{"id":1917,"date":"2026-05-11T00:30:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T00:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/?p=1917"},"modified":"2026-06-20T00:35:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T00:35:59","slug":"the-decision-was-made-months-before-the-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/?p=1917","title":{"rendered":"The Decision Was Made Months Before the Meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Decision Was Made Months Before the Meeting<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Most consequential decisions are not made in the meeting where they are announced. By then, the room has already decided \u2014 informally, unaccountably, and earlier than anyone admits.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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There is a particular kind of meeting that every experienced operator recognises, even if they rarely name it precisely: the meeting where a decision is presented as live, debated as though genuinely open, and then resolved in exactly the direction it was always going to resolve. The discussion was real. The outcome was not in question. Reconstructing how this happens \u2014 and it happens constantly, in organisations of every size \u2014 has taught me more about where real decision-making power lives than almost anything else in this work.<\/p>

The mechanism is rarely conspiratorial. It does not usually involve anyone deliberately staging a sham process. What happens instead is more mundane and, in its way, more interesting: a decision accretes gradually, through a series of small, informal exchanges \u2014 a corridor conversation, a one-to-one before the offsite, a quiet check-in with the person whose support matters most \u2014 until by the time the formal meeting occurs, the people who matter have already arrived at a shared position. The meeting itself becomes a ratification exercise wearing the costume of deliberation. Everyone in the room senses this, at some level, even when no one says so.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The meeting itself becomes a ratification exercise wearing the costume of deliberation.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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This pattern is not, in itself, a failure of governance. Pre-alignment exists for good reasons: it allows objections to be raised privately, where they are easier to absorb without losing face; it lets a leader gauge real support before committing publicly; it spares an organisation the spectacle of visible disagreement at the moment a decision needs to project unity. The difficulty is not that decisions get made informally before the meeting. The difficulty is what this does to the people who were not part of the informal process \u2014 and to the quality of the decision itself, when the pre-alignment closes off information that should have shaped the outcome but arrived too late, or through the wrong channel, to matter.<\/p>

I have reconstructed the timelines of enough strategic decisions, after the fact, to notice how consistently the real moment of decision precedes the moment of record. A board paper will describe a decision as having been made “following discussion” at a particular meeting. The actual sequence, recoverable from calendars, message threads, and the testimony of people in the room, usually shows the substantive decision forming weeks or months earlier, in a much smaller and less formal setting \u2014 and the board meeting functioning primarily to create the documentary record that the decision was made properly, by the right body, through the right process. The record is not false. It simply describes the ceremony, not the decision.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The record is not false. It simply describes the ceremony, not the decision.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What makes this worth taking seriously is not a procedural objection \u2014 that decisions should technically be made where the org chart says they are made. It is a practical one: information that arrives after the informal pre-alignment has hardened into a position rarely gets a fair hearing, regardless of its merit. By the time the formal meeting occurs, reversing course requires someone to publicly contradict a consensus that has already, informally, been reached \u2014 which carries a much higher social cost than raising the same concern earlier, before any position had calcified. The result is a systematic bias toward information that arrives early and against information that arrives late, which has nothing to do with the quality of the information and everything to do with timing.<\/p>

This has direct consequences for how a person in a position of real influence should think about their own role in a decision process. The most useful moment to raise a serious concern is very rarely the formal meeting where the decision is announced for ratification \u2014 by then, raising it is close to symbolic. The most useful moment is earlier, in whatever informal channel is actually shaping the outcome, which requires knowing, with some precision, where that channel runs. This is uncomfortable advice, because it implies that effective participation in consequential decisions depends on access to informal influence \u2014 and access of that kind is unevenly distributed, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of a person’s judgment.<\/p>

For those without that access \u2014 which, on any given decision, is most people in any organisation \u2014 the practical alternative is not to fight the informal pre-alignment process but to understand it well enough to anticipate it: to recognise, before a formal meeting occurs, that the real decision has likely already been made, and to direct energy accordingly. Raising a concern that has a genuine chance of changing an outcome looks different from raising the same concern for the record, knowing it will not. Both can be the right thing to do. They are not the same act, and conflating them \u2014 believing the formal meeting is where the real decision happens, when it is usually where the real decision is confirmed \u2014 leads to a great deal of wasted effort and quiet, misplaced frustration.<\/p>

For those who do hold the informal influence that shapes outcomes before they reach the room \u2014 and most senior leaders hold more of this than they recognise \u2014 the obligation runs the other way. If the meeting is, in practice, theatre, then the real responsibility for getting the decision right sits in the informal process that precedes it, not in the formal one that ratifies it. Treating the corridor conversation as the place where genuine scrutiny belongs, rather than treating it as a courtesy heads-up before the real business of the meeting, is a different and more demanding standard. It is also, in my experience, the standard that distinguishes leaders whose organisations make good decisions from leaders whose organisations simply make decisions efficiently \u2014 which are not the same achievement, even though they can look identical from the outside, in the minutes of a meeting that was never where the deciding actually happened.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Yanka Golemin provides private counsel to founders and principals navigating high-consequence decisions. Inquiries: counsel-inquiry@yankagolemin.com<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Decision Was Made Months Before the Meeting Most consequential decisions are not made in the meeting where they are announced. By then, the room has already decided \u2014 informally, unaccountably, and earlier than anyone admits. There is a particular kind of meeting that every experienced operator recognises, even if they rarely name it precisely: the meeting where a decision is presented as live, debated as though genuinely open, and then resolved in exactly the direction it was always going to resolve. The discussion was real. The outcome was not in question. Reconstructing how this happens \u2014 and it happens constantly, in organisations of every size \u2014 has taught me more about where real decision-making power lives than almost anything else in this work. The mechanism is rarely conspiratorial. It does not usually involve anyone deliberately staging a sham process. What happens instead is more mundane and, in its way, more interesting: a decision accretes gradually, through a series of small, informal exchanges \u2014 a corridor conversation, a one-to-one before the offsite, a quiet check-in with the person whose support matters most \u2014 until by the time the formal meeting occurs, the people who matter have already arrived at a shared position. The meeting itself becomes a ratification exercise wearing the costume of deliberation. Everyone in the room senses this, at some level, even when no one says so. The meeting itself becomes a ratification exercise wearing the costume of deliberation. This pattern is not, in itself, a failure of governance. Pre-alignment exists for good reasons: it allows objections to be raised privately, where they are easier to absorb without losing face; it lets a leader gauge real support before committing publicly; it spares an organisation the spectacle of visible disagreement at the moment a decision needs to project unity. The difficulty is not that decisions get made informally before the meeting. The difficulty is what this does to the people who were not part of the informal process \u2014 and to the quality of the decision itself, when the pre-alignment closes off information that should have shaped the outcome but arrived too late, or through the wrong channel, to matter. I have reconstructed the timelines of enough strategic decisions, after the fact, to notice how consistently the real moment of decision precedes the moment of record. A board paper will describe a decision as having been made “following discussion” at a particular meeting. The actual sequence, recoverable from calendars, message threads, and the testimony of people in the room, usually shows the substantive decision forming weeks or months earlier, in a much smaller and less formal setting \u2014 and the board meeting functioning primarily to create the documentary record that the decision was made properly, by the right body, through the right process. The record is not false. It simply describes the ceremony, not the decision. The record is not false. It simply describes the ceremony, not the decision. What makes this worth taking seriously is not a procedural objection \u2014 that decisions should technically be made where the org chart says they are made. It is a practical one: information that arrives after the informal pre-alignment has hardened into a position rarely gets a fair hearing, regardless of its merit. By the time the formal meeting occurs, reversing course requires someone to publicly contradict a consensus that has already, informally, been reached \u2014 which carries a much higher social cost than raising the same concern earlier, before any position had calcified. The result is a systematic bias toward information that arrives early and against information that arrives late, which has nothing to do with the quality of the information and everything to do with timing. This has direct consequences for how a person in a position of real influence should think about their own role in a decision process. The most useful moment to raise a serious concern is very rarely the formal meeting where the decision is announced for ratification \u2014 by then, raising it is close to symbolic. The most useful moment is earlier, in whatever informal channel is actually shaping the outcome, which requires knowing, with some precision, where that channel runs. This is uncomfortable advice, because it implies that effective participation in consequential decisions depends on access to informal influence \u2014 and access of that kind is unevenly distributed, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of a person’s judgment. For those without that access \u2014 which, on any given decision, is most people in any organisation \u2014 the practical alternative is not to fight the informal pre-alignment process but to understand it well enough to anticipate it: to recognise, before a formal meeting occurs, that the real decision has likely already been made, and to direct energy accordingly. Raising a concern that has a genuine chance of changing an outcome looks different from raising the same concern for the record, knowing it will not. Both can be the right thing to do. They are not the same act, and conflating them \u2014 believing the formal meeting is where the real decision happens, when it is usually where the real decision is confirmed \u2014 leads to a great deal of wasted effort and quiet, misplaced frustration. For those who do hold the informal influence that shapes outcomes before they reach the room \u2014 and most senior leaders hold more of this than they recognise \u2014 the obligation runs the other way. If the meeting is, in practice, theatre, then the real responsibility for getting the decision right sits in the informal process that precedes it, not in the formal one that ratifies it. Treating the corridor conversation as the place where genuine scrutiny belongs, rather than treating it as a courtesy heads-up before the real business of the meeting, is a different and more demanding standard. It is also, in my experience, the standard that distinguishes leaders whose organisations make good decisions from leaders whose organisations simply make decisions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-judgment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1917"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1921,"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions\/1921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yankagolemin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}