There is a particular kind of executive meeting that runs perfectly. The papers are read. The discussion is crisp. Everyone contributes. A decision is reached inside the allotted time and the chair thanks the room. And nothing that happened in that room had the slightest bearing on the outcome.
The decision was made three days earlier, between two people, in a corridor.
Most executives will recognise this immediately, and most will not be especially troubled by it. Pre-alignment is not a scandal. It is, in many organisations, simply how business gets done: you sound out the people who matter, you test the objections privately where they are cheap, you arrive at the meeting with the difficult work behind you. This looks like competence, and a good deal of the time it is.
But something is being paid for it, and it is worth being precise about what.
What the room is actually for
An executive meeting has two possible functions, and they are almost never distinguished. It can be a place where a decision is made, or a place where a decision is ratified. Both are legitimate. The difficulty arises when the team believes it is doing the first while in fact doing the second — because everything then depends on a quality of scrutiny that is no longer happening anywhere.
Consider what corridor alignment actually removes. It removes the encounter between an argument and the people most likely to find its weakness. In a corridor you speak to the person whose support you need. You do not speak to the person whose objection you dread, because the entire purpose of the exercise is to arrive at the meeting without having to deal with them. The awkward director is not consulted; they are outflanked.
And so by the time the proposal reaches the room, it has been tested by its allies and not by its critics. It has acquired the appearance of consensus without ever passing through the process that consensus is supposed to certify. The critic, arriving to find the matter effectively settled, does the arithmetic in about four seconds and says nothing — which everyone present records as agreement.
The proposal has been tested by its allies and not by its critics. It arrives wearing the appearance of consensus without ever having passed through the process consensus is supposed to certify.
Why it accelerates under pressure
This pattern is not distributed evenly. It intensifies precisely when the stakes rise, which is precisely when it does the most damage.
Under pressure, meetings become expensive. Diaries compress. The cost of an unresolved item rises. And so the executive team, entirely rationally, does more of its work outside the room in order to make the room more efficient. Each individual instance is defensible. The aggregate is an executive team that has quietly outsourced its most consequential decisions to a set of bilateral conversations that nobody minutes, nobody challenges, and nobody can reconstruct afterwards.
Ask any executive team, after a decision has gone badly, where exactly it was taken. The honest answer is frequently that nobody knows. There was a meeting, and there is a minute, and the minute is accurate, and it describes an event that was not the decision.
The two symptoms worth watching
You do not need an external assessment to detect this. Two symptoms are usually sufficient.
The first is the decision made twice. A conclusion is reached in the room, and then something happens afterwards — a message, a corridor conversation, a quiet adjustment — and what is implemented is not quite what was agreed. Nobody experiences this as a reversal. Everyone experiences it as a clarification. If this is happening more than occasionally, the room is not where the decisions live.
The second is the meeting that finishes early. A genuinely difficult decision, properly examined by capable people who disagree, takes a long time and is uncomfortable while it is happening. When difficult items are consistently completing inside their allotted time, and the atmosphere is agreeable, the difficulty has been moved somewhere else. It has not been dissolved.
The remedy is not more meetings
The instinct, having noticed this, is to insist that everything be decided in the room — which is a poor remedy, because it treats the symptom and misreads the cause. Corridor alignment is not laziness. It is a rational response to a room in which disagreement has become expensive.
People pre-align because it is safer than dissenting in public. That is the fact to work on. If the cost of open disagreement inside the room were lower than the cost of managing it outside, the behaviour would change on its own within about six weeks, without a single new rule.
Which means the intervention that works is not procedural. It is a chief executive who takes one decision the team has already reached comfortably, invites the person most likely to object to make the strongest case against it, and then — this is the whole of the mechanism — visibly changes their mind, in front of everybody, at least once.
Teams do not learn what is safe from being told what is safe. They learn it from watching what happens to the first person who tries.
Laszlo Cser is the founder of Vantaris Consulting, an executive leadership advisory practice working with organisations whose executive decisions carry significant commercial, operational or reputational consequence. More essays.