How to Get the Conversation Back on Track
Spoken with Authority’s Christine Clapp and coaches Lisa Richard, Lynne Adrine, and Jean Costanza Miller, Ph.D. responded with strategies to prevent situations before a conversation can go off track and how to respond in the moment when you are facilitating or moderating a discussion to get things back on track. Here are the highlights from the recent panel discussion contributors or view the full 11-minute discussion.
Lisa Richard
As public speakers, most of the work we prepare for is done long before we come into the room. We prepare by thinking about how much time we have, what areas we want to focus on, and what we anticipate people may ask. Making clear what the focus is and knowing where the distractions may come in can help you lay out clear parameters to keep the discussion on track. By laying out clear parameters in advance, you can table off-point contributions for a future discussion. You will find that most people in the room will thank you for keeping the discussion on point, therefore, respecting everyone’s time and the purpose of the meeting.
Christine Clapp
When you prepare a timed agenda, you are making a promise to meeting attendees to respect their time and the purpose of the meeting. If you don’t follow through, it is likely that your next agenda will become meaningless. You must be willing to interrupt as the facilitator of a meeting or the moderator of a panel.
Lynne Adrine
In media interviews, you may be asked a question by the interviewer for which you were not prepared. You can be honest and say that you do not have all the information and it would be better to follow up rather than lead them astray and then direct the interview back to the original topic. It won’t serve anyone well to offer information you’re not vetted on. With experience, you will gain dynamic flexibility and use that ability to seize on an unexpected point and turn the contribution back to the original focus of the discussion.
Jean Costanza Miller, Ph.D.
Two possibilities for dealing with conversations that get off track is to prevent them from going in the wrong direction in the first place and to steer them back quickly and directly when they do.
One way to prevent the conversation or meeting from going sideways is to have a system for putting ideas aside to be addressed later. One of my graduate school professors used to say "Let's bracket that." We all knew that phrase meant that an idea might take us off track, so he would write a label on the board with brackets around it, and sure enough, we would return to it later. In a meeting, you might say, "Great point. Let's take that up at our next meeting." The key is to have a system so people don't feel like their ideas are being dismissed and to really return to the message when the time is right.
If a conversation does go off the rails, you'll be able to steer it back most easily if you don't let it go too far astray. As soon as you think the discussion is veering away from the purpose, you can be direct and ask how X relates to Y, or you can simply say, "Let's go back and finalize our discussion of X before moving on." Sometimes, being direct and polite is all it takes to get others back on task.