Why I stopped leaving "Any Other Business" to last in meetings

There's a feature of most meeting agendas that drives me quietly up the wall.

It's right there at the bottom, sandwiched in after everything else: Any Other Business.

In theory, it's a generous gesture - a catch-all for anything that didn't make the list. In practice, it's a fiction. By the time you get to it, the hour is up, people are already mentally in their next thing, and whatever was lurking under "AOB" gets deferred, again, to a future meeting that will end the same way.

So what's the point?

Over the years, I've worked with a number of groups who've solved this quietly, without fanfare. They don't have a complex new meeting format. They don't use a fancy tool. They've just made one small, counterintuitive change.

They put Any Other Business first.

What that actually looks like

Before getting into the agenda - before the updates, the reports, the discussion items - someone asks a version of this question:

"Is there anything you need to share or need help with before we get started?"

The exact wording shifts depending on context:

• In a weekly team meeting: "Is there anything going on that people need to share or need help with today?"

• In a monthly governance meeting: "Is there anything that wasn't covered in the report that we need to be aware of?"

• In a workshop or planned session: "Is there anything you need to know or share before we get started?"

  
  

And then - crucially - it's timeboxed. Five minutes. Maybe ten. Declared upfront, so everyone knows the shape of it.

How this works in practice

I saw this in action clearly a while back. My colleague Amy was running a workshop for a group of agile coaches. Before we got into the planned content, she asked for any comments or questions on an ongoing topic the group had been working through - and gave it 15 minutes.

There was a lively discussion. Real energy in the room. Amy brought it to a close just in time, with a suggestion for a follow-up conversation.

And then something shifted. With that out of everyone's systems, the group were able to concentrate fully on the workshop. Properly present. Not half-listening while waiting for a gap to raise the thing they'd walked in with.

That's what this does. It clears the space.

Why it works (the invisible bit)

Most of us have sat in a meeting where something was clearly playing on people's minds. You could feel it. Someone was distracted, or oddly quiet, or subtly itching to say something that didn't fit the agenda. That unspoken thing is taking up space - not on the agenda, but in the room.

When there's no way to surface it, it doesn't disappear. It just goes underground. People half-engage. They wait and chat to colleagues separately afterwards, causing resentment to build. Or they find a way to shoehorn it in somewhere it doesn't quite fit, which derails the meeting anyway.

Starting with AOB acknowledges something simple: that time passes between when a meeting is planned and when it actually happens. Things emerge. Situations change. Someone found out something on Monday that makes Wednesday's agenda slightly irrelevant.

It also acknowledges something else - something that's harder for some leaders to sit with. The person who set the agenda doesn't know everything. They couldn't. They planned based on what they knew at the time, from where they were sitting. Other people in that room know different things, have seen different things, are carrying different things.

Putting AOB first is a small act of recognising that. It says: the agenda is a starting point, not a decree. What you know matters too.

And when people feel that, they bring it. Which is exactly why giving it a designated, timeboxed moment at the start works so well - what surfaces can be acknowledged and either dealt with appropriately, woven into the existing agenda, or parked properly. Not just ignored.

The meeting can then be shaped around what's most important to that group, at that time. Not sidetracked. Responsive.

"But won't this derail everything?"

This is the concern I hear most often. I understand it - there's a real fear that opening the floor will open the floodgates.

A few things I've noticed about this:

The timebox does most of the heavy lifting. When you declare upfront that you have five or ten minutes for this, it sets the frame. Most people respect a clear boundary. If someone brings something that needs more time, you have options - you can weave it into the existing agenda if it's relevant, or you can explicitly park it for another time. Either way, it's been seen.

Not naming it doesn't make it go away. If something urgent is in the room, it will find its way into the meeting one way or another - through distraction, through tangents, through the meeting that runs over. At least this way, you're choosing when and how to address it.

It rarely runs over. In my experience, once people know there's a proper space for AOB, they stop trying to create one somewhere else. The urgency diminishes when there's an outlet.

A few tips for your next meeting

Name the timebox out loud. "We've got five minutes before we get into the agenda - is there anything anyone needs to share or get off their chest?" The explicit time limit creates safety, not chaos.

Have a clear holding place for things that need more time. A whiteboard, a parking lot, a simple note - anything that signals "this has been heard and will be dealt with." People are much more willing to let something go when they trust it won't be lost.

Adapt the question to your context. The examples above are a starting point, not a script. The best version of this question is one that fits your group and your language. Try a few versions and see what lands.

Don't use it as a trap. This only works if people trust that raising something won't derail the whole meeting or land them in hot water. The facilitator's job is to acknowledge what comes up, handle it proportionately, and keep things moving.

This isn't a transformation. It's a small shift.

I'm not suggesting you redesign your entire meeting culture. That's not what this is.

It's just one small, practical adjustment - moving a thing that doesn't work (AOB at the end, with no time for it) to a place where it can actually do its job (AOB at the start, with a clear container).

The groups I've seen do this well aren't doing anything dramatic. They've just learned that what people are carrying into a room matters, and that acknowledging it early tends to make everything that follows work better.

Worth trying once and seeing what happens.