Park it

Have you ever felt that emotional, cloudy feeling in your brain when something seems so hard that you don’t know what to do next?

I have.

When the speaker makes the wrong assumption. Someone changes their mind. An agreement is broken.

Our mind can cope with only a few challenges at a time. In meetings, when more than 3 barriers are raised, notice how everyone’s confidence and constructiveness drops?

There’s a simple way to overcome this. Since our brains black out, it’s best to create a ‘parking lot’ on the whiteboard.

The parking lot is somewhere issues, blockers or cons can be stored and addressed at a later time. They are things raised during discussion, verbalised, noted and recorded.

Our brains love this. We don’t panic that they may be forgotten. We don’t stress about getting sidetracked. We don’t accuse people of hijacking the meeting.

When the time comes to go through the parking lot issues, you will find that the emotion has dispersed and once unpacked they are much easier to solve than previously thought.

The Parking lot technique is a simple way to keep meetings on track (and on time!) and to keep everyone focused on achieving the same thing. Try it!