One of the more interesting things about organizational life is how much faith we place in meetings.
When a problem appears, we schedule a meeting. When a decision needs to be made, we schedule a meeting. When a strategic planning process begins, there are usually several meetings before anyone has even decided what the planning process is intended to accomplish. Entire organizational cultures seem to operate on the assumption that gathering a sufficient number of people around a table will eventually produce clarity.
Occasionally it does.
Just as often, it produces something else entirely.
I’ve been noticing for years that many planning processes begin far later than people think they do. Most organizations assume the work starts when everyone arrives in the room. The agenda has been distributed. The consultant has been hired. Background documents have been circulated. Coffee has been arranged. Name tags appear if the occasion feels particularly formal.
From the outside, it appears that planning is about to begin.
In reality, the most important part of the process may already have been skipped.
I think of it as the meeting before the meeting.
It is rarely an actual meeting. More often it is a conversation that never quite happens. It involves a small number of deceptively simple questions that people assume everyone has already answered in the same way. What problem are we trying to solve? Why are we here? What prompted this process? What will success look like when we are finished?
Those questions sound so obvious that they can seem unnecessary.
That assumption is usually where the trouble begins.
One of the most common experiences in consulting is discovering that people who appear to be discussing the same issue are actually discussing several different issues simultaneously. The language sounds aligned. The intentions are aligned. The concern for the organization is certainly aligned. Yet underneath the conversation sit entirely different assumptions about what needs attention.
A board member may be worried about long-term sustainability.
A staff member may be worried about workload.
A funder may be concerned with community impact.
Someone else may be focused on audience growth.
Another person may believe the organization’s governance structure has become outdated.
None of these perspectives are inherently wrong. In fact, all of them may contain elements of truth. The difficulty arises when nobody realizes they are discussing different questions.
At that point, a planning process can become a remarkably sophisticated exercise in collective misunderstanding.
People begin proposing solutions before establishing a shared diagnosis. Strategic priorities are debated before anyone has agreed on the challenge those priorities are intended to address. Entire days can be spent discussing future possibilities while assumptions about the present remain largely unexplored.
From the outside, this often looks productive.
There are flip charts. Working groups. Breakout discussions. Dot-mocracy exercises. Colourful sticky notes multiplying across walls at a rate that suggests organizational transformation is imminent. By the end of the day everyone is pleasantly exhausted, which creates the reassuring sensation that important work has occurred.
Sometimes important work has occurred.
Sometimes everyone has simply become tired together.
That may sound unkind, but I don’t mean it that way. Most planning sessions are filled with intelligent, committed people trying sincerely to help their organizations. The challenge is not a lack of effort. It is that effort applied to different assumptions tends to generate complexity rather than clarity.
I occasionally compare it to planning a journey before agreeing on the destination.
Imagine gathering a group of thoughtful people to discuss transportation. One person wants a train. Another prefers a car. Someone suggests flying. Another proposes cycling. The conversation becomes increasingly detailed and increasingly passionate. Routes are considered. Costs are evaluated. Timelines are compared.
An hour later someone asks where everyone is trying to go.
Only then does the room discover that nobody had the same destination in mind.
Organizational planning can unfold in surprisingly similar ways.
Part of the difficulty is that agreeing on the problem is often less comfortable than discussing solutions. Solutions allow people to be optimistic. They create momentum. They provide something concrete to react to. Defining the problem requires people to examine assumptions, challenge interpretations, and occasionally acknowledge disagreements that have been sitting quietly beneath the surface for quite some time.
That work can feel slow.
It can also feel unproductive because very little appears to be happening.
No new initiative emerges. No strategic objective is announced. There is rarely a document at the end of the conversation. What emerges instead is shared understanding, and shared understanding has a frustrating habit of looking invisible until the moment it becomes necessary.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that many organizations underestimate the value of this stage. They rush toward planning because planning feels like progress. Yet planning without alignment often creates the illusion of movement while leaving the underlying confusion untouched.
The organizations that navigate change most effectively seem to approach the process differently.
They spend more time than expected discussing what appears to be the obvious. They clarify language. They test assumptions. They ask people to explain what they mean. They become curious about differences in perspective rather than attempting to smooth them over too quickly. To an observer, these conversations can occasionally appear repetitive.
In reality, they are doing some of the most important work available to them.
The longer I spend around organizations, the less interested I become in planning documents and the more interested I become in the conversations that occur before those documents are written. Plans matter. Goals matter. Timelines and priorities matter. Yet all of those things rest on a foundation of shared understanding, and that foundation is often either stronger or weaker than people realize.
When it is weak, organizations compensate by creating more plans, more meetings, and more discussions. When it is strong, many decisions become surprisingly straightforward because people are operating from the same understanding of reality.
That is why I have developed a certain affection for the meeting before the meeting.
It is usually the least visible part of a planning process. It rarely receives credit. Nobody frames the notes and hangs them on a wall. Yet it is often the moment when people finally discover whether they are solving the same problem or merely using the same vocabulary.
Planning does not really begin when everyone gathers around the table.
It begins when people reach a shared understanding of why they are gathering there in the first place.