Rule #3
An Account from the Margin of a Feasibility Study
I should explain that I have never attended a meeting. This surprises people. The misunderstanding arises because I am frequently present at meetings. Presence and attendance are not the same thing.
At the meeting in question I occupied a position in the left-hand margin of a feasibility study, approximately halfway down page fourteen. It was an excellent location. From there I could observe both the document and the people discussing it. Nobody noticed me. Margins are among the least examined regions of organisational life.
The feasibility study itself had travelled a considerable distance to reach the meeting. Some of its recommendations had been ignored. Others had been contradicted by appendices attached later. One paragraph had acquired a comment bubble containing a disagreement that was now several years old.
I knew the document well. I had been living in it for months. The meeting began, as meetings often do, long before anybody entered the room. From my position I had observed six emails, three reschedules, two apologies and a Teams link gradually assembling themselves around the event like scaffolding around a building.
The meeting itself appeared only at the very end of the process. People tend to think meetings generate emails. The reverse is true. Meetings are condensed from emails in much the same way that weather is condensed from atmospheric conditions. By the time the participants arrived, the meeting already existed. The room was merely where it became visible.
The feasibility study was opened. Several people glanced at page one. One person scrolled rapidly to the recommendations. Nobody looked at page fourteen. This suited me perfectly. The discussion proceeded. One participant referred to an issue that had been extensively addressed on page twelve. Another expressed concerns that had been anticipated in Appendix C. A third suggested commissioning a feasibility study. This struck me as especially interesting, given that everyone was already in possession of one. For a period of twenty minutes the conversation circled an idea which had been clearly expressed in a sentence located approximately eight inches above my head. Nobody encountered it. The sentence remained undiscovered. I waved at it apologetically.
Documents experience this sort of thing all the time. Eventually the meeting reached a conclusion. More accurately, it reached the point at which the allotted hour had been exhausted. The distinction is important. People gathered their notes. Actions were assigned. A follow-up meeting was proposed. The feasibility study was closed. Darkness returned. I remained in the margin considering what I had learned.
From my observations, meetings seem to function less as mechanisms for making decisions than as rituals through which organisations reassure themselves that decisions are occurring somewhere. The actual decisions are usually scattered across documents, spreadsheets, footnotes, emails and unexamined appendices. I know this because I live among them.
As the room emptied, somebody returned briefly to retrieve a forgotten notebook. They glanced down at page fourteen. For a moment I thought I had been spotted. But they were looking at a chart. Visibility and significance seem only loosely related. Rule #3. The margin remained invisible. Which is fortunate. An observer can learn a great deal from a meeting. Especially if nobody realises he is there.
✒️ Sigi