What if you could reduce your meeting time without cutting a single agenda item. It's called En bloc

Two words. Enormous time savings.

En bloc — French for “as a whole” — is one of those meeting tools that, once you discover it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. It’s elegant, it’s efficient, and it’s entirely legitimate in any formal meeting setting.

The Problem It Solves

Most agendas contain a mix of items. Some require genuine discussion and deliberation. Others are straightforward — routine matters, standard reports, correspondence that simply needs to be received and noted, minor procedural items where there is no dissent, no complexity, and frankly no reason for any individual discussion at all.

In a conventional meeting, these items get called one by one. The chair moves through them sequentially: item four, moved, seconded, carried. Item five, moved, seconded, carried. Item six, item seven, item eight. The clock ticks. Energy drains slightly with each repetition.

The en bloc process changes this entirely.

How It Works

At the beginning of the meeting — or before it, through the agenda distribution — the chair identifies the items that are candidates for en bloc treatment. These are items with no dissent, no complexity, and no requirement for individual discussion.

The chair then asks the meeting: “Items four through eleven on the agenda are straightforward matters that we believe can be dealt with as a group. Does anyone require any of these items to be taken separately?”

Here is the critical element: any member who wishes to discuss, amend, or vote separately on any of those items has the absolute right to request that it be extracted from the en bloc group and dealt with individually. The chair must honour that request without question.

Once any requested items have been extracted, the remainder are moved, seconded, and voted upon as a single motion. “That items four, five, six, eight, nine, ten, and eleven be adopted as presented.” One vote. All carried.

The Time Mathematics

Let’s say you have twelve agenda items. Six of them are genuinely substantive. Six are routine. Without en bloc, you might spend two minutes per routine item — calling them, moving them, seconding them, voting on them. That’s twelve minutes on items that required no discussion whatsoever.

With en bloc, those six items take perhaps ninety seconds total. You’ve returned more than ten minutes to the meeting with zero cost to the quality of any decision.

In a meeting with twenty routine items on a full agenda, the savings are even more dramatic.

What En Bloc Does Not Do

En bloc does not bypass democratic process. Every member retains the right to request individual treatment for any item. The en bloc motion cannot proceed if any member objects to any item being included in the group.

En bloc does not prevent scrutiny of routine matters. Members can examine the documents relating to those items before the meeting and raise any concern. The en bloc process simply means that if no concern exists, no individual discussion is required.

And en bloc does not apply to matters that are genuinely contentious or require deliberation. It’s a tool for the genuinely routine — not a mechanism for shortcutting important decisions.

Implementing It in Your Organisation

To use en bloc effectively, your agenda needs to clearly identify which items are proposed for en bloc treatment. This allows members to review those items before the meeting and decide whether they require individual attention.

The chair should always briefly explain the en bloc process to any meeting that’s not familiar with it — what it is, how it works, and crucially, the right of any member to extract any item. Transparency about the process is what makes it both efficient and legitimate.

Once a group is familiar with it, en bloc becomes a routine part of meeting management that sharpens the overall quality of proceedings — because the time saved on routine matters is time available for the ones that genuinely deserve it.