At the close of any review or meeting, one person has standing permission to stop the room for sixty seconds and ask three questions: who kept the decision human, what did we learn and change, and where did the saved time go. It is the team version of the receipts, and it costs a minute.
The answer, in one line
At the close of any review or meeting, one person has standing permission to stop the room for sixty seconds and ask three questions: who kept the decision human, what did we learn and change, and where did the saved time go.
Definition#
The pause minute: stopping a meeting for sixty seconds at its close, at the request of any one person, to answer three questions about the decisions just made. The practice is Rahim Hirji's.
The three questions#
- Who kept the decision human? A name, not a function. Not who approved it and not who executed it, but who shaped the choice.
- What did we learn and change? Not what was discussed. What is different now.
- Where did the saved time go? If nobody can answer, it went into volume.
They map onto Hand, Head and Hours, and the fourth receipt has its own question when the decision reaches beyond the room: who carries the consequence, including anybody who has no way of appearing in the data.
Why the permission is the mechanism#
The questions are not difficult and they are rarely asked, because asking them carries a cost. Stopping a room that is about to break for the next meeting reads as obstruction, and the person most likely to notice that nobody made the decision is often the most junior person present. Granting the permission in advance, to anybody in the room, moves that cost off the individual. It is the same mechanism that makes the premortem work: a doubt is easier to state when the structure has already licensed it.
What to do with an empty answer#
Sometimes nobody can name who kept the decision human, because nobody did. That is not a failed exercise, it is the finding. A run of pause minutes with empty answers describes an organisation in which decisions are arriving pre-made, and it does so in the organisation's own words rather than in a consultant's.
The practical response is to write the answer down over a quarter and look at the pattern rather than the instance. A single meeting with nothing to report is ordinary. Twelve in a row is the thing the drift argument is about.
Keeping it from becoming a ritual#
Any sixty-second practice can be performed. Three things keep this one honest: it is called by whoever wants it rather than run by the chair, the answers are recorded rather than spoken and forgotten, and an empty answer is allowed to stand as an empty answer instead of being filled in to look productive. The same failure mode and the same defence apply to the shared prompt review.
What this has not been shown to do#
Nothing here has been trialled. The adjacent evidence, from the meta-analysis of structured debriefs, supports reviews that are longer, facilitated and focused on process, and it cannot be claimed for a sixty-second version. What can be said is that the questions are the right ones and that asking them costs almost nothing.
Source#
Rahim Hirji, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, Kogan Page, 2026, chapter seven, "Keeping proof alive in teams".
Related SuperSkills research#
Essay · SS-2026-328
Hirji, R. (2026). The pause minute. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-328. https://thesuperskills.com/research/the-pause-minute. Last reviewed 26 September 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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