Experimentation

You ever do something just to see what happens? Sure you do. Everyone does, I suppose.

Today, I gave it a try in a completely new setting (for me). I was in a meeting (one of many today), and just for kicks, I wanted to see how easily the discussion could be derailed. I had my suspicions: I bet myself that it would take a full 5 minutes for the discussion to get back on track again. I calculated my risks: the group was engaged in the discussion, but I suspected easily distractible as we were approaching the end of the day. Similarly, I didn’t want to jeopardize our meeting run time or complications with any subsequent appointments anyone in the group may have had (hence the end of day tactic).

There is a basic assumption that meetings are rambling, tenacious beasts that we groan about prior to engaging in them, especially when they contain a large number of attendees. (Notice I didn’t use the word “participants”, because, more often than not, attendance and participation are mutually exclusive). We often refer to the meeting / discussion process as “herding cats” – hard to get a handle on. This one was different, though, because I was leading it. I figured I could throw a diversion topic out, see what happened, and wrangle the discussion back on point after my 5 minute experiment was up.

The interesting thing about the diversion tactic: it failed! Even though we were at the end of the day, nearing the end of the meeting, an interesting dynamic occurred – tangential bridge-building to return to the topic, by each member of the group, in turn. It was like a little verbal ballet – a pirouette here, a pivot there, a swirl there, and voila – back on point! Quite an interesting thing to observe. Even if it wasn’t quite efficient. But it did take less than 5 minutes.