The Meeting That Should Have Been a Decision

There is a meeting that exists in almost every organisation, that everyone who attends it can feel is the wrong shape for its stated purpose, and that keeps being scheduled anyway.

The meeting where a decision needs to be made but the decision does not get made. Where the issue is discussed at length, the relevant considerations are mapped out, the stakeholders all express their views, and then the meeting ends with an action item to meet again.

This pattern is so common it has stopped being visible. It is just how organisations work. But it is worth examining, because the cost is real and the cause is not what most people assume.

It is not usually about the information

The most common explanation for decisions that cannot be made is that more information is needed. The data is incomplete. The analysis is not finished. The options have not been fully modelled. When the information is ready, the decision will be straightforward.

This is sometimes true. But it is less often true than it is claimed. Most of the information that would meaningfully change a decision is available before the third meeting on the subject. What is missing after that is not information — it is willingness to act on the information that exists.

The demand for more analysis is, very often, a way of deferring a decision that someone finds uncomfortable without having to say that they find it uncomfortable.

What is actually making the decision hard

Decisions are hard for a limited number of reasons. The outcome is genuinely uncertain and the downside of being wrong is significant. The decision will require someone to be publicly wrong about something they have previously argued for. The decision will disadvantage one part of the organisation at the expense of another, and the person who has to make it would rather not be the one who did.

None of these are information problems. They are political problems, or courage problems, or problems of accountability. More data does not solve them.

The meeting that ends with "let’s do more analysis" is usually a meeting where one of these things is true and nobody has said it out loud.

What good decision culture looks like

The organisations that make decisions well tend to have a few things in common. Meetings have a stated purpose and an owner — someone who is responsible for leaving the meeting with a resolution, not just a summary of views expressed. Decisions are made at the lowest level where sufficient information exists, rather than escalated until the person making the decision is far enough from the problem that accountability is diffuse.

And there is a culture where being wrong and learning from it is treated differently from being wrong and hiding it. The former is how organisations get better. The latter is why meetings produce action items to have more meetings.

This is not complicated as a principle. It is genuinely hard in practice because it requires leaders who will make uncomfortable calls, own them when they go wrong, and not punish the people below them for doing the same. That is a culture built slowly, and it is fragile.

The question worth asking

Before the next meeting on a subject that has been in the meeting rotation for longer than it should have been, it is worth asking: what specific thing needs to be true before we can make this decision, and who is responsible for it being true?

If the answer involves data or analysis, you have a clear path. If the answer involves someone having a difficult conversation, or someone accepting accountability for an outcome that might be wrong, you have found the actual obstacle. Address that, not the meeting agenda.

This is something Greg Hay writes about from the IT governance side at greghay.co.za — the specific version of this problem that plays out in technology decisions, where technical complexity is often used to defer calls that are actually political. And it is one of the problems that Claritam is built to reduce — not by making decisions for organisations, but by giving them accurate data so that the information gap is no longer a credible reason not to decide.