“I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me” – Richard II<\/em><\/p>\n
One of the most common reasons people give for using a facilitator is “to keep us to time.” This is nearly always taken to mean having an agenda with fixed times and accomplishing various goals on schedule.<\/p>\n
Our hunch is that a lot of meetings run into difficulty if we don’t keep open to both these ways of thinking. We’ve increasingly realised that satisfying conversations have a pace and rhythm to them in which a more linear sense of time can fade into the background. It’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi\u00a0refers to when he talks about\u00a0flow states<\/a>.<\/p>\n
We also connect it to Paul Graham’s post about\u00a0management time vs maker time<\/a>. He writes, “When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.”<\/p>\n
(Photo by\u00a0Ben White<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Unsplash<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"