Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Term: Parking Lot

Term: Parking Lot

In a facilitated meeting, a mechanism for simultaneously acknowledging contentious or tangential issues while sidelining them for later resolution.

In the old days of in-person meetings and flipchart paper, a piece of paper was reserved for parking-lot issues. In the new days of distributed teams and online collaboration tools, it’s worth setting up an equivalent recording mechanism. In effective groups, people are heard and feel/know that they’re heard. Then they don’t keep trying to monopolize the conversation to deal with their problem.

There’s no reason why a permanent parking lot couldn’t be set up on proposals, so that people could record their concerns as they arise.

(If this were a personal blog, I’d comment here that this is similar to an individual acknowledging uncomfortable feelings or unhappy thoughts to themselves and making a plan to address them at the next session with the counselor/therapist/psychologist. Once the subconscious knows it’s heard, it stops beaking-off too.)