Facilitation and disruptive behaviours

Last updated on 2026-02-27 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How can I handle and reduce disruptions during a meeting?
  • How can I ensure that every meeting participant can contribute effectively?

Objectives

At the end of this episode, participants will be able to…

  • Identify and mitigate disruptive behaviours.
  • Facilitate inclusive discussions that enable everyone to participate.
  • Prevent discussions from diverging away from the intended topic or going over time.

Introduction

The meeting host may have done all of the necessary steps to prepare for a good meeting, including putting together a meaningful agenda and preparing participants to serve in the various meeting roles. However, once the meeting starts, and you’ve brought your participants together into your virtual space, a number of behaviours may combine to make the meeting uninspiring, demotivating, and downright painful. These behaviours can be particularly challenging when participants span multiple levels of your organisation’s hierarchy, or have different levels of power due to systemic social marginalisation.

Callout

“Behaviours” versus “People”

In discussing issues that may arise during meeting facilitation, we find it helpful to focus on specific behaviours that individuals may exhibit, rather than on the people themselves. We take this approach for two reasons:

  1. Peoples’ behaviour naturally varies in different situations. Someone who goes off on long tangents in the morning before they’ve had their caffeine, may be more to-the-point after their first hot cuppa.
  2. As an organization dedicated to the idea of “Always Learning”, we strongly believe that people can change their behaviour over time and learn to be more helpful, productive, and welcoming meeting participants!

Although you may not be able to flatten the organisational hierarchy or correct long-standing imbalances in power distribution in society, there are steps you can take during a meeting to mitigate negative disruptive behaviours. Some of these strategies are most easily implemented when you are serving as the meeting Facilitator, but others can be enacted by any meeting participant. Using these strategies intentionally across your meetings can help shift organisational culture over time and build a more positive meeting environment in which all participants feel comfortable sharing their perspectives.

Common Disruptive Behaviors

The goal of the Facilitator is to complete the agenda within the assigned timeframe, giving each participant a chance to contribute to the decisions being made.

It’s easy for certain behaviours to work against this, by slowing down the meeting or suppressing voices. Therefore, it’s important that the Facilitator can identify these disruptors, and take actions to prevent them negatively affecting the meeting.

Challenge

Identifying Disruptive Behaviours (5 minutes)

Think of a disruptive meeting behavior that you have observed. Describe what happened, how it impacted the meeting, and what could have been done to avoid or correct the disruption.

This exercise should take about 5 minutes.

The list generated by participants will differ for each session, but some common themes that might emerge include:

  • One or a few people talking repeatedly while others don’t talk at all
  • Interrupting
  • Re-stating someone else’s idea and claiming it as their own
  • Someone talking for a long time
  • Playing “devil’s advocate”
  • Shutting down other people’s ideas, being dismissive or overly negative
  • Participants stuck debating unimportant details (“bike shedding”)
  • Off-topic discussions happening in the chat
  • People not contributing even though their expertise would be valuable!

The United States’ National Ocean and Atmospheric Association provides one possible taxonomy of disruptive behaviours, along with possible interventions for each. In this course, we will focus on some of the most common behaviours, and those most likely to prevent the meeting from being successful, but we encourage you to check out this reference for further learning.

Dominating Conversation

Some people love to speak. They may have strong ideas, or may simply believe their experience or seniority gives them the right to dominate the conversation. This may lead to rambling, and limit opportunities for all participants to contributing their own ideas. In addition to taking up more than their fair share of the meeting time, overly talkative individuals may also negatively impact the group’s motivation.

Anyone can be verbose, but social conditioning and power dynamics mean that individuals from groups carrying higher degrees of privilege are more likely to dominate any particular meeting. This means that individuals from marginalised groups are likely to have fewer opportunities to participate in not just the current meeting, but the sum total of meetings they attend in their careers. As the meeting Facilitator, some things you can do to disrupt this pattern include:

  • explicitly noting an imbalance in who has spoken (e.g. “I see that Ethan has another hand, but we haven’t heard from Nadia or Felix yet.”)
  • only allowing participants to share one idea per turn (e.g. if Zane starts by saying “I have two points to make” interrupting with “Thanks Zane, could you please pick the most important point for this round and we’ll come back to your second point after Theo and Valentina’s hands?”)
  • interrupting someone who has been speaking too long, or is repeating themselves (e.g. “Thanks for sharing Noelle - I want to make sure we have an opportunity to hear from Priya before we wrap up this agenda item.”)

Even if you are not the Facilitator, if you are in a position of relative privilege, there are some things you can do at any meeting you attend to help equalise opportunities:

  • If you frequently are the first to speak, consider waiting to put up your hand until at least one or two others have shared their thoughts.
  • If the point you were going to make has been made by someone else, put down your hand and note in the chat that you agree with them (e.g. “+1 to Mariam’s point”).
  • If the next person on the list has spoken less than you, consider ceding your hand to them.

These strategies can be particularly effective if the individuals you are ceding time to or noting agreement with are members of marginalised groups.

Indecisive or Argumentative

There were goals for bringing together these individuals for this meeting. Whether those goals were to make a specific decision, implement the next stage of a project, or brainstorm funding opportunities to pursue, it can be frustrating to have those goals sidelined by individuals who are overly indecisive or argumentative.

An individual who is overly argumentative may want to play “devil’s advocate” - making arguments in favor of a position they don’t actually agree with. They may also continue to raise issues that have already been resolved, or keep debating after the rest of the group has come to consensus.

Similarly, someone who is overly indecisive may spend an inappropriate amount of time considering every detail of a proposed solution. While these considerations may be necessary to implement the decision, the meeting itself may not be the appropriate venue to hash out those details.

Although it can be important to consider a given issue from multiple angles, each of these behavior types may have the effect of slowing down the meeting’s progress and preventing important decisions from being reached. Let’s apply our previous discussion of issues with individuals dominating conversations to identify strategies that facilitators and individual meeting participants can use to mitigate these issues.

Challenge

Identifying Strategies (10 minutes)

In the Etherpad, share one or more ideas for how a Facilitator could help resolve issues arising from participants’ indecision or argumentativeness. Also add one idea for how a regular meeting participant can contribute to resolving these issues.

The group will likely come up with a few of the strategies below (as well as others we haven’t thought of!). The meeting Facilitator should highlight the strategies the group has identified, including any recurring themes, while adding any from the list below that have been missed.

Facilitator Strategies

  • Clarify the decision stage, ideally at the start of the agenda item. Is this item being raised for initial brainstorming, or is a decision needed today?
  • Clarify consequences of delay. What happens if the decision isn’t made today?
  • Set decision making rules in advance. We will discuss this in detail later in this lesson.
  • Ask participants to restrict comments to those that add new information or concerns.
  • Summarise and test for consensus (e.g. “It sounds like there is general agreement about X, but a concern about Y. Is that a fair summary?”)
  • Ask participants to be specific about risk levels. How likely is the scenario they are raising? If it does occur, how critical would it be?
  • Redirect details to asynchronous follow-up.

Participant Strategies

  • Avoid performing “devil’s advocacy” unless explicitly invited.
  • State your own position before critiquing others’.
  • Acknowledge when the discussion is becoming too detail-oriented (e.g. “Is this something we can follow-up on async?”)
  • Volunteer to handle implementation details outside of the meeting.
  • Offer synthesis to help clarify possible directions (e.g. “It sounds like the two paths forward are A and B.”)

Proactively Handling Disruptive Behavior

Dealing with disruptions can be scary, especially if you are not the most senior person in the room, but the other meeting participants rely on you, as the Facilitator, to bring the meeting back on track. Most of the times this can be done in a gentle, non-confrontational manner using a two-step intervention:

  • First, interrupt, if necessary, and state your observation of what is happening. E.g. “We are getting a bit of track here and are no longer talking about our objective.”
  • Second, suggest a constructive way forward. E.g. “Let us refocus, the question we were discussing was… Who can suggest a solution?”

However, if this is not successful, it might be necessary to be firmer in calling out the disruption. Address the disrupting person by name, and tell them what to do or stop doing. For example, “Tina, please don’t interrupt.”

For more actionable meeting facilitation strategies, we recommend checking out the Life Labs Learning two-page Meeting Course-Correction Guide.

Discussion

Forming the Fellowship of the Ring

Setting

You’ve just gotten back from a project kick-off meeting yesterday. It ran too long, the agenda seemed aimless and no-one stuck to it, and Gimli rambled for far too long on tangential topics.

You’re part of the RSE sub-team in the project, and you’re determined that your meetings will NOT be death-by-powerpoint and that Gimli will talk about as long as everyone else in the team, no longer.

Now you’re in the team meeting. Gimli is talking about the project tracker you should be using, and he’s spent fifteen minutes explaining how good the Mithril Project manager (tm) is. Legolas would like to use the Lembas project tacking method, and you can’t quite seem to get a word in edgewise.

Exercise

  • Discuss in small groups (or write down, if you’re working solo):
    • What types of disruptions are these? See the NOAA resource for more different types of disruptors and how to deal with them.
    • What might be a good way to handle this?
    • Assign the roles of Gimli and Legolas to two team members. Have a chair role-play how to redirect and defuse this type of difficult behaviour.

Thinking about the exercise: What went well? What was hard? Interrupting when a meeting isn’t “going right” isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Some points to remember:

  • Address disruptions in two ways.
    • At the time the disruption happens, make sure the behaviour is stopped.
    • After the meeting, make sure that you look at systemic ways to reduce that type of disruption as well - e.g. if you always run over time, consider assigning a standard “timekeeper” role to every meeting.
  • Practice can make it easier to interrupt, but be aware of power dynamics: it’s one thing to stop a disagreement when you’re chairing a meeting, but it might (or might not) be wise to interrupt someone who is in a much “higher” position in a hierarchy, if they aren’t receptive to feedback.
  • If you do have power or privilege (e.g. you’re a chair, or you’re a member of an in-group), make sure to use that power and privelege to support marginalised members. Sometimes it could be as simple as repeating what another person said and attributing it to the original speaker.
Key Points
  • Set explicit expectations and be ready to intervene gently then forcefully if disruptive behaviours recur.
  • Invite and make space for contributions from meeting participants.
  • Reinforce and attribute the contributions of marginalised individuals.