Effective Facilitation Techniques: Speaker Queue and Speaker Stack
Source: Dev.to
Background
Even engineers have meetings. These discussions or reviews can become quite heated and cover topics not only related to software development but also organizational development. However, engineers are not typically trained facilitators. The quality of a meeting depends heavily on facilitation, and without the necessary skills, meeting quality becomes inconsistent, leading to several issues:
- Selecting “compatible members” to reduce quality inconsistencies → increases hiring and onboarding costs.
- Conducting discussions exclusively with managers and senior engineers → incurs communication costs to convey information to on‑site engineers.
While meeting quality is not determined solely by facilitation, systematizing facilitation can make it more stable.
Speaker Queue and Speaker Stack
We introduce two methods for managing speaking rights: Speaker Queue and Speaker Stack. By controlling who may speak using queues (FIFO) and stacks (LIFO), facilitation becomes more predictable, and the visible management of turns makes it easier to quantify meeting quality.
How It Works
- Push a button – the participant’s name enters the queue.
- The facilitator selects a name from the queue and grants that person the right to speak.
A queue provides a classic FIFO approach, ensuring that participants speak in the order they requested. A stack, on the other hand, handles interruptions as a LIFO priority list. When a queue alone cannot address the complexity of a meeting, a stack allows urgent interruptions to be processed first.
Implementation Patterns
Basic 1‑Stack + 1‑Queue
- Queue – general speaking turns (FIFO).
- Stack – interruptions (LIFO) processed until the stack is empty.
Extended Patterns
Other configurations are possible. For example, a 2‑Stack + 1‑Queue system can prioritize different types of interruptions:
| Priority | Structure | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stack | Asking about unknown terms |
| 2 | Stack | General interruptions |
| 10 | Queue | Regular speaking turns |
This pattern helps address typical meeting challenges such as “There’s a term I don’t understand” or “The atmosphere isn’t conducive to asking immediately.”
Related Concepts
For a broader view on using multiple data structures for task management, see my earlier post: HQRST is Recommended for Lightweight Task Management – DEV Community. The same ideas can be applied to meeting facilitation.