How to Deal with Runaway Conversations
Establish the element of time
The first thing to do is ensure that you have an agenda with timing on it. Time boxing ensures that you know if you are going overtime on a section. Without this, it’s much more difficult to manage runaway conversations. Let’s first look at time boxing.
How to Time Box
The timer is so important and if you don’t have a person to do timing you will need to do it yourself. Timing really is critical. Select a mechanism to notify everyone of timing and time remaining in a section. Sometimes a verbal notification is enough, but sometimes you might want to have cards of different colors that you can show at certain times. However formal you want to be, you need to ensure that everyone knows that this meeting is timed and it's not optional to ignore the timer. Anything that isn’t finished on time goes into the parking lot to be finished another time.
If you have a long winded person, meaning someone who likes talking and doesn’t know how to get to the point, you can start having a timer, maybe 1 minute per person who wants to add a comment. Put the timer on the screen so the person can see it. Do verbal reminders when they are almost done and when their time is up.
Before each segment of the meeting remind everyone how much time is in the section and how the time will be allotted to the participants.
Now let’s look at some techniques to manage runaway conversations.
How to deal with run-a-way conversations
Running away is a lot of fun… unless you are facilitating an important meeting
One issue you often find is that passionate attendees will go off on tangents. Often called red-herrings. These will ruin your meeting. You must identify and put the items into the parking lot if they are important. If your participants want to keep talking remind them that they agreed to the agenda and that to give this new topic is important we can cover it another time. Put it into the parking lot.
A key phrase that I find useful is to say “This is an important topic. So important that it deserves our full attention. Because we dont have enough time today to give it that respect, I am going to put this in the parking lot and we will have a meeting focused on this topic when we have the time to do it justice.”
Is it rude to stop a conversation?
So is it rude to stop a discussion and ask if we can move it to the parking lot? Well no because everyone agreed to the agenda at the top of the meeting. Each person values their own time. They want to get the goal of the meeting accomplished. So they will actually be glad that you are moving the meeting along.
There have been many times that people have thanked me after the meeting for keeping the meeting going. Have the courage to keep the meeting on target, even if it feels uncomfortable to do so.
With this technique you can keep your meeting focused and moving forward. Don’t let a runaway conversation ruin your meeting.
