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Can we talk about how one guy at our library book club meeting in Boise turned a 20 minute chat into a 90 minute fight?
We were at the Boise library branch on Cole Rd last Tuesday with 11 people there to talk about a short mystery novel, and one guy kept cutting off every woman who tried to share her take. Half the group says we should've let him run out of steam instead of stepping in, and the other half says a leader should've shut it down at the 10 minute mark. What do you all do when one person hijacks the discussion, and does your club have a rule for it or do you just wing it?
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the_terry27d ago
Ugh, we had almost the exact same thing happen in a group I was in a few years back, and it went on for months before anyone did anything about it. What finally worked was picking a rotating moderator each meeting (just one person whose job is to watch the clock, not to be bossy) so no single person had to play bad guy every time. We came up with a simple rule that everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice, and the moderator just says that out loud if someone jumps back in too early. We also agreed that if one topic runs past 10 minutes with the same person talking, the moderator says "let's hear from someone who hasn't gone yet" and that's it, no debate about it. The key was making the rule ahead of time so it wasn't personal when it got used, because trying to fix it in the moment just made everyone pick sides like what happened with your group. People grumbled for a meeting or two but honestly the quieter folks started showing up more once they knew they'd actually get a turn.
And yeah, waiting for him to run out of steam never works. Talkers like that don't run out, they just find a new thing to talk about.
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