The meeting after the meeting

The meeting has been going for forty minutes. The agenda says ‘Q3 update’. Everyone has the numbers. Someone has brought in a box of Krispy Kremes and everyone’s leaving the white chocolate ones. So far, so normal.

But this meeting isn’t really about the numbers. The real agenda – who’s accountable for the slip, that decision that wasn’t made in June, the person whose silence is speaking volumes – isn’t written down anywhere.

It’s in the car park, or the quiet call between two Board members afterwards. It’s on the Slack channel few people in this meeting can access. It’s in the careful non-invitation that excluded Richard because, well, Richard is always Richard, isn’t he? Or it’s nowhere. Not discussed, not acknowledged, just there in the look two people exchange across the table that no one else catches.

I’ve been in a lot of rooms. Board meetings, offsites, strategy days, post-merger alignment sessions, redundancy conversations both one-to-one and at scale. The gap between what’s officially on the agenda and what’s actually shaping the outcome is where I spend most of my time. The rooms are all different, but something keeps recurring regardless of context, and it strikes me every time.

The agenda is rarely the agenda.

Not because people are being dishonest. It’s that organisations have evolved a deft capacity for having two conversations at once without acknowledging that both are happening. The sanctioned conversation makes it into the minutes. It’s the other one that shapes the outcome, sometimes for better, often for worse.

That gap is where organisations get stuck. Not in big obvious ways, at least not at first. It happens in the unresolved tension that follows them from room to room and year to year, never quite surfacing and never quite going away, until one day it surfaces all at once.

That’s what this short series, In The Room, is about. Over the next eight weeks I’ll take you into eight different rooms, from a board under pressure to a founder who’s run out of road. I’ll show you the real work that needed to happen in each, and what shifted when it did.

A note on ethics. The rooms and the situations in them are real, but I’ve anonymised the people and the organisations. More often than not they’re composites: the problems of organisational life tend to follow familiar patterns. But everything I describe is something I’ve either witnessed firsthand or been brought in to help navigate.

Each piece will be short, one a week. I suspect the moment where what’s officially happening and what’s actually happening diverge will feel familiar each time. I hope you’ll tell me when it does. 

What doesn’t get said has a habit of running the show.

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