What Are We Actually Talking About?
On three things that get mixed up in almost every meeting, and why it helps to keep them apart without separating them.
The meeting about the new approval rule has been going for an hour when someone says: “I think we’re talking past each other.” They’re right. One colleague just wants to know what applies from next month and where it’s written down. Another keeps talking about what the rule means for his team, namely a vote of no confidence. And the team lead wants to settle who does what on Monday. All three are talking about the same rule. And yet they’re talking about three different things.
The first is information. What applies, what’s the current state, where can you look it up? Shared information and transparency make things traceable, and with that comes a measure of orientation. The second is meaning. What does this mean for me, what does it trigger, what does it stand for? The third is coordinating action. What do we do, who does what, by when?
These three get mixed up all the time, and often you only notice once the meeting is already stuck.
One assumption is particularly stubborn here: that acting together requires shared meaning. That we first have to understand the same thing before we can do something together. You can test this assumption with a simple experiment. Give a longer text to a hundred people and ask them to summarize the core of its meaning in five sentences. You’ll get back a great many different meanings, even from people with comparable abilities. If meaning lay in the information itself, they would all arrive at the same one. That simply isn’t the case.
The hundred summaries aren’t a failure of communication. They’re the normal case. Maybe organizing begins exactly where we stop demanding shared meaning as a precondition for acting together.
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From this follows a fairly radical stance, radical in the sense of going to the root. Meaning is and remains individual, and that’s fine. It can be similar, and it can be wonderful to exchange views about it. But it isn’t the precondition for acting together.
What comes before the shared part, then, is something each person clarifies for themselves. That’s not an extra hurdle, more of a relief: whoever has clarified it for themselves has less to defend in the meeting.
It’s only a few questions, and you can ask them in the five minutes before the meeting. Do I have enough resonance to get involved at all, or do I basically not care much either way? That’s allowed too. If something does resonate: is it clear enough, or do I first need to sort out for myself what it is that moves me? And if my response is negative: what would I suggest instead? Not as a finished counter-proposal, more as a direction I can offer. Whoever has answered these questions no longer brings a vague unease into the room, but a concern. A concern can be negotiated into something to do. Unease can only be talked about at length.
This can be irritating, and rightly so. Isn’t that cold? People want to be understood, and often it’s meaning that moves them to act in the first place. Separate meaning from action and you risk a collaboration in which everyone functions and nobody knows what for anymore.
But keeping things apart isn’t separating them. The three belong together; they just need different kinds of conversation. Information should be shared. Meanings may be exchanged, but they don’t have to converge. Actions have to be negotiated. Mix them up and you often end up in one of two dead ends: either you try to agree on meanings before acting and never get anywhere, or you decide on actions while an argument about meanings runs in the background that nobody says out loud.
The colleague with the vote of no confidence doesn’t have to give up his reading, and nobody has to talk him out of it. It already helps to recognize it for what it is: his meaning, to be taken seriously, but not an objection to the question of who does what on Monday. If it turns into a real objection, that’s exactly where it belongs.
And it takes the pressure off. You no longer have to convince everyone. You just have to know what you’re talking about right now. Maybe that’s the most helpful question when a meeting is about to get stuck: are we talking about what is, what it means, or what we’re going to do?
