The Double Meeting: Why Good Decisions Need Time to Land

Picture a meeting that covers a change to timetables, a new adjustments plan, or a restructure proposal. Everyone nods. Actions are agreed. Then, over the following days, the questions start to arrive. Emails asking what was actually decided. Corridor conversations revealing different understandings. An unplanned follow up meeting to unpick it all.

In other words, the second meeting happens anyway. The difference is whether we plan for it or stumble into it.

This matters for everyone, but most of all for neurodivergent staff. Many ADHD, autistic and dyslexic people process information differently: sometimes more deeply, sometimes more slowly in real time, and often at a cost that nobody else in the room can see. When we expect people to hear, understand, evaluate and commit to something in a single sitting, we are not testing their capability. We are testing how well their processing style fits the meeting format.

What the evidence tells us

Cognitive Load Theory, developed by the educational psychologist John Sweller, offers a useful lens here. It starts from a simple premise: working memory is limited. We can only hold and manipulate a small amount of new information at once. Sweller describes three kinds of load. Intrinsic load is the complexity of the material itself. Extraneous load is everything else competing for attention, such as the environment, the pace, or the way information is presented. Germane load is the productive effort of turning new information into lasting understanding.

A typical single decision meeting piles all three on at once. New and often complex information arrives (intrinsic). It is delivered verbally, at speed, while people take notes, read the room and manage their own reactions (extraneous). And then they are asked to decide before any real integration has happened (germane). For neurodivergent colleagues, extraneous load is often higher still. Masking, filtering noise and decoding unspoken expectations all draw from the same limited pool.

Other research points in the same direction. Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab used EEG monitoring to study people attending back to back meetings. Stress built steadily across consecutive meetings, while short breaks let it reset. A meta analysis by Sio and Ormerod, drawing on more than a hundred studies, found that a period of incubation, stepping away from a problem before returning to it, reliably improves problem solving.

There is also a human dimension. Crompton and colleagues’ large 2025 study in Nature Human Behaviour found that autistic and non autistic people passed on information to each other equally accurately, yet mixed groups reported lower rapport. That distinction is important. Many workplace “misunderstandings” are not failures of comprehension at all. They are failures of connection and perception, where one person assumes the other has not understood because they did not respond in the expected way or at the expected speed. Building in time to process, and a planned space to check back in, reduces both genuine misunderstandings and the perception of them.

The CIPD’s Neuroinclusion at Work report adds the organisational picture. Only 46 per cent of managers said they felt confident supporting neurodivergent staff, and just 38 per cent of employees felt their organisation offered meaningful support. Nearly a third of neurodivergent employees had not disclosed to their manager or HR. That final figure is the one leaders should sit with, because it means any approach that relies on individuals asking for processing time will miss a large share of the people who need it.

Why FE feels this pressure acutely

The sector’s structures make the single meeting habit hard to break, but the pressure plays out differently across settings.

In general FE colleges, teaching staff often have tightly timetabled days with limited non contact time. Meetings are squeezed into short slots, and the instinct is to get everything agreed in one go because finding another slot feels impossible. Change also clusters around key points in the academic year.

Independent training providers and apprenticeship organisations face a different version of the problem. Assessors and coaches often work remotely and meet employers and apprentices in tripartite progress reviews. These conversations carry high stakes, involve three parties with different priorities, and are usually expected to reach agreed actions there and then. An apprentice who needs time to think is easily read as disengaged, and an employer who has only half understood can quietly derail a learning plan.

Compare both with how most colleges already run their governance. Board and committee papers go out days in advance. Members are expected to read, reflect and arrive ready to question. Nobody considers this an adjustment. It is simply how good decisions are made. The blind spot is that we routinely extend this courtesy to governors and rarely to staff sitting in a capability meeting, an adjustments review or a restructure consultation, where the personal stakes are often far higher. Acas’s own guidance on neurodiversity adjustments uses the example of a teaching assistant given early warning of curriculum changes and extra time to process them. If it works as an individual adjustment, it is worth asking why it is not simply standard practice.

The case for the double meeting

The double meeting is a simple idea. The first meeting is for sharing information. Then there is a planned gap. The second meeting is for questions, clarification, checking that everything has been captured, and agreeing what happens next.

Decisions are better because people have had time to weigh them properly. Less time is wasted revisiting things later, because the revisiting has been built into the process rather than left to chance. Processes get built faster and more effectively, because the thinking that normally happens in scattered emails over several weeks is concentrated into one well prepared conversation. And misunderstandings, real and perceived, are caught while they are still small.

This applies across all kinds of meetings. In an adjustments or workplace needs assessment follow up, it gives someone time to consider whether proposed support will actually work in their role. In an appraisal, capability or probation meeting, it allows a person to respond to feedback thoughtfully rather than defensively. In a team change meeting, it gives quieter voices an equal chance to shape what happens.

Making it work in practice

For leadership teams and HR, the priority is to make the double meeting the default rather than an exception people have to request.

• Build it into policy. Capability, grievance, probation, adjustments and change consultation procedures can all state that significant decisions will normally be confirmed at a second meeting.
• Start with a 24-hour guideline and adapt it. Twenty four hours is a sensible starting point. Some situations need a much shorter gap, others need several days. The principle is that the gap is planned from the outset, never assumed away.
• Label the purpose of each meeting. An invitation that says “this is an information meeting, no decisions today” lowers anxiety and changes how people listen.
• Use the gap well. Send a short written summary within a few hours, including what was said and what is still open, and offer more than one way to send questions back, whether by email, voice note or a quick call.
• Protect time for it. In colleges and providers where timetables are tight, this means leaders creating the capacity, not asking staff to find it.

For managers, assessors and practitioners, the changes are smaller but just as important.

• Open the second meeting by asking what has changed in someone’s thinking since last time, rather than restating the proposal.
• Treat questions that arrive later as a sign of engagement, not resistance.
• In tripartite apprenticeship reviews, consider splitting the review so that information is shared first and actions are agreed a day or two later.
• Ask individuals what gap and format work best for them, while keeping the default in place for everyone, so that nobody has to disclose to benefit.

Leaders can measure the impact too: tracking how often decisions are reopened, or how long a new process takes to bed in, will show whether the double meeting is saving time.

Beyond the quick fix

This is more than a scheduling tip. The single meeting habit reflects an assumption about how people think: that understanding is instant, that silence means agreement and that speed signals competence. None of those assumptions hold up well against the evidence, and they fall hardest on the neurodivergent people our sector says it wants to include.

It is also a good example of looking through a lens rather than a label. The double meeting does not wait for a diagnosis, a disclosure or a formal request before it helps someone. It starts from curiosity about how people actually think and designs around that. This idea sits at the heart of the forthcoming book Lens Not Label, due out in November, which explores how leaders can work well with neurodivergent talent without leaning on diagnostic categories. More at lensnotlabel.com.

Changing that assumption will not happen with one policy update or one training session. It needs leaders to model it, protect time for it and keep asking whether decisions in their organisation are being made with people or simply announced to them. The reward is real: fewer crossed wires, less rework, stronger processes and teams who feel their thinking is actually wanted. That is worth a second meeting.

By Nathan Whitbread, Founder of The Neurodivergent Coach

References

• Sweller, J. (1988) Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2).
• Sio, U. N. and Ormerod, T. C. (2009) Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1).
• Crompton, C. J. et al. (2025) Information transfer within and between autistic and non autistic people. Nature Human Behaviour.
• Microsoft WorkLab (2021) Research proves your brain needs breaks.
• CIPD (2024) Neuroinclusion at Work report.
• Acas, Adjustments for neurodiversity (reasonable adjustments guidance).
• Lens Not Label (forthcoming, November 2026). lensnotlabel.com