The Rattle of Collective Confusion
Slamming the lid of my laptop feels like an exorcism, but the ghost of the last forty-four minutes is still rattling around the room. I can hear it in the silence that follows-a low-frequency hum of collective confusion disguised as professional consensus. We just finished the ‘weekly sync,’ a term that has become increasingly ironic as the weeks progress. My keyboard is still slightly sticky because I spent the first fourteen minutes of the call picking coffee grounds out of the switches with a toothpick. It was a meticulous, frustrating task, much like trying to extract a concrete commitment from a group of twenty-four people who are all deathly afraid of being the one left holding the metaphorical bag.
Nodding is a rhythmic lie we tell each other to end meetings faster. When the project lead says, ‘Great, so the action item is to circle back and synergize on the deliverables,’ and we all nod, we aren’t agreeing to work. We are agreeing to a truce. We are agreeing that for the next twenty-four hours, no one will be forced to define what a ‘deliverable’ actually is or who is responsible for ‘synergizing’ it.
As a queue management specialist, my entire professional existence is predicated on the idea that things move in a linear, predictable fashion. If A happens, B must follow. But in the modern corporate landscape, we have replaced B with a vague cloud of ‘next steps’ that have no anchor in reality. I have seen queues stall for sixty-four days because the ‘action item’ was assigned to a collective ‘we’ rather than a specific ‘you.’
The ‘we’ is a dangerous entity. The ‘we’ has no hands to type, no brain to decide, and no reputation to lose when things go sideways. It is the ultimate shield for the risk-averse.
The Friction of Clarity
I’ll admit my own hypocrisy here. Just yesterday, I sat through a briefing where I knew the proposed timeline was a total fabrication-a beautiful, shimmering lie composed of eighty-four slides of pure optimism. I didn’t say a word. I let the ‘action item’ to ‘review the feasibility’ float past my head like a stray balloon. Why? Because I didn’t want to be the person who turned a thirty-four-minute meeting into a seventy-four-minute interrogation.
We prioritize the social harmony of the moment over the operational success of the month. Cleaning those coffee grounds earlier taught me something about precision. If I didn’t get every single speck out from under the ‘S’ key, the word ‘synergy’ wouldn’t even register on the screen. It was a binary situation: either the key worked, or it didn’t. There was no room for ‘circling back’ to the cleaning process.
Business needs that kind of binary accountability, but we flee from it because binary means someone can be wrong. Someone can be late. Someone can fail. In a world of ‘action items’ without owners, no one ever truly fails; the project just slowly evaporates until it is replaced by a new, equally vague initiative.
– Internal Reflection
The Unyielding Rule of the Physical World
This lack of ownership is a relatively modern luxury. If you look at industries where the physical world imposes its own rules, this ambiguity doesn’t exist. You cannot ‘synergize’ a physical structure into existence. You cannot ‘circle back’ to the foundation of a building once the walls are up.
No defined owner
There is no ‘conversational confetti’ when you are measuring a room down to the last 1/4 inch.
The Tyranny of ‘Try’
In my world of queue management, I try to implement a similar rigor, though it often feels like trying to hold water in a sieve. I have attempted to mandate that every action item must end with a name and a date. Not a department, not a ‘team,’ but a human being with a pulse and a calendar. The resistance to this is fascinating. People react to a specific assignment as if I’ve just asked them to sign a confession.
Frequency of Evasion Language (Sample)
I’ve counted as many as forty-four instances of ‘I’ll try to’ in a single project thread. ‘Try’ is the word we use when we’ve already decided that failure is a valid option.
The Productivity Spike of Naming Names
I remember a project where we had 154 open tickets, and 84 of them were categorized as ‘waiting for feedback.’ Feedback from whom? From the ‘stakeholders.’ It took me twenty-four hours of digging to realize that the ‘stakeholders’ were a group of executives who hadn’t even been invited to the original briefing.
We were all standing around a metaphorical hole in the ground, waiting for someone we didn’t know to tell us how to use a shovel we didn’t have. It was a masterpiece of organizational inertia.
I eventually had to delete the word ‘stakeholders’ from our internal lexicon and replace it with a list of actual names. The productivity spike that followed was almost violent in its speed. When people realized their name was the only thing standing between a ticket and its completion, they stopped ‘circling back’ and started actually working.
Ambiguity (Comfort)
Accountability (Exposure)
There is a psychological safety in the vague. If the action item is ‘explore options for the Q4 rollout,’ I can spend four weeks ‘exploring’ and never actually produce a map. But if the action item is ‘Kendall P. will provide a list of 4 vendors by Friday,’ I am suddenly exposed. Most people don’t fear work; they fear visibility.
The Craftsman’s Precision
I once spent $474 on a mechanical keyboard because I thought the tactile feedback would make me a better communicator. It was a delusion, of course. The coffee grounds I cleaned out of it this morning didn’t care about the price tag; they just wanted to jam the mechanism. Our corporate language is the coffee grounds in the machinery of progress.
We need to start treating our professional commitments with the same precision a craftsman treats a piece of oak or a slab of granite. We need to stop accepting ‘action items’ that don’t have a soul attached to them.
Simulating Rigor in the Void
The feeling of trying to mandate structure where none is accepted.
The next time someone tells you they will ‘get back to you on that,’ ask them exactly when. Ask them which version of ‘you’ they are getting back to, and what specific information they will be bringing with them. Do not let them turn the conversation back into confetti.
Holding the Silence for Clarity
Force the clarity. Because at the end of the day, a project isn’t a collection of ‘synergized deliverables.’ It’s a series of promises made and kept by individual people. If we lose the ability to name those people and those promises, we aren’t a team anymore; we’re just a group of twenty-four strangers nodding at each other in the dark, waiting for someone else to turn on the light.
Building on Four Solid Feet
Promise Made
Named commitment.
Individual Soul
Ownership established.
Promise Kept
Result delivered.
Stands on 4 Feet
Operational success.
Let’s stop sweeping up the confetti and start building something that actually stands on its own 4 feet.