The Contagion of Conceptual Alignment

Dragging the cursor across the screen feels like pulling a lead-lined weight through a vat of honey. I am clicking ‘Join’ on a calendar invite that shouldn’t exist, for a conversation that has already happened twice in various states of undress-conceptually speaking. The title of the invite is ‘Pre-Sync for the Q3 Strategy Offsite,’ and the primary agenda item, written with a straight face by someone who surely has a soul hidden under their fleece vest, is ‘to align on the preliminary agenda for the pre-read document.’

This is not a singular event. It is a contagion. We are living in an era where the act of doing has been entirely supplanted by the act of discussing the potential of doing. In my day job-or my real life, depending on how you measure soul-death-I conserve stained glass. When a window from 1887 comes into my shop, it doesn’t need a steering committee. It needs someone with a steady hand, a sharp glass cutter, and the terrifying willingness to make a definitive mark.

I’m currently staring at 27 tiny squares on my monitor. Most of them are muted. Half of them are clearly answering emails. One person is eating a salad with an intensity that suggests they are trying to punish the kale. We are all here because no one wants to be the person who said, ‘I’ve decided the agenda, here it is, see you at the offsite.’ That would require ownership. It would require a singular point of failure.

The Fractal of Inefficiency

I once spent 67 minutes in a call where the only outcome was the realization that we needed to invite three more people to a different call to explain why the first call didn’t have a clear outcome. My studio is currently littered with fragments of cobalt blue glass from a project that actually matters, and here I am, contributing to the carbon footprint of a cloud-based video service to discuss whether ‘Synergy’ or ‘Alignment’ should be the header for slide 7.

I didn’t have to wait for a consensus to feel the weight of [a costly error]. In these recursive meetings, mistakes are impossible to find because nothing is ever actually finished. We just iterate on the preparation. We polish the map until the actual territory has changed so much that the map is useless anyway.

The Architectural Antidote: Intention and Light

We often find that our physical surroundings dictate the clarity of our thoughts, which is why I often retreat to the quietest corners of my workshop. There is a profound difference between a cluttered, noisy digital room and the clean, expansive feeling of a space designed with intention. In my work, I’ve seen how light changes a person’s mood depending on the frame it passes through. A cluttered mind cannot produce a sharp cut. When everything is disorganized, we default to the safety of the group.

If you’ve ever stepped into one of the Sola Spaces, you understand the contrast I’m reaching for here. It’s the difference between a dark, cramped hallway filled with voices and a room that is literally built to hold the sun. In those spaces, the clutter of the ‘pre-sync’ mentality feels absurd. You are forced to be present with the light, with the environment, and with your own decisions. It’s an architectural antidote to the recursive meeting.

We have $777-per-hour rooms filled with brilliant people who are afraid to say ‘This is the plan’ because the plan might be wrong. But being wrong is a vital part of the process. In stained glass, if you don’t break a few pieces, you aren’t learning the tension of the material. Corporate culture has become so obsessed with risk mitigation that it has mitigated the possibility of movement.

The Shadow Sibling: The Post-Meeting

I have this theory that we use meetings as a way to avoid the terrifying silence of actual work. Real work is lonely. It’s you and the glass, or you and the code, or you and the blank page. There is no one to nod along with you. Meetings provide a cozy, social buffer against that loneliness.

There is a specific smell to a meeting that has gone on too long. It’s the smell of stale coffee and cooling laptops, mixed with the faint, metallic tang of collective anxiety. I need the air to move. I need the reminder that there is a world outside the recursive loop.

Reclaiming the ‘No’ and The Master Mason

We need to start valuing the ‘No’ more than the ‘Yes.’ We need to be able to say, ‘No, we don’t need a meeting for this.’ We are so focused on the structure of the conversation that we’ve forgotten the purpose of the talk. We are architects who only draw blueprints but never lay a single brick.

What if the next time you got an invite for a ‘Sync about the Sync,’ you simply didn’t go? What if you trusted your colleagues enough to let them make a decision without you? Or better yet, what if you made the decision yourself and just told them the result?