There is a particular look I have come to recognise on people’s faces as they arrive at a session. It is the look of someone who is technically in the room but still mentally three meetings back, with two more already pressing in. They are here, and they are not here. And increasingly, this is the condition we are all working in.
The signs are everywhere. Sessions are getting shorter. Diaries are stacked so tightly that thinking time never makes the cut. Cancellations and drop-outs creep up, not because the work doesn’t matter, but because there is simply no slack left in the system. We have become, in a phrase that has stayed with me, time poor — and time poverty has a way of quietly shaping everything: how we lead, how we listen, and how much of ourselves we actually bring to the people in front of us.
The instinctive response to scarcity is to do more with less. Pack the agenda tighter. Speed up. Cover more ground in the time available. But after years of facilitating leaders and groups, I have come to believe this instinct is precisely wrong. The answer to time scarcity is not to cram. It is to create space.
Spaciousness is a choice, not a luxury
Here is the reframe I keep returning to: spaciousness is not the same as having lots of time. It is a quality of attention, and it can be created in surprisingly little time if you are deliberate about it.
I think it begins the very moment people arrive. If someone walks into your session and it feels like every other back-to-back meeting they have had that day, you have lost them before you have started. But if something signals this is different — a question about how they are actually arriving, a moment of music, a pause before the work begins — you give them permission to land. You are telling them, in effect, that this hour is going to be used differently.
It need not be elaborate. Five minutes of an arrival activity. An invitation to turn off the distractions. A single minute of stillness to think before anyone speaks. A one-minute pause can feel long and a little uncomfortable at first — but that discomfort is the sound of people slowing down enough to think. And thinking, real thinking about the problems that actually matter, is the thing we have squeezed out of our working lives almost entirely.
The leader’s job is to protect the thinking, not fill it
There is a temptation, when time is short, to lead more forcefully — to direct, to steer, to make sure every minute is “productive.” I would gently push against that too. The more scarce the time, the more important it is that the people in the room get to decide how it is spent. Your job as a leader or facilitator is not to be directive. It is to create the conditions in which others can think well, and then to get out of the way.
That requires a discipline of subtraction. Given our limited time, what really matters? is one of the most useful questions a leader can ask out loud. It gives everyone permission to let go of the merely urgent. More cases means less time for each; more topics means less depth. You cannot escape that trade-off, so name it, and choose consciously. Often the braver, more valuable choice is fewer things, held more spaciously.
And it requires presence — yours. We model what we want to see. If I want a group to be present, I have to be present for them, not half-listening while planning my next move. Presence is contagious, and so, unfortunately, is distraction. The leader sets the temperature of attention in the room.
A few practical moves
For all the philosophy, this is also wonderfully practical. Some of the things I find myself reaching for:
• A timed share. Two minutes each, with a visible timer. It sounds rigid, but a clear boundary is freeing — it tells people their turn is protected, and it tells them to share the essence rather than the whole backstory.
• Think, then speak. Give one minute to consider what you actually want to say before anyone says it. The quality of what follows is transformed.
• Let people choose. Post the questions or topics and let each person pick what to answer. Ownership of the agenda is itself a form of respect for their time.
• A halfway turnaround. Pause in the middle and ask the group: is this working — where do we want to go from here? Adaptability mid-session almost always creates more value than rigidly sticking to the plan.
What we are really practising
Much of this thinking has been shaped by my work with Action Learning — the discipline of bringing real problems to a small group and thinking them through together. At its best, Action Learning is a community that enables thought, dialogue and honest reflection, where people receive help without having to ask for it, and without feeling they are a burden for needing it. That, to me, is a model for leadership in a time-poor world: an environment where focus, listening and presence are not occasional virtues but the actual work.
It makes me ask sharper questions of my own practice. What is the minimum time a person needs to truly get inside a problem? What is essential for me to keep, and what can I let go of? When am I most alive, most useful to the people I am working with? And what do people leave with — not what did I cover, but what are they carrying out of the door?
The world of work is not going to hand us more time. That much is clear. But scarcity, faced honestly, can be a kind of gift. It forces the question of what really matters, and it invites us to lead not by filling every gap, but by protecting the space in which good thinking can happen. The leaders I most admire are not the ones who do the most. They are the ones who, somehow, create the sense that there is room to breathe.
In a time-scarce world, that may be the most valuable thing any of us can offer.
If this resonates, I’d love to hear how you create space in your own work. Or better still let’s have a chat about this important topic.
