How come that we always finish the meetings on time with you? Reflections on boundaries, attractors, buffers

Some reflections about creating meeting agendas, and running meetings with enough resilience built in, and also about attractors and boundaries.

When you are facilitating a group and they have a hard stop, I find it super important to plan well and to facilitate with both flexibility and adaptation. There are a few ideas that I have matured over time that have helped me to always finish the meetings on time.

Building slack. In general, a most helpful approach is to build agendas with some buffer, or slack, built in. This means three things:

• Create at least one (better two) sections of the agenda where you estimate "this is more than enough time to run this activity". We are hopelessly optimistic in estimating how much time an activity takes. Plan some items with spaciousness.
• The accordion principle: At least one activity of the agenda (could be the same as above) should be ready to be re-sized if need be: can this section shrink if needed, if we have a hard stop?
• The unmovable stone principle: once you know which activities can be shrunk if needed, have some clarity about what is the one activity of the meeting that you will NOT compromise on, because it's already been designed with thin margins of error. For instance, when we build agendas we often decide that the time for breakout conversations shall NOT be touched, no matter what happens

Negotiating and resizing the agenda if needed. Some things are very important here.

• Negotiate the time towards the end; if there are 20 mins left, ask the group who has a hard stop, and let them know that they will be released from obligation to attend at the agreed time. Nobody wants to be kept as a "prisoner" to a meeting, it's basic politeness to make this clear
• If there is a few mins left and not all activities / items can be carried out, ask the group what they want to prioritize, but let them know that you will be able to flex the timing. They own the agenda, not you.
• Once you have mandate from the group, have some ideas in your back pocket for how to make the most of the last agenda points, if you were to run all activities in less time, or some of them only. You have process expertise, and it's your task to have ideas for how to run the meeting

Closing well. It is very important to hold the polarity here: on one hand you want to honor the time boundary, and on the other hand you want to close properly without feeling rushed. Some helpers here:

• In the planning phase, have with you various options for closure, conclusions, or check-outs at the ready. In this way, if you run short with the end time (and you likely will) there is no need to panic.
• Use the end time as a hard boundary, and plan backwards with that constraints in mind. Get skilled in fast back-of-the-envelope calculations on the fly if you want to hear all voices before closing a meeting. If you have a group of twenty people, and have 14 mins left till the end of the meeting, plan for 30 seconds sharing for each person. Now, how do you invite people to share for only 30 seconds?? This brings us to our last two points
• Use various metaphors as both constraints and attractors. This is what I mean by that: you want people to share in closing for 30 seconds or less. Use a vivid image for that. "Share your closing thoughts in a text message"
• When you are half-way through the group, remind them that others might need to be more concise IF they want to hold on to the shared agreement of finishing on time. The IF is crucial. I really don't like being paternalistic with my participants. But as a facilitator I keep an eye on the time and I notice that if they want to finish on time the last 10 people need to share in more concise form. The choice is theirs, and it puts some of the responsibility for closing on time back to the participants

It all seems easy, and in a sense it is, but there is a lot of craft in this, and even some lessons from resilience and slack in systems, attractors, constraints, and boundaries. What works for you when you want to hold the finishing time with a group?