Finding the Best Prompts in Meetings
Studies when and what kind of words deepen thinking in meetings, mapping the timing and phrasing of prompts to measurable changes in discussion quality.
This project analyzes facilitation “micro-moves”—the exact timing and wording of prompts that nudge teams toward deeper reasoning. We log multimodal meeting data (speech turns, keyword flow, discussion indicators like expansion/intensity/variety) and align them with facilitator utterances (e.g., probing, reframing, contrastive questions). Using time-series models and causal designs, we estimate which prompts, at which moments in a meeting’s lifecycle, most reliably improve idea integration, shared understanding, and decision clarity—across face-to-face, online, and hybrid settings. Deliverables include a taxonomy of effective prompt types, timing heuristics, and classroom-ready examples that teams can practice.