard becomes a cultural norm. It closes with five specific practices that spread design literacy to the people around you — so the change you make doesn't stop at your calendar.

What changes after this course

The Meeting Design Intensive is not a course you take and then return to your calendar unchanged. The frameworks are designed to be applied immediately — in the meeting you run this week, before the invite you're about to send, in the sixty seconds before you open a recurring sync.

By the time you complete all nine modules, you will be able to:

See dysfunction as a design problem, not a people problem. When a meeting isn't working, you'll know what layer to look at and what question to ask — rather than defaulting to blame or resigned tolerance.

Diagnose any meeting in real time. Name the archetype, identify the gravity force, observe the structural failure. This takes practice, and the course builds it deliberately across four modules before asking you to act on it.

Apply SANE to any meeting you run. Before you schedule it: name the conversation type, identify the decision-maker, validate the need, imagine the closing sentence. During it: open with structure, protect the authority, hold the thread. After it: speak the closing script, share the written record, open the next meeting by reviewing the commitments.

Audit and redesign your full calendar. Not just one meeting — the whole portfolio. Keep what's working, redesign what has a real need and a broken structure, end what exists purely out of habit or inertia.

Spread the practice to your team. Five specific practices that migrate design literacy from your personal habit to your team's shared expectation — without a training program, a mandate, or a culture initiative.

Who this course is for

The Meeting Design Intensive was written for anyone who runs meetings, attends them, or is responsible for the culture in which they happen. That covers a wider range of people than most courses — deliberately.

Managers and team leads who run recurring meetings and know something isn't working but haven't had a structural language for it. This course gives you both the language and the tools, and the application is immediate.

Senior leaders and executives whose organizations move more slowly than their talent warrants. Decisions stall, ownership blurs, and the calendar fills with conversations that produce comfort rather than clarity. The course shows you where the drag is coming from and exactly what to change.

Consultants, facilitators, and coaches who work inside other organizations' systems and need a rigorous, practical framework for diagnosing and redesigning meeting culture at the team level. The five archetypes, five gravity forces, and SANE framework are directly applicable to client work.

HR and organizational development professionals looking for a systems-level approach to one of the most persistent and costly drains on organizational performance. This course treats meetings as design problems, which means the interventions are structural rather than behavioral — and structural changes stick.

Individual contributors who attend meetings they didn't design and feel the waste acutely but have never had a framework for naming it or changing it. You don't need to be the most senior person in the room to apply what this course teaches. You need to attend meetings and care whether they work.

Want to go further?

The Flim Flam Reset Intensive combines this course with a 60-minute private working session with Jamie — applied directly to your meetings, your team, and your specific situation. If you want the frameworks and dedicated time to apply them to your own context, the bundle is available at a combined price.