One of the things I really miss about corporate life is playing the “which, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is where you go to meetings with the express intent of taking zero actions whatsoever. And if you’re thinking, what is this corporate lingo, then an action is something that you actually have to do. And you might think, “Well, isn’t that the whole point of work, that you actually get stuff done?” To which I would say, “No, foolishness!” You’re too busy attending meetings at which you’re avoiding actions to actually have time to do anything.
So how do you avoid taking any actions? Well, you might think, maybe just don’t show up to the meeting, which would be a terrible strategy, because then the people at the meeting will give you all of the actions, and you hear about it later. So that’s a rookie mistake. There are a variety of strategies for avoiding taking actions, one of which is to just remain perfectly still. This is the Jurassic Park approach. You hope that if you just don’t move, the dinosaur won’t see you, like this. But sadly, the dinosaurs often do spot you, so it’s not a good strategy.
A much better strategy is to constantly be positive in meetings and compliment people, saying things like, “That’s a really great idea!”, “I just wanted to double down on that point…”, “I completely agree!” or “Let me just build on that…”, because that gives people the impression that you’re contributing to the meeting without actually contributing anything.
There is a risk, though, that at some point an action will start to come your way. You need to spot that and head it off quite quickly. You do that by saying things like, “We’re just so busy right now,” or “My team just don’t have the bandwidth,” or even a kind of inferred threat where you say, “We’d have to deprioritize some of our strategically aligned work.” That usually stops them.
You might think that leaders of these meetings would get very frustrated with everybody avoiding taking actions, but they don’t, generally, because that’s how they got where they are, by being very good at giving the impression that they’re doing something whilst at the same time not actually doing anything whatsoever. And I know you’ve got this lingering suspicion: in that case, how does any work actually get done? Well, good question.
The answer is, you give it to somebody else to do. If you have budget, you lodge that with a third party, a vendor, who can actually do the doing, and then you take the credit for the doing. But if you don’t have budget, then you just kind of moan incessantly about not having sufficient budget. “My team doesn’t have enough budget.” “We just don’t have the budget to get anything done this year.” That ensures that you can continue attending meetings where you avoid taking any actions but nevertheless give the impression that you’re actually doing work.