Why ground rules are important?

The term originally comes from baseball. Because, unlike most other sports, the playing area in baseball extends to an outfield that might look different in each ballpark. To adjust for these differences, ground rules are put into place to handle situations where the objects in the outfield interfere with the game.

In this post, we will discuss:

Ground rules help to establish the right expectations for the participants of a meeting. This helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page and reduces the risk of the meeting turning unproductive or running out of hand.

Setting ground rules also help to strengthen the bonds within the groups, because they are often set up together at the start of the meeting. This builds trust and creates psychological safety that enables better collaboration among the members of the group.

Ground rules should always be used with a clear purpose. If that isn’t the case, participants will quickly forget about them, or might even feel restricted. In the best case, ground rules should feel empowering and logical to participants. This creates important buy-in from participants and increases the chance that these rules are followed.

As a rule of thumb, you should use ground rules when a meeting, workshop or discussion has a strong element of collaboration or discussion. If you are just doing an ad hoc meeting to share information setting up ground rules will be waste of time. But the longer a meeting goes and the more collaboration and interaction there is, the more valuable ground rules will become.

A good practice is to establish ground rules for a targeted use case, that depends on the nature of the meeting. Here is a list of common use cases for ground rules:

For each of these use cases, there are several ground rules that can be established.

[.box-highlight]Tip: To make it easy to find the right ground rules, we created a library of over 30 meeting ground rules that can be filtered by each use case.[.box-highlight]

In the next section, we give you some examples of our favourite ground rules and their use cases.

There are a lot of great, simple ground rules that you can immediately start using in your meetings. Here are some of our favourites:

It’s often difficult to reach an agreement in a meeting because some people are often dogmatic about their position. But if participants mutually explore the interest behind the positions, it becomes much easier to find a common ground.

Use case: Handling and avoiding conflicts

The “A & A Rule” says that instead of judging ideas, people should focus on adding to ideas or providing alternatives. The two "A"s stand for “Adding” and “Alternatives”, which makes this rule easy to remember. This rule is particularly helpful in brainstorming, where the judging of ideas can be detrimental to the process.

Use case: Sparking creativity and having a productive brainstorm

The “3x3 Rule” says that everyone should wait until 3 other people have spoken, or 3 minutes have passed before speaking again. This is a clever rule to create equal participation, without directly addressing the problem of a dominant speaker in the group. Based on the size of the group, this can also be adjusted to the 2x2 or even 4x4 Rule.

Use case: Create equal participation

“Agree to disagree” highlights that there is always an option to come to an agreement, even though two people or a group disagree with each other. How? Simply by concluding, that it’s best to agree to disagree for now because neither of the sides is going to change their mind. After this agreement, the group can stop arguing and move on.

Use case: Handling and avoiding conflicts

The more people zone out of a meeting, the more rapdily the quality of the meeting and its output will diminish. Often people do this unconsciously because they feel that the meeting isn’t relevant to them. “Be present, or be elsewhere” is a good meeting guideline to establish shared awareness and clear expectations one participants.

Use case: Increase Engagement

E.L.M.O stands for “Enough, let’s move on” and can be established as a meeting rule to cut unnecessary discussions. Once stated, anyone in the meeting can say “ELMO!” at any time to indicate that it is time to move on to the next topic.

Use case: Maintain focus and stay on time

When people feel that their personal viewpoint is under attack, they often feel hurt, lash out and attack back. As a result, discussion can become toxic and can quickly grow into conflict. “Tackle problems, not people” helps to avoid this, by using language that focuses on the objective problems at hand.

Use case: Establish a safe space

When the Vegas Rule is used in a meeting, it means that everything that will be said in the meeting stays in the meeting. As you may guess, this comes from the original saying “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”.

Use case: Establish a safe space

Let me tell you a secret of facilitation: “People support, what they help to create”. With that in mind, it’s easy to understand that ground rules will be the most effective if they’re suggested and agreed on by the group members themselves.

There are three ways you can go about this:

What you use depends on the type of meeting, how important the ground rules and how much time you have at hand. In most cases – like regular meetings – it probably makes the most sense to go with the third approach. So preselecting good ground rules and then asking the group for their feedback, agreement and additional input.

At what time should you introduce and discuss ground rules? Here we would recommend, doing it as early as possible. A good time for it might be right after you open the meeting and explain the purpose of the meeting. Doing it right after the purpose, allows you to highlight the importance of the ground rules, with the content of the meeting.

[.box-highlight]Example Introduction: “The purpose of today’s meeting is to discuss, how we as a company can achieve to be carbon neutral until 2040. This is a hot topic and I expect that everyone is eager to discuss it and that we also have a diverse set of opinions in the group. Therefore I would like to establish a set of ground rules, that helps us to have a more productive and focused discussion as a group. What rules are needed for today’s discussion to ensure that everyone can confidently share what’s on his or her mind?”[.box-highlight]

We find that one of the key parts covered when starting a facilitated session is the establishment of ground rules. Often, participants in our classes ask, “Are ground rules a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘need to have’ in meetings?” Are they simply pedantic, or can they be effectively used in facilitated sessions?

There is a school of thought that ground rules are for elementary school – they are trite, and people would be better served to focus on more “important stuff.” At Leadership Strategies, we find that ground rules can serve a multitude of purposes both to run better meetings (wouldn’t that be a nice change?) or to run better facilitated sessions. So, let’s start with two key reasons for using ground rules and then offer what we refer to as “Provocative Ground Rules: Ground Rules to Address Key Issues.”

1. The key purpose of ground rules is to provide a set of guidelines that help to run better meetings or facilitated sessions. They are meant to be self-governing.

What we mean by that is once the ground rules are established and the group agrees to the ground rules, the entire group – both the facilitator and the participants – share the responsibility for enforcing the ground rules. A specific example would be the inclusion of the following ground rule that has been agreed to by the participants:

“One Conversation”

This means that if you have a Whispering Willie in your session and Willie begins his conversation with his neighbor, any participant would be fulfilling their responsibility to the ground rules by courteously reminding Willie about that ground rule.

2. Another reason ground rules are needed is that they start a “consensus-focused process” (our tagline for Principle 7, Consensus Building, in The Effective Facilitator).

In addition to gaining agreement on the agenda during the session’s start, the establishment and adoption of ground rules is also one of the first opportunities for a group to gain consensus at the start. By getting everyone’s acceptance of the ground rules, the group is trained to build consensus (starting with relatively easy areas), which initiates the meeting on a positive track. When a controversial disagreement arises in your meeting or facilitated session, the group looks to you as the facilitator to guide them through a process to gain consensus. Ground rules help remind the group to return to consensus.

Last month, we provided resources around Preparing for Success (Principle 1 in the Leadership Strategies methodology). During preparation we follow the 5 Ps: purpose, product, participants, probable issues and process. When we identify those probable issues, often times as the facilitator we can address those probable issues by “taking them off the table” by the use of provocative ground rules. Below are three of our most popular provocative ground rules we recommend you try.

1. “Build up”

Ask participants not to be critical of recommendations or suggestions as they arise. We ask them to not criticize and to take the chance to onlybuild up on what is said to make it better.

2. “ELMO”

This means “Enough Let’s Move On.” Allow participants to take a check to avoid the “beating a dead horse to death” on any discussion/issue. If the majority agrees that a discussion is essentially completed, we move on.

3. “You can leave silent but not unhappy”

This centers on consensus and lets the participants know that if they do not agree, the time to speak up is in the meeting/session – not after in the hallway/cafeteria/office/water cooler/etc.

Activity 1: Build a genuine, collaborative policy team.

Establishing ground rules[1] for how a team will work together is an essential step that teams should take before embarking on any collaborative endeavor. Developing ground rules sets an important foundation for how the team is expected to work together in order to accomplish its goals and serves as a reminder of the values the team intends to uphold.

All policy team members should be involved in the development of your team’s ground rules.

When setting ground rules, consider the following questions:

Some other tips for creating ground rules include the following:

Example: Grant County, Indiana, Policy Team Ground Rules

The following ground rules and operating norms have been established, and team members have agreed to hold each other accountable for adherence to these rules and norms:

Example: Mesa County, Colorado, Policy Team Ground Rules

Center for Effective Public Policy (CEPP). (2005). Teamwork exercise: Developing ground rules. Retrieved from https://cepp.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Teamwork-Exercise-Discussion-of-Roles-and-Responsibilities.pdf

———. (2005). Ten tips for effective team participation. Retrieved from https://cepp.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Signs-of-Effective-Meetings.pdf

———. (2006). Getting it right: Collaborative problem solving for criminal justice. Retrieved from https://nicic.gov/getting-it-right-collaborative-problem-solving-crimina...

Tip: Set ground rules

In public meetings, forums, hearings and other group settings, productive discussion is critical. Ground rules help a group start and maintain a productive discussion. Ground rules clarify expectations for behavior in the meeting.

Ground rules are a short list of expectations to guide how a group works together. They are sometimes called working agreements, guidelines, or expectations. While many public organizations use parliamentary procedure as a form of ground rules, such formal rules may not be sufficient or appropriate for guiding public discussion.

Effective ground rules help:

Here are suggestions for ground rules that can be especially helpful for public meetings:

Groups can create ground rules in advance of the meeting, or with the group at the meeting. The group's size and purpose can determine how ground rules are set.

Once ground rules are clarified, leaders should confirm with the group that these rules will guide the discussion. The group's agreement allows the leader or a group member to directly address an issue when a ground rule is not followed.

Having nine or fewer ground rules helps the group more easily remember and support them. Post rules on a handout, table tent or flip chart so that they are readily available. If the group meets multiple times, repost rules at each meeting to orient new participants and remind others.

Developing ground rules sets an important foundation for how the team is expected to work together in order to accomplish its goals and serves as a reminder of the values the team intends to uphold.