Hello Reader,
You know this meeting. It runs twice as long as it should, decides nothing, and at some point derails into a 40-minute technical deep-dive that's genuinely important to two people in the room and invisible to everyone else.
The cause isn't bad facilitation. It isn't even a bad group. It's that nobody defined what the meeting was supposed to produce.
One sentence fixes this: "By the end of this meeting, we will have ___."
Written before you schedule, stated at the start of the room, used as your referent when the conversation drifts. If you can't complete that sentence in under a minute, you probably don't have a meeting — you have an email. That's useful information before you've put ninety minutes on twelve people's calendars.
In a new video this week, I walk through three ways this sentence earns its keep: as a filter before you schedule, as a tool that tells you who actually needs to be in the room, and as the thing that gives you permission to redirect the expert rabbit hole without shutting anyone down. That last one is particularly relevant if you lead technical teams. It turns out the expert rabbit hole is almost never a people problem.