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Meeting skills
I should figure out how to make people stop talking in meetings I'm running. (Either "what you're saying is irrelevant" or "let someone else talk".) This occasionally is a problem in the one group I'm responsible for right now; last night could have been a disaster but worked out to be mercifully okay.
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But there are a lot of mechanistic things teachers have developed to streamline class discussion and spread it around a bit. Some of them are just not going to work ("you can only talk if you are holding the magic nerf toy", "you have n rocks and you can talk once per rock and then you are done"). But some things center on expectation-setting and might work. That is, you set up front some ground rules for the discussion (eg "I want to hear everyone's point of view, so we'll go around the table and give everyone x amount of time to state an opinion"). Then, if people are being irritating, you can refer back to the rules (see, it's not about you or them, it's a rule!). And it gives you a chance to state up front the reason behind the rule (eg you value everyone's participation). Agendas are an elaborate version of this rule ("see, the piece of paper says we have to discuss x y and z, so, while I value your input and would love to talk more with you at some future time, we simply have to keep moving").
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So the problem is typically "move the meeting along", but it's more an irritation than a necessity. It doesn't feel like it justifies Process (TM), and that would ruin the warm-fluffiness for the rest of us.
an observation
The interaction that made this difference clear to me was when one idea was met with quick and firm disagreement, and he said "OK, that didn't work, let me try another" (paraphrased).
Perhaps this observation is so obvious as to go without saying, but it was new to me.
It may provide an underlying explanation for the "going on at length to convince the group of something the group already agrees with" phenomenon, at least in his case. (I don't mean to imply that he's the only one who does such a thing, but for the rest of us, it feels more like "ooh, a shiny new argument for my point of view, let's play with it and see if it's useful." And I suppose it could be the same for him, but he does it so forcefully and doggedly that it does feel different.)
Will this help you figure out how to make him, or any of the rest of us, shut up once a point is made? I don't know. But it seemed worth saying, in case it wasn't obvious.
Re: an observation
First, every meeting has a certain amount of structuredness. This ranges from a free-for-all complete with chocolate pudding to the very formal roberts rules style of discussion. Once you've embarked on a discussion or a meeting, you've picked a point somewhere in this range. There is then only so much you can succeed in increasing the level of formality during the course of the discussion.
To a large extent, this is equivalent to what
The other thing is that everyone needs to be clear what the point of the discussion is. I think one of the things that caused last night to go better than I expected was that the point of the final discussion became "convince
I also agree with what
Furthermore, when he is arguing that "A implies B by rule X", often everyone in the meeting will agree that B is true and X is a logical rule, but A is not the case or simply not relevant to the current situation. But he'll interpret their arguments to be arguments against X, particularly when A is something that we don't have data about anyway. I believe that this caused a certain amount of confusion on his part in the past, because he would simply state B and X and everyone would agree, but later he would get disagreement when he took it as a given that adding A into the picture was logical.
I think the net result of all of this is that he doesn't necessarily feel that he knows when other people agree with him and so he feels like he needs to go through a lot of argument for everything. I find it annoying on many levels, but I suppose it's less annoying than when there was confusion.
In any case, these aren't the easiest meetings to keep control of and fwiw I do think you're doing a good job. For all my advice, your meetings are running a lot shorter and with a better signal-to-noise than mine ever had :).
Re: an observation
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1. I wasn't well prepared for the discussion (and neither were most of the other participants). I'm not sure how that could have been fixed: even if things had been ready earlier, they wouldn't have been distributed outside of a meeting. Maybe having quiet time to read each whole document, then proceeding once everyone had finished?
2. I felt that I was competing for floor time. There was a point when I said "you should discuss this... oh, wait, maybe you already did, but in a previous section... oh, uh, then I guess you should make the connection more explicit, or say it here also, or something, uh..." (etc). Now, one reason I was fumbling so badly was the lack of preparation, of course, but the reason I kept going was that I felt like I had something to say, and eventually I'd figure it out, and I'd better keep the floor, because if I didn't, I might not get it again any time soon.
3. I wasn't entirely clear on our purpose. The general idea was obvious, of course, but... well, more on that in email, not here.
#2 is just a corollary of the problem you were already wondering how to solve, but I guess it helps illustrate the self-reinforcing nature of it.
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I think I understand the purpose now, but it wasn't clear to me until the very very end of the meeting. I probably should have asked