The Orchestrator

The first two parts of this book were about a person and the systems that person designs. This chapter is about a room.

An institution runs on its meetings. Decisions get made in them, authority gets exercised in them, and — more often than anyone wants to admit — work gets delayed by them. Most companies are running meeting habits designed for a world where finding anything out was expensive. If the only way to learn why customers abandon their returns is to gather ten people and ask them, the meeting is not a culture problem. It is the organization’s only available mechanism for investigating its own operations.

That world is ending, and most calendars have not noticed.

Start with the numbers, because they are worse than most people admit. Executives now spend nearly twenty-three hours a week in meetings, up from less than ten hours a week in the 1960s, and the load has been rising for fifty years.¹ The people inside those rooms know what the hours are doing to them. One executive interviewed for Harvard Business Review described stabbing her leg with a pencil during a staff meeting, to keep herself from screaming.

Orchestration attacks that number directly. Not by making meetings shorter — by making most of them unnecessary. When a system can investigate, prototype, and assemble evidence overnight, the meetings that existed to assign, sequence, and track human investigation lose their reason to exist, and the meetings that remain get better, because the people in them are looking at evidence instead of at each other’s guesses. The savings from orchestration are not only technical. Some of the largest savings are the procedural meetings themselves.