Back in the office. Still not in the room.
Most meetings aren’t collaborative.
They’re polite hostage situations.
Cameras off. Mics off. Participation on life support until your name gets called.
We call it “collaboration.” But it’s just compliance with a commute.
Hybrid work didn’t kill energy.
We did—by designing for presence, not participation.
Leadership is stuck in False Positive Culture:
✅ Everyone showed up
✅ The office was used
✅ The meeting happened
But nothing moved. No signal. No insight. No real exchange.
You don’t fix that with mandates.
You fix it by redesigning the room.
1. Rewrite the Meeting Contract
The failure mode: Live time used for information transfer instead of insight generation.
Fix it:
No decision? Async.
Status updates? Written.
Live time = input, iteration, tension.
If the meeting could be replaced by a memo, replace it.
2. Shift from Attendance to Ownership
The failure mode: Passive presence mistaken for contribution.
Fix it:
Rotate facilitators.
Define success as what got unblocked, not who spoke.
Ask: What changed because we met?
If you can’t answer that, cancel it.
3. Fix the Facilitation, Not the People
The failure mode: Blaming low energy on employees, not structure.
Fix it:
Use prompts like: “What assumption haven’t we challenged yet?”
Curate input. Don’t cold-call.
If there’s no output, kill the recurring invite.
Better tools won’t fix a broken structure. Better design will.
Challenge:
Pick one meeting this week.
Redesign it for signal, not obligation.
Then ask yourself:
If this meeting disappeared—who would notice?
Hybrid isn’t broken.
Your information architecture might be.