YES – the owner is your key person. The owner knows more about the problem than anybody else. If you don’t have an owner don’t do the session. It all revolves around the owner – all we’re trying to do is help. This person(s) knows everything and a good owner is one who is going to be very forthcoming –  he/she will not only answer questions, they often give even more information that nobody asked for, so the owner is critical. The only thing the owner can’t do – lead the session.  An owner cannot lead the session – these two roles must be separate.

One of the biggest problems people deal with are bad meetings. When we ask people how many of them have been in a meeting which was total waste of time, all hands go up.   When we start asking why – what are some of the things that go wrong? Usually the answer is there was no accountability – nobody in that group was accountable. Why in the world would you have a meeting without someone totally accountable? The only reason for having a meeting is to solve a problem that is verbatim – solve a problem, get from A to B.  There is no other reason for wasting people’s time. You have to have an owner involved – someone who’s willing to do something – where the whole subject and the objective of the meeting comes. As participants, our job is to help our owner get into action going all the way to step 8 – action.