Books That Change Meetings
Books That Change Meetings
Building better meeting cultures through the science and art of gathering
A meeting is never just a meeting.
It is a reflection of how people work together—how they communicate, share ideas, make decisions and create change. Behind every meeting is a culture: one that can encourage curiosity and collaboration, or one that quietly reinforces habits of listening less and talking more.
At the Art of Meetings Academy (AMA), we believe meetings are both a science and an art.
The science helps us understand the foundations: human behaviour, group dynamics, learning processes, subconscious defaults, and what enables people to participate meaningfully.
The art lies in bringing these elements together—designing the right atmosphere, creating connections, balancing structure and flexibility, and turning a group of individuals into a community that can think and act together.
To deepen the insights for our course participants, every AMA programme includes a carefully curated reading list from our faculty. These books are not simply about facilitation techniques or running smoother meetings. They explore the more probing questions behind every gathering:
Why do people come together?
How can we create environments where people contribute their best thinking?
What makes a meeting create impact beyond the room?
And many more.
Among the essential titles are:
Meetings, by Default or by Design
By Mike van der Vijver and Eric de Groot
This book challenges one of the most common assumptions about meetings: that they are simply something we organise.
Instead, Mike and Eric invite us to see meetings as a form of communication we can design.
Thinking about a meeting should never start with an agenda. It should start with the purpose. What should participants understand, decide or change? And to achieve that, what should they experience?
From the flow of conversations to the role of interaction, every element becomes a design choice. This book gives you over one hundred of such design choices, arranged in forty topics that are relevant in practically every meeting. It demonstrates how to move from meetings that happen by default to meetings created with intention.
Into the Heart of Meetings
By Mike van der Vijver and Eric de Groot
If Meetings, by Default or by Design introduces the practical design choices, Into the Heart of Meetings explores the basic thinking that underlies those choices: how do meetings actually work?
Thanks to many years of international experience, Mike and Eric reveal what makes meetings truly meaningful—not more content, more slides or more activities, but better conversations and deeper connections, thanks to a well structured design process.
The heart of a meeting is not the logistics of the programme. It is what happens between people in the course of the programme.
Learning beyond the meeting room
The best meeting professionals continue learning from different fields: psychology, creativity, leadership, facilitation and behavioural science.
Because designing a great meeting requires more than knowing how to manage time and logistics. It requires understanding people.
At AMA, our reading recommendations are an invitation to explore, reflect and experiment.
Because better meetings do not begin when participants enter the room.
They begin with a different way of thinking.
Explore the full AMA reading list:
www.meetingdesign.academy/reading-list