The time a group spent outside its intended scope that nobody caught and redirected — and the leadership capacity that displacement represents.
Direct Answer
Unbounded Drift is time spent outside the forum's intended scope that no one named or redirected. It is capacity leaked — the group's agenda was displaced by unplanned work that nobody chose to do and nobody caught. Bounded drift — where someone names the tangent and parks it for a different forum — is healthy facilitation and is not penalised. Conversations naturally wander; what matters is whether the wander is caught. Unbounded Drift is different: the group surfaced from the meeting without resolving the questions it convened to address, having spent real time on something else. With eight people in the room, even a small amount of unbounded drift represents meaningful leadership capacity displaced.
Every group wanders. Ideas connect. A status update surfaces a problem worth solving. A planning conversation touches on a question that belongs in a different forum. This is not a failure — it is how thinking works. The question is what happens when the wander starts. Sam Kaner, in Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Jossey-Bass, 2007), describes this as "Taking Tangents Seriously": tangents often contain hidden complexities that are genuinely worth capturing, but if left unmanaged they pull the group into confusion. Kaner's technique is to capture them on a "Side Issues" chart — acknowledging the speaker while protecting the main agenda. The tangent is validated, not dismissed, and parked for a forum where it belongs.
Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats framework (Back Bay Books, 1999) assigns this same function to the Blue Hat: the cognitive role responsible for managing the process itself. The Blue Hat orchestrator sets the agenda and actively redirects the group when it slips into the wrong thinking mode. De Bono notes that when the Blue Hat function is absent, the result is drift and unclear outcomes. Bounded drift is when someone plays that Blue Hat role — naming the tangent and parking it. Unbounded drift is when nobody does. The planning conversation becomes a problem-solving session. The status update becomes an architecture debate. The group surfaces having done real work, but not the work it convened to do.
Drift affects every person in the room simultaneously. Eight people spending twenty minutes on unplanned work is not twenty minutes lost — it is 160 person-minutes of leadership capacity displaced from the agenda the group chose. This is not a theoretical concern. In organisations where senior leaders' time is scarce and calendars are already oversubscribed, unbounded drift is one of the most consistent sources of capacity leakage. It does not show up in project trackers or capacity plans. It shows up in meetings where important decisions keep getting deferred because the forum keeps getting consumed by something else.
Unbounded drift is rarely random. David Snowden's Cynefin framework identifies chronic meeting drift as a behavioral marker indicating that the ordered structure of an organisation is failing to contain its current reality — that leaders are trying to process a complex or chaotic problem inside a standard, routine meeting container that was never designed for it. The topic has nowhere appropriate to go, so it takes the forum that's available.
Patrick Lencioni's model of team dysfunction adds a second driver: when teams lack a safe forum for productive conflict, tensions don't disappear. They simmer beneath the surface and derail subsequent discussions — the relevant parties keep finding each other in the wrong meetings, relitigating the same underlying disagreement in contexts where it can't be resolved. Both mechanisms point to the same structural intervention: not better meeting discipline, but a new forum. The recurring drift is the signal; the missing forum is the fix.
Not all drift is equally costly. Cynefin's framework distinguishes between Ordered domains — Status Updates, Planning sessions — where meetings must be highly structured and drift represents a failure of execution, and the Complex domain — Ideation, Problem-Solving — where a degree of wandering is what Snowden calls "messy coherence": a generative, necessary state that allows new patterns to emerge. Forcing tight boundaries on a Complex-domain meeting is its own form of failure. Coordination Quality weights Unbounded Drift's contribution to the score by arena precisely for this reason: a planning meeting that loses thirty minutes to unplanned problem-solving has failed in a way that an ideation session that wanders organically has not.
Two limits are worth naming. First, the over-policing risk: Kaner and Cynefin both warn against premature closure in complex or creative contexts. The thought that arrives from left field is often the exact trigger needed for a breakthrough. If a facilitator rigidly parks every off-topic remark to protect a Coordination Quality score, they may be suppressing the Probe-Sense-Respond cycle that genuine innovation requires. Bounded drift is the tool; mechanical enforcement of scope is the failure mode.
Second, a measurement subjectivity problem: distinguishing when "wandering" crosses from Kaner's Groan Zone — where people are speaking from competing frames of reference and the messiness is doing real cognitive work — into genuinely unproductive drift requires judgment. Mechanically penalizing a meeting for twenty minutes of drift might punish a group that was doing the hard, generative work of integrating different perspectives, not failing to stay on topic.
Kaner, S., Lind, L., Toldi, C., Fisk, S., & Berger, D. (2007). Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. (Taking Tangents Seriously; Side Issues chart; Groan Zone.)
de Bono, E. (1999). Six Thinking Hats. Back Bay Books. (Blue Hat; cognitive role segregation; drift and unclear outcomes.)
Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76. (Cynefin; erosion of structure; messy coherence; Complex domain.)
Lencioni, P. (2005). Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass. (Productive conflict; unresolved tension as drift driver.)
"Tangents often contain hidden, crucial complexities — but if left unmanaged, they plunge the group into confusion. The skill is capturing them without surrendering to them." — Sam Kaner
Unbounded Drift is time spent outside the forum's intended scope that no one named or redirected. It is capacity leaked — the group's agenda was displaced by unplanned work that nobody chose to do and nobody caught. Bounded drift — where someone names the tangent and parks it for a different forum — is healthy facilitation and is not penalised. Conversations naturally wander; what matters is whether the wander is caught. Unbounded Drift is different: the group surfaced from the meeting without resolving the questions it convened to address, having spent real time on something else. With eight people in the room, even a small amount of unbounded drift represents meaningful leadership capacity displaced.
Bounded drift is when someone in the meeting names the tangent — "this is worth discussing but it's not what we're here for today" — and parks it for a different forum. Sam Kaner calls this "Taking Tangents Seriously": acknowledging the tangent's value while protecting the main agenda. Edward de Bono assigns this function to the Blue Hat role in his Six Thinking Hats framework. Unbounded drift is when nobody plays that role. The group follows the tangent, the meeting time elapses, and the agenda items that brought everyone into the room remain unresolved.
Because drift affects every person simultaneously. Eight people spending twenty minutes on unplanned work represents 160 person-minutes of leadership capacity displaced — not twenty. In organisations where senior leaders' calendars are already oversubscribed, this compounding effect makes unbounded drift one of the highest-leverage coordination failures to address.
That the topic has no appropriate forum. David Snowden's Cynefin framework identifies chronic meeting drift as a marker that an organization's ordered structure is failing to contain its current reality — a complex or urgent problem surfaces in whatever meeting is available because it has no dedicated home. Patrick Lencioni adds a second driver: when teams lack a safe forum for productive conflict, unresolved tension bleeds into every meeting where the relevant parties are present. The recurring drift is the signal; the missing forum is the intervention.
Yes. Kaner warns against premature closure in complex problem-solving contexts. Rigid enforcement of scope can suppress exactly the kind of unscripted thinking that produces breakthroughs. What looks like off-topic wandering may be the Groan Zone — the messy, necessary stage where people are working through competing frames of reference before convergence becomes possible. Cynefin's "messy coherence" concept validates this: in Complex-domain meetings, a degree of drift is a healthy sign, not a failure to redirect.
Whether the group's cognitive mode matched what the arena required
The composite score that includes Focus (Unbounded Drift) as one of its five dimensions
The partial closures most likely to resurface and consume future meeting time
Topics that resurfaced in this meeting after being parked or escalated before
The structural causes of decision churn and rework cycles
ResearchUnderstanding how teams achieve reliable closures on decisions
Community ResearchWhy coordination infrastructure is becoming essential organizational work
Category DefinitionThe foundational systems that enable reliable decision-making
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