The Request Nobody Can Cancel
Eleven people meet every Thursday at ten.
It is a cross-functional sync. Product, engineering, support, two from operations, somebody from finance who joined because finance should be in the room. Forty-five minutes. Nobody has missed it in a long time.
Four years ago an integration went badly enough that a director called the meeting into existence until things stabilized. Things stabilized inside a quarter.
That director works somewhere else now.
Nobody in the Room Was There
This is the part that makes it different from the ordinary kind of waste.
Of the eleven people who sat down last Thursday, two were at the company when the integration failed, and neither was on it. The other nine joined afterward. They inherited a Thursday.
Ask any of them what the meeting is for and you get a version of the same answer. It is the sync. We go over what is moving. It has always been on the calendar.
Which is true, and none of them can tell you whether the thing it was built to catch is still capable of happening. Not because they are incurious. Because there is nobody left who knows.
Five Monkeys
There is a story about five monkeys in a cage with a banana at the top of a ladder. Every time one climbs, all five get sprayed with cold water, and before long they stop each other from trying.
Then they are swapped out one at a time until none of the five who were sprayed remain. The new ones have never seen the water. They still pull anyone off the ladder, and asked why, the answer would be that this is how it is done here.
It is not a real experiment, whatever anybody tells you. It is a story people pass around, which is a fitting way for it to have survived.
It is also a reasonable description of a Thursday morning.
Some of These Have an Author You Could Ask
A standing rule whose author is still in the building is a different problem. Annoying, maybe expensive, but solvable. You can find the person, tell them what changed, and let them be the one who ends it.
This is the other kind. The author is gone, and what is left is a request with no owner and a room full of people who assume one exists.
That assumption is the load-bearing part. Everyone in that meeting believes somebody upstream wants it. Nobody has ever been able to name who.
The Person Asking Permission Is the Person Doing the Work
The detail that gives it away is sitting in plain sight.
The meeting is organized by a senior manager in operations. She sends the invite. She builds the agenda. She owns the recurring series in the calendar system, which means she could delete it this afternoon with two clicks and no approval from anybody.
She has raised it twice, both times in passing, both times to peers who agreed it was not needed anymore. Neither conversation produced anything, because neither person thought it was theirs to end.
She is asking permission from people who are asking her.
When the person who could stop a thing is also the person waiting to be told they can, you are not looking at a governance problem. You are looking at a room where everybody has mistaken a habit for an instruction.
What It Costs
Eleven people, forty-five minutes, forty-six weeks a year. That is three hundred and eighty hours annually before anybody prepares anything, and the preparation is another eighty-four.
Call it forty-five thousand dollars a year. It has run for four.
None of which appears anywhere, because a meeting is not a line item. It is eleven calendars quietly agreeing to be unavailable at the same time every week.
Find Out Who, Then Find Out Whether
Two questions, in order.
Who asked for this. Not which department, not which function. A person, with a name. If nobody in the room can produce one, you have found the thing this piece is about.
Then, whether the condition still holds. The integration stabilized in a quarter. Four years of Thursdays have been spent watching for something that stopped being possible before most of the room arrived.
The monkeys never got their water back either. They just never found out.
-BZ
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