The Performance of Agreement

The Zoom window collapsed into the taskbar, taking the weight of forty-two minutes of polite, practiced agreement with it. It was 3:02 PM. Everyone nodded, everyone praised the ‘robust discussion,’ and everyone knew that zero progress had been made, or rather, that the progress had been intentionally obstructed.

Thirty seconds later, the Slack channel named ‘Project Chimera: The Real Thread’ lit up. The first message wasn’t a summary or a congratulation. It was the question that sliced through the pretense, the necessary cruelty of the aftermath:

*Okay, so what are we ACTUALLY going to do?*

We spend 102 collective hours a week preparing slides just to perform consent.

The Craving for Chaos-Free Order

This system, beautiful and terrifying in its inefficiency, creates a culture of sanctioned dishonesty. Success isn’t measured by the brilliance of your idea or the quality of your execution; it’s measured by your access to the informal, invisible channel-the whispered ‘real thread.’

I’ll admit, sometimes I crave this kind of rigid, unspoken order. I spent the weekend matching every single sock I own-folding them perfectly into their drawer. It was tedious, but it provided a strange, grounding satisfaction, a direct correlation between effort and visible result. In that drawer, chaos was conquered. The corporate world, however, rejects this clarity. It demands chaos as a precondition for influence. It insists on creating a confusing game, knowing that if the rules are always slightly unclear, only those initiated into the hidden truths can ever win.

The Cheating That Delivers

And I, the staunch critic of back-channeling, often participate in it. Because if you want to be effective-if you truly want to save the project from the bureaucratic sludge of the formal mechanism-you have no choice but to grab the ear of the person who matters

after the presentation, or send that quiet DM that bypasses the public record. It feels dirty, like cheating, but it is also the only way to deliver on a promise in a system fundamentally geared toward delay. I criticize it, but I do it, because failure to engage in the back-channel is simply failure, full stop.

I remember working with Wei S.-J., a brilliant museum lighting designer based out of Hong Kong. Her specialty was creating environments for highly sensitive, ancient artifacts. On one project, she was tasked with illuminating 272 specific pieces across three galleries. Wei’s process was relentless and transparent. She had 52 individual data points for every artifact-lux levels, temperature, color rendering index-all laid out in a massive, shared matrix. Her expertise was undeniable, her methodology pristine, yet she ran into a wall of passive aggression every time the formal committee met.

But logic wasn’t the currency. Every time Wei presented, the VP of Collections, a man named Marcus, would nod approvingly, offer a minor, innocuous suggestion-a tweak to the ambient lighting in the stairwell-and then, in the 12-person follow-up email, he’d insert a single sentence:

*We will proceed with the updated plan as discussed between myself and the Director of Operations.*

This was the subtle sabotage.

Contrast: Accountability vs. Architecture

This kind of corporate behavior stands in stark contrast to the way you often deal with local operators-people who live and die by their immediate reputation and transparent dealings.

When you talk to the person who actually owns the business, there is a directness-a one-to-one relationship between what is discussed and what is delivered-because they have no complex organizational layers to hide behind.

Take, for instance, dealing with a straightforward service provider like a local energy consultant. If you’re looking for that kind of transparency in a complex industry, it’s refreshing to see operations like

Rick G Energy prioritizing clarity over obfuscation.

Big companies, conversely, have built an entire architecture designed to absorb and deflect blame, and the formal meeting is the central pillar of that architecture. When a decision goes sideways, everyone points to the minutes of the formal meeting:

*We agreed to this course of action on the 2nd of the month*. But the actual decision… remains untraceable, leaving the formal participants holding the liability bag.

The Alibi and The Leverage

The real irony is that we all tolerate this because we believe it’s the only path to safety. We confuse formality with seriousness, and we confuse volume of participation with quality of decision-making. We keep attending the staged meetings, knowing full well that they are merely an elaborate alibi for the cabal that actually steers the ship.

If your organization believes that decisions are made in the main conference room, your organization is being lied to, and you are participating in the lie. You are prioritizing the appearance of consensus over the pursuit of efficacy.

Why attend the meeting at all? Because the meeting is the moment they tell you what they want you to believe. The meeting after the meeting is where they tell you what you need to know.