Good thoughts.

I have one very specific suggestion for one specific part of what you said. I totally agree that “make time for an unscheduled break to give everyone a few minutes to read and process the news” is an excellent plan; I would just add that it’s a good idea to make very clear at the start how long the break is.

(I’m focusing on this specific thing because of a personal experience. An already-somewhat-difficult meeting was interrupted by big national news; the meeting-runner decided to cancel the rest of the meeting (which I felt like was the right decision, but I would have been okay with a time-limited break instead); then later he decided to start it up again, but I was off reading about the news and didn’t see the notification about starting the meeting again, and nobody called or texted me about it. So they had the rest of the meeting without me, and the fallout from that miscommunication led to something like six months of work-related misery for me. That whole fiasco could have been avoided if the meeting-runner had either said “Let’s take a break and re-convene in half an hour” or stuck with the cancellation and rescheduled for another day.)

(I realize that that’s a very specific and unusual set of circumstances; I don’t mean to say the consequences would always be that bad. Just an example of how badly things can go.)

Wow, sorry that happened to you! What a terrible set of circumstances.

Yeah, depending on the situation, the timezones and flexibility of the participants, and where we are in the workshop (for instance, are people due for a five-minute bio-break anyway?) I would decide and explicitly say how long the break would be and when I'd like people to return, just as the leader of a meeting or workshop always should.

I do think workshops, here, have a different dynamic than do the kinds of meeting you're discussing, and that's relevant to what I would do if big national news came up in one of those environments. Basically, the stakes are probably lower for workshops. A workshop is usually non-urgent and easy to move around on a calendar, compared to many work meetings where participants in a postponed meeting are stuck waiting for its results before they can do work. A workshop more likely has many participants from lots of different organizations, and we're less likely to need a specific group of people to participate together, compared to a meeting. It's much easier to run a makeup duplicate session of a workshop than to do that with a meeting. We make binding decisions and share time-sensitive information in meetings but usually not in workshops, so the consequences of someone slipping through the cracks and missing a work meeting are more likely to be terrible.

And, of course, people who lead meetings and workshops shouldn't declare decisions -- about who's invited, about meeting or break duration, about cancellations, about the agenda -- and then change them without following up on the consequences of those changes.

I imagine that the guy who ran that meeting was distracted enough, by the combination of big national news and the high-stakes decision under consideration in the meeting, that he wasn't at his best. I hope he learned of the error he'd made so that he won't repeat it.