The agenda topic has been set and there's a limited amount of time to discuss how to make the current project phase come in on time and under budget. Along the way the issue of the support team comes up and their lack of staffing, limited number of test machines and the inability to mirror the customer experience due to the way the VPN has been setup. Although a discussion on the long term support of your company's products is an important topic, it has nothing to do with the current project phase. What you've just run across is a meeting rathole.
A meeting rathole is an off-topic discussion that has little relevance to an agenda topic at hand. Sometimes these topics have low value such as when the discussion moves to what folks will be doing in their off time for the up coming weekend. Or other times the discussion might be more important such as how you're going to celebrate the closure of the next project phase, but simply isn't relevant to the current agenda item.
But in some situations the discussion is tied to the agenda topic, but simply never ends. Maybe there's some disagreement over a minor point and debate rages on at the detriment of making progress and staying within the time boundary for the agenda item.
Or in the pursuit of discussing how to make the current phase come in on time and under budget, you return to the previous agenda item where you discussed the pass downs from last week's strategy session with the CEO. This too is also a meeting rathole as would be any rehashing of previously resolved issues.
But you can also end up in a rathole if you end up in a situation where minute details are over analyzed and you end up in the weeds rather than staying on the intended path for the agenda item. This type of rathole is a bit more subtle than the others, but nevertheless is still a rathole.
And then there's a kind of rathole that is less about what is being discussed but instead is focused on who is doing the discussing. In a solidly run meeting, all attendees should have a voice in the meeting but if a few participants dominate the discussion, this will be at the exclusion of other voices and perspectives. As such, this too is another kind of rathole to be avoided.
Now that we've covered what is a meeting rathole, in next week's blog post we'll talk about how to avoid and remedy them once they take place. Ratholes will invariably popup in meetings and learning how to positively address them is yet one more way to make your meetings more effective.