Two Minutes Well Spent
I share ground rules at the start of every meeting I facilitate. It only takes a couple minutes, and I think it's one of the most valuable two minutes of the day. Not because I expect people to be unruly, but because it gives everyone in the room a shared sense of what to expect from each other before the real work begins.
When people know how the group has agreed to behave, they can focus on the conversation instead of wondering about the dynamics. A room with shared agreements tends to stay on track, even when the topic gets hard. I still use the term ground rules because it's familiar and people know what they're signing up for, but I think of them as agreements. Rules feel like constraints. Agreements feel like a shared commitment to how the group will work together. I write them on a flip chart that stays up in the room for the duration of the meeting — visible, present, and something I can point to if the conversation needs to come back to them.
In practice, I rarely have to point back to them, but I think that's the point. The work happens at the start, when you set the tone, not in the middle when you're trying to recover it.
The agreements I come back to most often are: listen to understand, be present, take space and make space, and assume good intent. I present them rather than co-create them, partly because co-creating takes more time than it sounds and can occasionally derail the beginning of a meeting before anything substantive has happened, and partly because a short, sensible list generally lands well when the framing is "here's how we'll take care of each other today" rather than "here are the rules."
A few of the agreements are worth explaining, because I think the specific choices matter.
"Listen to understand" is the one I'd keep if I could only keep one. It's easy to sit in a meeting mentally preparing your rebuttal while someone else is talking, and this agreement asks people to come from curiosity instead, which changes the quality of the conversation in ways that are hard to overstate.
"Take space, make space" speaks to a dynamic every facilitator knows well: some people tend to fill the air and some people tend to hold back, and this agreement invites everyone to notice which one they are and adjust accordingly.
"Assume good intent" does the most work in contentious rooms, not by asking people to pretend disagreement doesn't exist, but by asking them to start from the assumption that the person across the table isn't the enemy, even when they're on the other side of a hard issue.
You don't have to use mine. The specific agreements matter less than the practice of setting them — of pausing at the start, naming how the group will work together, and giving everyone a shared foundation before the conversation gets going.
