The Three Questions to End Every Meeting
Close every meeting with: what did we decide, who does what by when, and who else needs to know
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 96%
A simple closing ritual that fixes the most common meeting failure: no continuity, so teams re-meet and re-decide the same things. In the last five to ten minutes, someone asks three questions and captures the answers as deliverables. The first question alone — 'what did we decide?' — routinely surfaces that six people in the same meeting have six different answers.
Origin
Alisa Cohn's meeting-facilitation practice with executive teams.
Core principles
- 01Meetings fail when decisions aren't captured, so teams re-decide next time
- 02'What did we decide?' surfaces hidden disagreement — same meeting, different answers
- 03Decisions must cascade; teams routinely decide things and forget to tell anyone
- 04Reserve time at the end — meetings run to the wire and skip the close
- 05Anyone can start this ritual; you don't need to run the meeting to do it
How to run it
- 1
Reserve the last 5-10 minutes
Bake the close into the meeting as a ritual so it isn't squeezed out when discussion runs to the end.
Pro tip Assign it as someone's job — ideally a person who enjoys follow-up and list-making, the 'follower-upper.'
Watch out Meetings always run out of time; if you don't protect these minutes the ritual dies.
- 2
Ask: what did we decide here?
Go around the room (in a small ~6-person meeting) or ask two or three people (in a large group) to state what was decided, and capture it.
Pro tip Have someone put the doc on screen and fill it live — but still verbally poll, or a dissenter may stay silent about a different understanding.
Watch out Just posting a summary silently risks someone not weighing in when their view of the decision actually differs — surface the differences on purpose.
- 3
Ask: who needs to do what by when?
Turn the decision into action items, each with an owner and a date.
- 4
Ask: who else needs to know?
Identify who outside the room must be told, and cascade the decision down so it isn't trapped in the room.
Pro tip Make cascading part of the protocol — otherwise busy people simply forget to share, with no malice.
In the wild
Cohn observes that if you ask six people at the end of a meeting to write down what was decided, you'll get six different answers even though they were all in the same room.
→ Surfacing the divergence lets the team stitch a real shared decision together instead of leaving with false consensus.
Cohn has worked with executive teams that make decisions and promises in the room, then leave and forget to tell anyone who needs to act on them.
→ Adding 'who else needs to know?' as a standing question closes the cascade gap.
Common mistakes
Assuming everyone left with the same understanding
Each person silently believes they know what was decided, but those pictures often differ — skipping the explicit 'what did we decide?' locks in a false consensus that unravels later.
Posting a summary without polling the room
If you just put the decisions on screen to save time, a person with a genuinely different view may not speak up, so the disagreement stays buried.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone in recurring team or executive meetings that keep re-litigating past decisions
Not ideal for
Purely informational or social gatherings with no decisions or deliverables to capture
From the transcript
“what did we decide here who needs to do what by when and who else needs to know”
“if you really go around the room at the end of a meeting or six people in the meeting”
“you will get six different answers even though we're in the same meeting”
“you could just be the person in the meeting and just chime in and just start it yourself”
From the episode
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more
Alisa Cohn (executive coach)