I was reading an article about running board meetings, for reasons that should be obvious. During the course of this article, I discovered an interesting (to me) discussion of the role of AOCB - Any Other Competent Business (that is, the bit at the end of the meeting where people bring up anything that hasn't yet been discussed).
Anyway, what was interesting was that the article recommended that AOCB be extremely strongly constrained - specifically, it should be allowed only for things that had come up in the meeting itself but that couldn't possibly have been predicted beforehand.
For other topics, these should ideally be submitted for inclusion in the agenda ahead of time, or they should be raised (but not yet discussed) at the outset of the meeting. Either way, they should be added to the agenda at the start of the meeting, at the latest.
The reason given for this, other than just for a more efficient running of a meeting, is that it protects against the case where someone has to leave the meeting early (or just "on time") and shouldn't later discover that something has been discussed, and potentially decided on, in their absence.
Which is, of course, quite right. And it's one of the things that I wish I had considered, and acted upon, while I was Chairperson of the band, and found myself stuck in very long, very repetitive meetings where AOCB so frequently was the thing that got out of hand.
But, as I said, it's a bit of an obscure topic for the blog. If not the most obscure ever.
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