The hum of the projector fan was the only honest sound in the room. For 44 minutes, we had been engaged in what was theatrically billed as the ‘final alignment session.’ On the whiteboard, two columns, A and B, were covered in the frantic scribbles of a debate that had spanned 14 days and 4 separate meetings. Pros, cons, SWOTs, stakeholder impacts-the entire corporate vocabulary of diligence had been exhausted.
And just like that, it was over. The air didn’t move. No one nodded, but no one shook his head. There was just a collective, silent exhale. Option B, the one championed by the engineering lead and backed by 24 pages of data, evaporated. The energy that had fueled weeks of argument simply dissipated, leaving behind the stale taste of ozone and compliance.
The real problem with this charade isn’t just the monumental waste of time. I once calculated we lose about 344 work hours a year to these performative alignment rituals. No, the true cost is far more insidious. This process, the illusion of collaborative choice, is more corrosive to trust than a simple top-down directive. A blunt order is at least honest. You can disagree with it, you can resent it, but you know where you stand. The charade is different. It forces you to be a ventriloquist for an opinion you don’t hold. It asks you to invest your intellect and energy in a game where the outcome has already been written, quietly, in the corner office. It teaches you, meeting by meeting, that your contribution is not for guidance, but for validation.
The Insidious Cost
To performative alignment rituals.
I’d love to say I’ve always been on the right side of this, a champion for authentic debate. That would be a lie. Years ago, I managed a significant facility upgrade project for a mid-sized logistics company. The budget was tight, around $474,000, and the timeline was aggressive. The core debate was between two competing security infrastructure philosophies. The CEO was enamored with a sleek, new wireless system he’d seen at a conference. It promised minimal disruption and a modern interface. The IT and security teams, however, were deeply skeptical. They argued that for a facility with concrete walls and high-value inventory, reliability was everything. They pointed out that Wi-Fi could be jammed, and battery-powered sensors created hundreds of potential points of failure over time. They presented a case for a hard-wired system built around Power over Ethernet technology.
I saw my role as ‘building consensus’ toward the CEO’s preference. I framed their concerns as ‘valid implementation hurdles’ that we could ‘workshop collaboratively.’ I scheduled 4 extra sessions focused on ‘mitigating the risks’ of the wireless system. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell the truth. I steered every conversation, reframed every objection, and celebrated every minor concession from the tech team as a ‘huge step toward alignment.’ We eventually got their exhausted, reluctant sign-off. The project was a disaster. The wireless system was a constant headache, with dead zones and maintenance tickets piling up. Six months after launch, after a critical outage during a server reboot, we had to spend an additional $124,000 retrofitting key areas. The most reliable components we ended up installing were for a new, isolated network to ensure data integrity, starting with a simple poe camera at each loading bay, a solution the team had proposed on day one.
The Click, Not The Nod
I find myself rehearsing conversations in the shower. Imagining the perfect response to a point that was never actually made in a meeting that has already passed. It’s a strange habit, this retroactive crafting of arguments. It’s about control, I think. An attempt to impose a logical, linear script on the messy, unpredictable reality of human interaction. This is exactly the same impulse that drives the consensus charade: a deep-seated discomfort with genuine dissent. A real conversation, like a real decision-making process, can go anywhere. It’s unpredictable. Manufacturing consensus is an attempt to nail the script down before the actors even take the stage.
His job, as he sees it, is not to force agreement but to create the conditions where the child’s brain can have its own moment of insight. He uses different tools, different angles, different sensory inputs, until something clicks for them. The goal is the click, not the nod. He said the biggest mistake new teachers make is rewarding the nod instead of waiting for the click. They mistake compliance for comprehension. And so we fill our organizations with people who have become experts at nodding. But we have very few who are still waiting for the click, or who know how to create the space for it.
It’s a contradiction, I know, because I’m also deeply impatient. I loathe inefficient processes. And yet, sometimes a slow, deliberate process is exactly what’s needed. The difference is intent. A process designed to *explore* a problem is valuable, no matter how long it takes. A process designed to *ratify* a predetermined solution is a cancer. The former is a searchlight. The latter is a rubber stamp that requires 4 meetings and 84 emails to ink.
We think the damage is contained in the project’s failure. But the real fallout is what happens to the people. The bright engineer who brought 24 pages of data to the meeting? Next time, she’ll bring 4. The time after that, she’ll just come with a notebook and wait to be told which column to put her name under. You don’t burn people out by giving them too much work. You burn them out by making their work meaningless. You ask for their brain, their experience, their soul, and then you use it as set dressing for a decision you made on the golf course last Saturday.