Does your group have Meeting Guidelines? Should you? What can you do when your group is stuck on a topic, or when someone in your meeting is having trouble moving on? In this 2-minute video Craig explains a key technique for getting unstuck.
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Here’s what Craig says in the video:
Hi everybody. Hey it’s Craig Freshley here. I just finished a meeting and I thought I would take a moment to talk about what to do when a group gets stuck. Sometimes a group will be talking about something and they just want to talk and talk and talk. And it seems difficult to bring the discussion to a close.
I have learned that the best way to move off a topic, to wrap up a topic, is to have a next topic to go to. This is why planning out meeting agendas in advance is so useful. It shows the group that there’s a certain time allocated to a certain topic and when we get close to that time, we wrap it up. Not because we don’t care about that topic, or because we want to cut somebody off, but because we have another important topic to discuss.
It’s similar to when we call on people and a person is going on and on and maybe even stuck. Or there might be two people in a conversation, maybe even an adversarial conversation, seemingly stuck in trying to resolve it. The best way to move on is not to cut them off but to say, “We have some other people that we want to hear from” or “We have another topic that we want to go to.”
If you are leading a group, whether it is as a meeting facilitator, whether it’s a conversation leader, or whether it’s in a whole big process, if you are leading a group and you want them to stop doing what they’re doing, the best way to do that is to have something else equally important or more important for them to start doing.
That’s my good group tip for today. I hope it helps you help your group make good decisions. Thanks a lot everybody.
