The Meeting After the Meeting

Every company has two types of meetings.

There's the one on the calendar. The one with the agenda and the deck and the person who always asks "Can everyone see my screen?" three times before sharing.

Then there's the meeting after the meeting. The hallway conversation. The Slack DM. The quick "Hey, can I grab you for two minutes?" that turns into thirty.

The second one is where the real decisions get made.

The Pattern

I've watched this pattern in every organization I've worked with. The formal meeting ends. People nod. Action items are assigned. Minutes are sent.

Then two or three people find each other.

"So what did you really think?"

"Yeah, that's never going to work."

"I know. So here's what we should actually do..."

And just like that, the real strategy is born. Not in the boardroom. In the kitchen, next to the coffee machine that nobody knows how to descale.

Why It Happens

It's not conspiracy. It's not politics — well, not entirely politics. It's something more fundamental.

Formal meetings are optimized for consensus. Informal conversations are optimized for truth.

In the meeting, you perform. You say the thing that's safe. You agree with the thing that has momentum. You don't challenge the VP's pet project because the last person who did that is now "pursuing other opportunities."

After the meeting, you can be honest. You can say what you actually think. You can point out the obvious flaw that everyone saw but nobody mentioned because mentioning it would add forty minutes to an already-overlong meeting.

"The quality of an organization's decisions is inversely proportional to the gap between what's said in meetings and what's said after them."

The Cost

Here's what nobody calculates: the meeting after the meeting is extraordinarily expensive.

Think about it. You just spent an hour in a room with twelve people reaching a decision. Then three of those people spend another thirty minutes undoing that decision and reaching a different one.

The twelve-person meeting cost the company roughly $1,200 in salary time. The hallway conversation cost $150. But the real cost is the six weeks of work that happens based on the meeting decision before the hallway decision quietly redirects everyone.

That's not $1,350. That's $135,000 in misdirected effort.

What To Do

You can't eliminate the meeting after the meeting. Trying to would be like trying to eliminate gossip — it's a fundamental human behavior.

But you can shrink the gap.

Smaller meetings. Fewer stakeholders. Explicit permission to disagree. A culture where the VP's pet project can be challenged without career consequences.

Or, if you're feeling radical: start with the hallway conversation and skip the meeting entirely.

Your calendar will thank you. Your margins will too.