Mythbusting — Agendas in the collaborative process

MYTH

You don’t need to follow agendas in the collaborative process.

BUSTED

As with litigation, the collaborative process works because there is a structured process.  We don’t make up the rules of Court as we go through the litigation process (well most of us don’t!). Similarly, with the collaborative process we don’t make up the rules as we go along.  We sell the process to our clients as a structured process to assist them to resolve their property/parenting issues.

The use of an Agenda:

• Helps our clients prepare for their next meeting;
• Focuses our clients on what homework they need to do for that meeting;
• Focuses the professional team on the issues that need to be addressed and the matters that are going to be raised by the clients;
• Allows us to prepare our clients for what is going to be raised in the meeting;
• Helps to prevent ‘surprises’ popping up at meetings

The absence of an Agenda:

• Makes the professional team look unprofessional and the process haphazard;
• Allows a party to hijack the process by going off on a tangent;
• Can derail the process when a party is not prepared for issues that are unexpectedly raised;
• May lead to a party feeling disadvantaged and disempowered;
• Can result in parties feeling disillusioned with the process.

We recommend always having a Coach to keep the parties and the professionals focused on the Agenda.

One quick tip

If you are preparing documents to share during the course of a meeting – don’t share them until that Agenda item is reached. Otherwise clients tend to look through the documents as soon as they get them, without context, and blow-ups result.