I have lost count of the meetings where every person in the room agreed the process was broken, and then walked out of the room and did the thing the broken process required them to do.

The agreement was real. The complaint was real. The understanding of the cost was real. And the next day, the process kept producing whatever the process produces, because each person’s local behavior preserved it.

This is one of the patterns I cannot stop noticing.

What the meeting actually agreed to

What the meeting agreed to was, roughly, “this is bad.” What the meeting did not agree to was who would change their behavior on Monday, what they would change it to, and what would happen to the people who did not.

Without those three commitments, the meeting was not a decision. It was a shared observation. Shared observations are pleasant. They produce relief. They produce camaraderie. They do not produce changed behavior.

A meeting is not movement.

Why each person’s local behavior preserves it

Because the broken process is what each person is being measured against on Monday morning.

The person at the bottom of the chain who is supposed to push back gets graded on whether they hit their number. The person in the middle who is supposed to escalate gets graded on whether the work shipped. The person at the top who is supposed to decide gets graded on whether the team feels supported.

The process is broken at the system level. The incentives are working perfectly at the individual level. So each person, doing what they are individually rewarded to do, preserves the system everyone agrees should be different.

This is not a moral failure. It is what happens when an organization decides to fix a process without changing the incentives that produced it.

What it would take to change

It would take someone with authority saying, on Tuesday, “Starting Monday, here is what we are going to do differently. Here is how I will know whether we are actually doing it. And here is what happens to the metric you are measured against in the meantime.”

That is a much harder meeting than the one that ended with “we all agreed it was broken.”

Effort is not work. Most organizations would rather have the easy meeting twice a year than the hard meeting once.