Thayer Method

The Thayer Method, born at West Point in the early 19th century, flips the traditional lecture model by making students responsible for learning before class. In a modern workplace that means requiring pre-reads, memos, or data dashboards ahead of the meeting so everyone arrives ready to work, not to listen.

When the meeting starts, the facilitator acts like a blackboard teacher, asking pointed questions and urging participants to write, sketch, or annotate ideas in real time. Tools like digital whiteboards, shared docs, or simple sticky notes become the new "blackboard," letting every voice surface without the pressure of a formal presentation.

The payoff is concrete: meetings shift from status-update broadcasts to focused decision-making workshops. Teams can resolve strategic plans, design critiques, or cross-functional problems in a single session because the heavy lifting was done beforehand and the live time is spent on synthesis and trade-off analysis.

The approach isn't a universal replacement for all gatherings-quick updates, emergency calls, or all-hands briefings still belong to a broadcast format. But for any meeting where the goal is to solve a problem, align on a complex issue, or generate high-quality input, the Thayer-inspired structure dramatically improves engagement, reduces wasted time, and extracts the collective intelligence of the group.