The layer nothing is built on
Almost everything you pay for to help your leadership team decide works on what goes into the meeting or what comes out of it. Help with what the team assembles in between mostly arrives at the offsite, not the weekly meeting.
Six roles are frozen across two regions, and one of your regional heads has started taking recruiters’ calls. The consolidation has been item three on Tuesday’s leadership agenda for six weeks.
The reviews have been orderly. Each concern gets a considered answer. The pre-read is thorough, the tracker is current, and last week’s summary arrived before anyone was back at their desk. The framework from the spring offsite is attached.
At 10:40, another adjustment goes into the proposal. The regional heads accept it. Finance takes a note. It looks like the team is getting closer.
But each adjustment has preserved another part of the arrangement the consolidation was supposed to change. The proposal is becoming easier to accept and less capable of delivering its purpose.
Nothing in the quality of the preparation or the record tells you whether the group is doing that. To understand it, you have to look at what its members are producing together as the conversation unfolds.
What happens at 10:40
One region needs to retain control of customer relationships during the transition. That is reasonable. The other needs guaranteed access to specialist staff. That is reasonable too. The team accommodates both concerns, then adjusts the proposed central unit to fit.
Now the central unit is responsible for improving service and reducing duplication, but the regions retain control of the people and work it would need to move. The team has answered the objections by removing the means to achieve the result.
Nobody proposed that outcome. It was assembled through a sequence of sensible concessions.
The spreadsheet can show the cost of the resulting plan. A shared document can make every amendment visible. The decision framework can specify who has authority to approve it. Those are useful functions. They do not, simply by being available, help the team recognise how it is making the proposal unworkable.
That is the distinction that matters here. Software may be open throughout the meeting. A framework may guide every turn. Running during the conversation is not the same as working on what the group is assembling through it.
In this case, every objection receives a local answer while the combined proposal loses its purpose. Another conversation might spend three hours testing alternatives without developing any of them far enough to choose. The first feels constructive; the second feels exhausting. Both require attention to how the contributions are shaping what the group can do next.
This is what support for the live conversation would have to address. Better inputs alone cannot establish that the group will use them well. A better record can preserve exactly how it did not.
What the offsite changes
A skilled adviser in the room may recognise what is happening and help the team work through it. Leadership teams already pay for that kind of help. There is no need to pretend it cannot work.
Suppose the spring offsite was excellent. The team reached a difficult decision, understood the trade-offs and came home with a framework it still uses. Tuesday’s meeting is better because of it.
The question is how that support reaches the next conversation when the difficulty takes a different form.
A framework gives the team something to apply. It cannot itself notice that a series of reasonable exceptions is undoing the decision it was designed to support. Someone must recognise that happening and judge when the group can use help with it.
The adviser could join Tuesday’s review. If they do, the gap closes for that session. The practical question becomes whether that attention is available across the recurring meetings where consequential choices develop — not only for the offsite or the meeting everyone already knows will be difficult.
For people at the top, meetings are most of the job. When Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked 27 chief executives of large companies around the clock for 13 weeks each, meetings took 72 per cent of their working time.
Without that attention, the team can keep improving the things it knows how to commission. A more detailed cost model. A revised transition plan. Another round of consultation. Each may be useful. But if the group keeps resolving objections by stripping the proposal of what makes it worthwhile, those additions leave the same problem to form again.
The six frozen roles remain frozen while the team prepares a more complete account of why.
What would have to work here
Start with the weekly leadership rhythm: the exec sync, the project review, the strategy check-in. Support for those conversations would need to be available as they happen. It would also need to respond to what the group is producing together, rather than assume that a prepared process will fit whatever develops.
This is the case for a different category of AI: software built to work on the group’s developing thinking, within the conversation itself. We built Akheon to operate there.
Akheon joins the conversation and reads the live patterns the team is co-producing beneath it. When the group can use a contribution, it offers one thing, then returns to reading, including what its contribution changed. The product is the reading and the timing.
A pilot has to establish whether its reading and timing help that particular team in its actual meetings. The decision remains the team’s to make.
The distinction matters beyond the weekly review. In board preparation, an acquisition discussion or a strategic pivot, the consequences grow. Access to those rooms has to be earned through the ordinary leadership conversations first.
At your next review, pay attention when an adjustment makes a difficult proposal easier for everyone to accept. Ask what that adjustment does to the proposal as a whole. Then consider which support you have commissioned is helping the group work through that consequence while the choice is still forming.
At 10:40, the central unit may have lost the authority it needs while everyone agreed to a reasonable protection. By 11, that protection will be in the plan. By next Tuesday, six more days will have passed with the roles still frozen.
That is the moment your support needs to reach.
Source
Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria, “How CEOs Manage Time,” Harvard Business Review 96(4), July–August 2018: 42–51. 27 CEOs of large companies, participants in Harvard Business School’s New CEO Workshop; time tracked 24/7 for 13 weeks each, from 2006; nearly 60,000 hours.