Everyone is so task-oriented these days it sounds like heresy to speak warmly about holding a meeting with no agenda. Yet many find it a refreshing, creative experience that invites breakthroughs. Protests will be instant: “it’s bad enough ‘taking time out from work’ for meetings with an agenda without being required to attend a meeting without one.” This response is revealing: do your managers and directors, or members of your team, feel they are in a time famine, always working desperately against the clock? What does that tell you?

The value of meeting with no agenda is that people with important things to develop ideas and approaches to, get to relax enough to have the conversations that perhaps should have been had days, weeks or even months earlier. There you are, in the same room and the same time, distractions parked. You’ve committed that hour – or even two hours – to the conversation. Quality time. Serious commitment to quality time.

Do you think you’ll have nothing to talk about? What about exploring things done and things yet to be done from a much larger context? What is the trajectory of actions and movements presently underway and imminent? Is it leading the organization where it should go? How good is day to day communication? Are people defended when difficulties are raised that concern them? Or are they welcoming of the feedback, eager to grow into greater levels of leadership and responsibility? Are they looking for someone or something to blame, or digging into the situation to extract the learning and significance of it? What is the direction of the current in the organization, affecting everything on the surface like the current of a river, yet itself hidden?

It can powerfully assist in agenda-less meetings to have a coach-facilitator asking questions to draw out those conversations. The coach-facilitator is taking the pulse of participants and the organization at all such meetings. I’m speaking here of a kind of coach that has expertise in asking powerful questions to which the coach does not know the answer. This is different from mentor coaching. With the coach’s process skills and the participants’ substantive expertise, results can flow quickly and surely.

The larger the context the coach-facilitator brings to the discussion, the more participants are invited into their own larger context. Such coaches may be holding quietly within themselves this question: “What wants to happen here?” as discussions ensue. When the coach then asks questions from that place of inquiry so well described by Otto Scharmer in Theory U – Leading from the Future As It Emerges – something new can happen. Perhaps it’s that what-everyone-knows-but-no-one-is-discussing at last shows up through gentle, non-judgmental inquiry. And all of a sudden, something real and important can be seen in the light of day, recognized and acknowledged. No longer is its influence hidden. Now a strategy can be developed to deal with it.

Think about it. These agenda-less meetings have great impact at the highest levels of the organization, because here is where the largest context is life’s blood. But even at the line level, agenda-less meetings can be both highly productive and creative. You and your team get to interact about business in a non-task-oriented way, and everyone learns more about the art of speaking effectively and receiving feedback. In other words, such meetings serve to grow the leadership capacities of participants who through the coaching-facilitation process, learn better how to safely share what they know and help others to do so.

How often should such meetings be held? Ideally about 10 to 15 times a year. That’s often enough to keep the larger context in view so that the smaller contexts function more optimally toward the greater good.

And what kind of coach-facilitator do you want? Using a coach-facilitator – even a triple-qualifier that includes mediation experience – who is not embedded in the organization invites the asking of questions an acculturated person knows not to ask. All cultures have compartments for “don’t asks.” And what’s in those compartments is often the very thing that desperately needs to be asked for the well-being of the organization and those within it. Your non-acculturated coach is a prime resource for you in inviting real breakthrough.