---
title: "How to squeeze a decision out of a sleepy meeting"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-squeeze-a-decision-out-of-a-sleepy-meeting.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-squeeze-a-decision-out-of-a-sleepy-meeting.html"
published: "2009-10-15T08:34:21+00:00"
updated: "2009-10-15T08:36:31.953000+00:00"
tags: ["Decision Making", "people patterns"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "A link to Yves Hanoulle's short post on a simple protocol for squeezing a decision out of long, tired meetings that never seem to reach one."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# How to squeeze a decision out of a sleepy meeting

[Yves](http://paircoaching.wordpress.com/) has [a short and to the point post](http://paircoaching.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/tired-of-long-meetings-without-decisions/)  - There's a simple protocol you can try for that.

## Read next

- [How to deal with bad decisions made by the team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-deal-with-bad-decisions-made-by-the-team.html): How a team lead can steer a self-directing team away from bad technical decisions by asking hard questions, based on Mike Cohn's Succeeding with Agile.
- [Immediate and delayed satisfaction in software development](https://www.5whys.com/articles/immediate-and-delayed-satisfaction-in-software-development.html): Why software teams should not accept slow builds and manual work, and how leads who can't stand delayed satisfaction push for automation and fast releases.
- [Check-in: sharing emotions in an effective way](https://www.5whys.com/articles/check-in-sharing-emotions-in-an-effective-way.html): Yves Hanoulle explains the Check-In protocol from The Core Protocols, using mad, glad, sad and afraid to share emotions at work and at home.


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/