Agendas as outcomes

"Roadmap discussion" has no finish line. Nobody can tell, twenty minutes in, whether the item is nearly done or has not started, so nobody can tell whether to push on or move to the next one. The item ends for an outside reason: the clock, a senior person's next meeting, or a long enough silence.

Worse, everyone brings a different meeting. At Larkfield (constructed), Ravi reads "Roadmap discussion" as a chance to explain why the platform needs a quarter of reliability work. Mara reads it as a review of which growth experiments are blocked. Three of the nine team members think it is a status update and bring slides. All of them are on the agenda, and none of them is having the same meeting. That is most of what happened in the two failed attempts.

An outcome is a noun: a thing that exists when the item is over and did not exist before. "A ranked list of four items." "A summary of each team's needs that the other team has confirmed." "Three options with an owner to cost each one." The test is physical: could you hold it up at the end, on a wall, a sheet or a screen, and could everyone agree it is there?

Verbs fail the test. "Discuss the roadmap", "align on priorities", "explore options" all describe activity, and activity can go on for ever. If an item's wording starts with a verb, ask "and when we have done that, what will exist?" The answer is the outcome. If nobody can answer, the item is not ready to go on the agenda.

Purpose answers "why is this item here, and for whom?" One sentence. It is the field people skip, and the one that tells you an item does not belong: if the honest purpose is "Ravi wants to present his slides", it is a pre-read, not an agenda item.

Outcome answers "what will exist at the end?" A noun that passes the Part 1 test. It is the field the facilitator holds the room to: when the outcome exists, the item is over, even if the clock says there are five minutes left.

Process answers "how, who, and by when?" A named technique, the people involved, and a clock time. At Larkfield (constructed), the understanding item's process is "each team states its needs for five minutes, the other team paraphrases, the first team corrects, Jo charts both", from 15:10 to 15:35.

"Discuss" is not a process. It is the absence of one: open discussion, where whoever speaks first and longest shapes the item. Open discussion is a legitimate technique, but it should be chosen, not defaulted to. Write the technique by name:

• A round: each person speaks once, in turn, before anyone speaks twice.
• Pairs: two people talk for a few minutes, then each pair reports one point.
• Silent writing: everyone writes on cards for two minutes before anyone talks.
• Open discussion: named as such, with a facilitator and a stop time.

The choice follows from the outcome. If the outcome is "everyone's view is on the wall", a round or silent writing produces it; open discussion usually produces the views of the three most confident people. Session 3 adds the tools built for divergence and convergence, and session 4 shows what happens to airtime when nobody chooses.

Kaner's guide devotes chapters 10 to 12 to agendas, titled design principles, desired outcomes and process design. Only the titles were read, via the publisher's table of contents, so nothing here paraphrases what those chapters say. The guide's chapter 1, which was read, presents the Diamond of participatory decision-making as, among other uses, a roadmap for agenda design (p.20); session 3 draws that shape.

Purpose, outcome and process as three fields on each item is widespread in facilitation practice, in many slightly different wordings ("why, what, how" is a common one). No single source owns this exact form. Treat it as a well-worn template, not a finding.

Write "15:35-15:55", not "20 minutes": a clock time tells everyone, at a glance, whether the room is on track. The training-room version of this, with full session plans, lives in course design, Delivery 3.

Take the outcome line from your session 1 contract and place it at the end time. Then ask, item by item, moving left: what has to exist just before this, for this to be possible? At Larkfield (constructed): the list with owners exists at 16:30 only if the four items were chosen by 16:20; four items can be chosen by consent only if the options are all on the wall; the options only include combinations that serve both teams if each team has first heard what the other needs; and nobody can engage with any of it until the givens and the rule have been said aloud.

That chain is the agenda. Each link becomes an item, and each item's outcome is the precondition of the next. Durations come last, by dividing what is left, which is why the decision gets 25 minutes and the opening gets 10.

The fallback is the buffer. A 90-minute agenda with no slack will overrun, and the item that pays is the last one, which is usually the one that matters. Jo puts the fallback on the agenda itself, at 16:20, so the room can see it from 15:00: if consent has not been reached by then, Dana decides after hearing Ravi and Mara summarise the remaining objections. A visible fallback is not a threat. It tells the group the clock is real and that the decision will be made either way, which tends to sharpen the last stretch.

Givens go first, out loud. Anything the group cannot change is read in the opening, before discussion: capacity for about four items, item 1 (the compliance deadline) already committed and not one of the four, the candidate list fixed. A given discovered at 16:05 costs the room its decision time; read at 15:02 it costs nobody anything.

Leave a few minutes inside the long items. If the understanding item needs 22 minutes of process, give it 25. When it finishes early, start the next item early; nobody ever complained about that.