Last week I walked into a meeting the way I like to walk into anything that matters. Prepared. Not "kinda ready." Not "let's see where this goes." Prepared. I'd done the thinking. I had the context. I had the first problem — the real one — clearly laid out.
And within minutes, I could feel it. No alignment. Not even close.
Different definitions, different priorities, different assumptions. We were all reading the same sentence in completely different languages. I got frustrated. Because I kept watching something happen that I've seen a thousand times in business: people trying to get to Step 4 when we couldn't agree on Step 1.
Avoidance Dressed as Productivity
That's not moving fast. That's not being efficient. That's not leadership. That's avoidance dressed up as productivity.
Jeff Bezos said something that's stayed with me — he never understood why we schedule meetings for a fixed length of time when we don't actually know how long it's going to take to solve the problem. I was in that meeting, putting the first problem on the table, and everyone was already mentally skipping ahead to the next one. The easier one. The one that doesn't require conflict. The one that doesn't require anyone to admit, "Yeah, we're not aligned."
That's what people do. They don't want the hard problem. They want the clean one. The one that fits neatly on the agenda bullet. The one you can "capture in the notes" and feel like you accomplished something. The one where nobody has to look stupid, nobody has to take ownership, nobody has to ask the sentence that actually matters: "Wait — what are we solving? And why?"
The Quiet Poison That Kills Teams
The result? That meeting didn't go well. No problems were solved. No alignment was created. And everyone walked out carrying that subtle, quiet poison that kills teams: the feeling that we met, but we didn't actually do anything.
If you can't agree on Step 1, Step 4 is a fantasy. And if your team keeps sprinting past alignment because alignment feels slow, you're not going fast. You're going in circles faster.
Real progress is not motion. Real progress is agreement. Agreement on the problem. Agreement on the definition. Agreement on what "done" actually means. And here's the truth most people don't want to hear: the hard problem is usually the one that matters most, and the easy problem is usually the one we use to pretend we're making progress.
Ask the Question Nobody Wants Asked
So next time you're in that meeting — and you feel the pressure to move on — ask it: "Are we aligned on Step 1?" And if the answer is no, don't rush. Don't pretend. Don't escape into easier tasks.
Sit in the discomfort long enough to actually solve the thing that's holding everything else hostage.
Because the meeting isn't supposed to end on time. It's supposed to end with alignment. And if it doesn't, you didn't have a meeting. You had a group of people doing synchronized avoidance.