How to facilitate a meeting Tip 5 - Stop a topic if it isn’t relevant

27 Aug 2022 · 2 min

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In this instructional video, Chris Fenning explains the fifth tip for effective meeting facilitation: stopping topics that are not relevant to the meeting’s defined purpose and desired outcomes. He emphasizes that every meeting should have clear goals; allowing unrelated discussions wastes time and jeopardizes achieving those goals, leading to a failed meeting and a facilitator’s failure to guide the group. When an off‑topic issue arises, the facilitator should explicitly ask whether the new item aligns with the meeting’s objectives, or state that it does not seem relevant. The group can then decide to either continue the discussion in the current session or defer it to another meeting, call, or email. By identifying and removing irrelevant topics, the facilitator keeps the conversation focused, increasing the likelihood of meeting the original goals, purpose, and expected outputs.

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How to facilitate a meeting, tip number 5: stop a topic if it isn't relevant. When you have a meeting, it has a defined purpose and a defined outcome, or perhaps multiple purposes and multiple outcomes. If during the course of the discussion a new topic comes up, but it's not relevant to those defined goals and outcomes, you need to stop that topic. If you don't do this, you end up taking time away from the core purpose of the meeting. And if you don't achieve what you set out to in the meeting, it will be a failed meeting. And as a facilitator, you won't have done your job, which is guiding people towards the outcome that they are there to achieve. So when these topics— so how do you do this? How do you stop a topic that isn't relevant? Well, if somebody raises something that isn't related to the specific purpose of the meeting, you can ask, is this relevant to what we're trying to achieve? Or you can say, this doesn't sound like it's relevant to what we're trying to achieve. Should it be in this session or should we move it to a different call, meeting, email, and so on. Identify that the topic has been added. Say whether it— or ask whether it relates to what you're trying to achieve or not. And maybe the room can decide whether it's relevant to carry on talking about it, or maybe the room can acknowledge, no, that's not what we're here to do. Let's put that to one side. If you do that, you're going to help bring the topic back to the original purpose of the meeting, and that gives you a far greater chance of succeeding in whatever your original Goal, purpose, and output were.