There’s a leadership meeting I run where the same five minutes has been showing up every week. One person enters the numbers into the scorecard. Another says, I don’t think those are right. And then we spend five minutes poking through the data to figure out who’s off. Any single week, it’s nothing. We find the discrepancy, we fix it, we move on, and by the next agenda item everyone has forgotten it happened.
This week I finally stopped solving it and flagged it instead. I put the topic on our issues list, and I got some fair pushback, because one of the guys was confused about why it was even there. He wasn’t wrong to ask. Every individual instance had already been handled. There was nothing left to solve from last week, or the week before that. What I said back was close to this: you put in the numbers, he says he doesn’t think they’re right, and we spend five minutes poking through. That happens too much for me to think it’s normal.
I also gave them the innocent read, out loud, because it might be true. Maybe we’re just careful about our data and the fact-checking is healthy. If that’s all this is, fine. And I admitted the other half too: I’m not certain how to solve it. I just know it keeps coming up, and I’m noticing the trend. I even told them they could tell me the whole thing was unnecessary. Nobody did.
Here’s the thing I keep chewing on. Meetings are built to solve instances. Something breaks, we discuss it, someone owns it, it gets closed. What no standard agenda catches is repetition. Five minutes of confusion will never earn a spot on an issues list, because five minutes is too small to escalate. So the same five minutes shows up every week for a quarter, everyone politely solves it every time, and the process problem underneath never gets a turn. You have a version of this. The invoice question that gets asked every close. The “who owns this client” conversation every Monday. The scramble before every quarterly review. Each one handled. None of them ever discussed.
The instance is easy and the pattern is awkward, because escalating a pattern means saying something is wrong here before you can prove it or fix it. That’s the part I had to get over this week. Here’s how I’m handling it.
Working Theory: Escalate the Pattern
Pick one recurring meeting and run this on the next thing that feels familiar:
Use repetition as the trigger, not severity. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it earns a spot on the issues list no matter how small it is. Five minutes a week is the exact size of problem this catches.
Name it without blame, and offer the innocent explanation yourself. I told the team maybe we’re just careful with data and this is fine. Saying that first lets people examine the pattern instead of defending themselves. Then give them permission to kill it: you can tell me this is unnecessary.
Escalate without the answer. “I don’t know how to solve this, and it keeps coming up” is a complete contribution. If you wait until you have the fix, the pattern stays invisible for another quarter.
Leave with one small owned step and a check-in date. Ours was a form, one owner, review next week. The step probably isn’t the fix. Its job is to turn a recurring vibe into a tracked item, because tracked items get solved and vibes get repeated.
Reference Document
