“We can’t actually talk about the strategy until we’ve agreed on the vocabulary we’re going to use to describe the strategy, which is why I’ve called this pre-sync.”

I stared at my laptop screen, the fan whirring like a jet engine preparing for a takeoff that never happens. I’m a building code inspector by trade, a man who deals in the hard physics of load-bearing walls and the unyielding mathematics of fire egress, but lately, my 41-year-old brain feels like it’s being slowly dissolved in a vat of corporate consensus. The speaker on the call was a junior project manager with a voice so smooth it could de-escalate a hostage situation, yet he was currently holding 11 of us captive in a meeting designed solely to prepare us for the meeting we were scheduled to have tomorrow.

The absurdity isn’t just in the redundancy; it’s in the physical toll. I’d just come from a site on the 21st floor of a half-finished high-rise where the wind screams through the rebar, and I was trying to sit that didn’t involve a bucket of curing sealant. My jaw was still slightly numb from a morning appointment where I’d attempted small talk with my dentist. It’s a specialized kind of torture, trying to explain the intricacies of seismic bracing when your lower lip feels like a wet piece of ham. He’d asked about my stress levels, and I’d tried to grunt something about the ‘process,’ but the word came out as a gargle. He nodded as if he understood, but how could he? He deals with cavities; I deal with the structural integrity of souls being crushed by calendar invites.

We are terrified of dissent. We are terrified of the 101 variables that might arise if we haven’t already rehearsed our reactions to them. So, we huddle in these purgatorial digital rooms, smoothing out the edges of our opinions until they are as round and useless as marbles.

The Code vs. The Consensus

I remember an inspection I did 21 months ago. A contractor, a guy who had been pouring concrete since before I could ride a bike, tried to show me a ‘pre-inspection’ checklist he’d made for my actual inspection. He wanted to walk me through what he was going to show me before he actually showed it to me. I told him to save the 31 minutes of breath. If the rebar isn’t spaced to code, no amount of ‘alignment’ is going to keep that balcony from sagging.

But in the corporate world, we believe the opposite. We believe that if we talk about the balcony long enough, and in enough ‘pre-syncs,’ the physical laws of gravity might eventually decide to give us a pass.

This obsession with pre-alignment reveals a lack of individual empowerment. If I, as a code inspector, cannot make a call on a site without first checking with four other people to see how they ‘feel’ about the stairwell width, the building never gets built. Yet, in the modern office, nobody wants to be the person who said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ without a buffer of 11 other signatures. We use these pre-meetings to distribute the risk of being wrong until the risk is so thin it’s practically invisible. It’s a hedge against accountability.

I’ve noticed that the more senior the managers involved, the more likely the pre-meeting is to have its own pre-meeting. I once saw a calendar invite for a ‘Lead-up to the Pre-Strategy Alignment Session.’ That’s three layers of abstraction away from an actual decision. We are spending $5001 worth of billable hours to decide which font to use on a slide that will be seen for 11 seconds by a VP who is currently answering emails under the table.

The Cost of Safety

I mentioned this to a practitioner at White Rock Naturopathic while seeking a way to lower my baseline cortisol, which seems to spike every time I hear the chime of a new Outlook notification. We talked about how the body reacts to perpetual states of ‘waiting’-the physiological cost of never quite reaching the point of action. My job used to be about action. I’d walk a site, I’d find a flaw, I’d write a notice, and things would change. Now, even my inspections are followed by 11 follow-up calls to ‘debrief’ on the findings before the findings are officially released. It’s as if we’re afraid that the truth might be too jarring if it isn’t delivered in a velvet-lined box of ‘pre-alignment.’

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There is a specific kind of silence that happens in these meetings. It’s the silence of someone waiting for their turn to speak without actually listening to what’s being said. We are all just monitoring our own internal ‘alignment’ meters.

– Observation on Collective Monitoring

If someone says something slightly off-script, you can feel the collective intake of breath through the microphones. The goal is no longer to solve the problem; the goal is to ensure that the 301-slide deck tomorrow goes off without a single uncomfortable question.

Learning Through Failure

I once made a mistake-a real one. I missed a pipe penetration seal in a basement back in my second year. It was a $1001 fix that should have been a $51 fix if I’d caught it early. My boss didn’t call a pre-meeting to discuss how we would tell the client. He just told me to go back and fix it. That moment of being wrong, of being exposed, taught me more about building codes than any 21-day training seminar ever could.

Last week, I was looking at a set of blueprints for a new library. The architect had included 11 different ‘collaborative spaces’-which is code for ‘places to have meetings.’ I looked at the square footage and realized that more space was dedicated to people talking about books than to the books themselves. It’s a perfect metaphor for where we are. The ‘meta-work’ has become the work. We are building structures, both physical and organizational, that prioritize the process over the product.

The Strength in Tension

I often find myself wondering what would happen if we just… stopped. If we showed up to the Q3 Strategy Offsite with no prior alignment. What if we actually had a disagreement? What if someone proposed an idea that hadn’t been vetted by 11 different sub-committees? The walls wouldn’t collapse. In fact, the structural integrity might actually improve.

My dentist finally finished his work, and as the lidocaine wore off, the pain returned-a sharp, clear reminder that something had actually happened. I prefer that pain to the dull ache of an hour-long call about a call. At least the pain is honest. It tells me where the problem is. A pre-meeting is like a local anesthetic for the corporate conscience; it numbs the reality of our inefficiency so we can pretend we’re being productive.

I went back to the high-rise site today. I stood on the 11th floor and looked out over the city. From up there, you can’t see the calendars or the ‘pre-sync’ invites. You just see the results of people who, at some point, had to stop talking and start pouring. I checked my phone. I had 21 new messages. One was a ‘Quick sync to prep for the debrief.’ I deleted it.

I’m going to go back to my blueprints now. There’s a load-bearing column on the 31st floor that looks a little suspect. I don’t need to align with anyone to know it’s a problem. I just need to do my job. It’s a novel concept, I know. But maybe, just maybe, if we all spent 51% less time preparing to do our jobs, we might actually have the time to do them well.