I have sat in a great many meetings convened to make a decision, and I can count on one hand the number of times a decision was made in one.

What happens in the meeting is ratification. The decision was made somewhere else, usually by two people, usually in a conversation nobody minuted, and the meeting exists so that everyone can be present for it becoming official.

The Two People and the Corridor

You can find them if you watch for it. Before any meeting that matters there is a pair of people who have already spoken.

They are not always the two most senior. That is the part people get wrong. It is whoever owns the consequence and whoever owns the information, and if those are two different people then the real conversation is between them and everyone else is downstream of it.

The tell is in the first ninety seconds of the meeting. Watch who looks at whom before speaking. There is a small glance that happens between people who have already agreed, checking whether they are still agreed, and it is almost impossible to suppress.

Once you have seen that glance, the rest of the meeting is theatre and you can stop working so hard at it.

Why the Theatre Is Not a Waste

I want to be careful, because the cynical reading of this is that meetings are pointless and that is not what I think.

Ratification is a real function. A decision that has not been witnessed does not bind anybody, and a room full of people who watched it happen will execute differently from a room that received an instruction. The meeting is not where the choice is made; it is where the choice acquires the ability to be carried out. Those are both necessary and they are not the same event.

Where it goes wrong is when somebody mistakes the ratification for the decision and tries to influence the outcome in the room. By then it is far too late. Everyone who has ever felt that a meeting was rigged against them was noticing something real — not a conspiracy, just that the actual conversation happened in a corridor they were not in.

If you want to affect the outcome, you have to be in the corridor. That is not a complaint about how organizations work. It is how they work.

The Corridor I Was Not In, and What It Taught Me

I have been on the wrong side of this and it was formative.

Fairly early on I spent three weeks preparing for a meeting. Genuinely good work — I still think the analysis was correct. I presented it to a room that listened politely and then did the other thing, and I came out of it convinced I had been treated unfairly.

I had not been treated unfairly. I had spent three weeks preparing for the ceremony and no time at all on the two people who were going to decide, one of whom I had barely spoken to in a year. The information I brought was better than theirs. It arrived in the wrong room, at the wrong point in the process, addressed to an audience with no authority to act on it.

“Nobody was against you,” a colleague told me afterward, trying to be kind about it. “You just weren't in the conversation.”

That distinction took me another few years to stop resenting and start using.

How I Allocate My Own Attention Now

I spend very little time preparing for meetings and a great deal of time on the two conversations that precede them. That is close to the inverse of how I operated at thirty and it is the single largest change in how I work.

It also means I say almost nothing in the room, which reads to some people as disengagement, and I have stopped correcting them about it.

The one thing I am careful about, now that I am often one of the two people: making sure the corridor conversation is genuinely open, and not just me arriving with a view for somebody to agree with. A corridor with a foregone conclusion in it is worse than no corridor at all, because it produces the same theatre with none of the thinking.

The meeting still happens. It should. I simply stopped expecting anything to be decided in it, and I have been wrong about that perhaps twice.

Note: Victor Draemont is a character, and these notes are written in his voice. Nothing here is financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or gamble on anything.