A Parking Lot is a spreadsheet that tracks various topics for each person that might make for a good presentation later. There are typically three types of topics that are tracked for each person:
- Challenges – These are challenges that each person might be facing. Topics like not working out, cash flow crunch, team morale, family issues, etc…
- Expertise – These are things you did/are doing really well and might be able to teach to the group. Maybe you just lost 50 lbs with a new training, or are hired 5 new amazing people, etc.
- Group Topics – These are challenges that the whole group is facing, and instead of having just one person present, the Forum could bring in an outside expert to teach the whole group.
Topics are added to the Parking Lot each month based on each person’s monthly reflection. (I’ll do another post on how to go from the monthly reflection to the Parking Lot without wasting time.)
If a topic is added to #1, then the person would rate the topic based on a scale of 1-10 for two things:
- Importance – How important is this topic to you in your life right now?
- Urgency – How quickly would you like to present on this topic to your Forum?
These two numbers are recorded into the Parking Lot along with a third number that tracks how many times a topic has shown up. The third number is important because someone might say over and over that a topic isn’t important or that they don’t need to present on it, but for some reason, they keep talking about it.
These three numbers are multiplied together, and it will give you a score for each topic in the Parking Lot. That way, when it’s your time to present, all you have to do is look at your Parking Lot and will quickly see which topics over the year have been the biggest and worth digging into deeper.