A strategy meeting to determine a better way to plan meetings for enhanced office synergy ended promptly after 5-hours as all involved parties agreed to take it offline. There was talk of tabling the discussion throughout the meeting, but some members saw the initiative as low hanging fruit, and thus it persisted on and obliterated any chance of productivity for the day. Members of the meeting passionately disputed the state of transparency across the department, and furthermore the department’s core competency which happened to be transparency.

The 800lb gorilla in the room was ultimately leadership’s inability to buy into putting all of their cards on the table. They maintained they would only drink the Kool-Aid if the solution was within the industry best practices and also scalable. They failed to mention any specific best practices, but assumed everyone was aligned given that they were after all…best practices. Several other people from middle management endorsed this thought adding that the scalability should be granular while simultaneously staying out of the weeds. This thought seemed contradictory at first, but since it didn’t involve reinventing the wheel, all parties involved agreed it might be disruptive enough to work. So long as of course, the disruption didn’t cause a complete paradigm shart…or shift rather.

The meeting threatened to end multiple times as varying hard stops by participants arose, however it was never completely pencils down as no one could even tell who was running meeting, or if they were actually in a meeting at all. There were several evolutions of the meeting, though no one seemed to notice or care, so long as everyone had their ducks in a row. At one point a pack of stray cats from the alley behind the building paraded around the crowded room before being promptly herded. Someone at one point suggested boiling something in the ocean or seeing if a dog could hunt, both were noted as follow-up items to be addressed at the next meeting. Another person opened the silk Kimono they were inexplicably wearing, before closing it and sitting back down quietly.

The energy that had been dwindling since the first half hour was nearly depleted, until the participants agreed to circle the wagons and take the discussion offline. A recurring calendar invitation was sent to refine processes for sending calendar invitations, and everyone looked forward to the same thing the next week.