Everyone Nodded And Nothing Moved

Sound familiar?

I keep attending the same meeting. The company changes, the room changes, the brand of sparkling water changes. The meeting stays.

Somebody names a gap everyone already knows about. Heads nod. Somebody proposes a fix. More nods. The agreement in the room is warm and thick as August. Then the meeting ends, and the gap just sits there in the parking lot, waiting patiently for next quarter’s version of the same conversation.

For a long time I thought the problem was commitment. It wasn’t. Everyone in that room was supportive. Nobody was lying.

The problem was that the solution had been positioned for no one.

It floated above the table in company-speak, relevant to everybody in general and nobody in particular. And priorities don’t get set in general. They get set by each person deciding, privately, that this thing matters to them. (I’d go so far as to say, it’s not even decided via some digital tracker. It’s their spirit. You know… the thing we get hired to actually bring to the table of the work. The thing AI doesn’t have yet.)

Marketers already know how this works. We would never send a prospect an unaimed message. We segment, we study the buyer, we adjust the words until they land on the exact nerve. Then we walk into an internal meeting, present the initiative in our own dialect, and wonder why it dies of politeness.

I learned this the slow way. If you want sales to care about a gap, attach revenue potential to it. Not a vision. Not a principle. A number with a dollar sign that could plausibly show up in someone’s pipeline.

If you want product to care, bring a prospect’s actual words, verbatim, ugly grammar and all. Product people can resist a strategy document forever, but a customer’s own sentence gets under the skin and stays there.

Think of it as columns. Every function has one, the place their eye goes first. Revenue for sales. The customer’s voice for product. Risk for finance. Hours for ops.

Your job, before the meeting, is to fill in the column for every person who will be sitting there. Same gap, same fix, translated into every currency in the room. (I hinted the work of cross-department alignment was possible. Not that it was easy!)

Then you need one shared scale so the whole group can rank the pile together, and it should be embarrassingly simple. Effort, time, impact.

Something anyone can read in ten seconds. The translations get each department to lean in. The shared scale keeps them from tearing each other’s lists apart.

None of this is extra work. (And damn, I’d say it even buys you back time in meetings that never happen and words that never get echoed in them from the previous status meeting…)

It’s the same audience research we already do for strangers, finally aimed at the people we eat lunch with.

And there’s something almost tender about it done right. It says I know what your week looks like, I know what you’re measured on, I did the work to make this land in your world. That’s not politics. That’s respect wearing a spreadsheet, which makes the whole thing work even harder!

The gap doesn’t care that the room agreed. The gap moves when each person in it can see their own reason to move it.

Stay Positive & Ask Them What It’s Worth To Them (Might Mean A 1-1…But Ask It)