Three days after a call about the year plan, it came up in another meeting as settled. The plan had changed. Nobody had told me, and nobody in that meeting realised I did not know.
After that meeting I got on the bike to clear my head.
Black Forza, as always. Bangkok at 3pm, a lot of traffic but not rush hour yet, and sunny. I took Sukhumvit rather than the Bang Na-Trat road. The only plan was a coffee at the other end, at Cafe on Saphan on the Chalomkhawithi Bridge between Bang Saen and Ang Sila.
For the first stretch I kept going back over the call.
The call
Early in the year we had met in person for the budget meeting, all of us, and agreed the year plan.
A couple of months later came a call. Three of them were in a room. I was on a screen on the wall.
The CEO, the chief marketing officer, the chief sales officer, and me, from a desk in Bangkok, with the afternoon light coming in behind my monitor and a call that started at an hour that was reasonable for them.
The plan came up. Whether it still held, whether something should move. My position was simple: we continue as planned. I hardly argued it. There did not seem to be much to argue. We had a plan, we had agreed it, and nothing on that call sounded like a reason to change it.
By the end there was something that felt very much like agreement. I hung up and got on with my week.
The U-turn in Chonburi
In Chonburi I took the U-turn to get onto the bridge instead of following Sukhumvit.
When I went back over the call, my question was no longer what they had decided. It was how it had been decided without me.
I was not outvoted. I was out-houred.
It is not sinister.
After the call, the three of them kept talking. The corridor, a coffee, then dinner. By the end of the evening the new plan had been said and reheard and said again, at a table with nobody saying "as planned".
They told me afterwards. They had discussed it over dinner and had not realised that I, the remote one, was not part of it. They felt bad about it too.
My position ended the second I hung up.
Theirs kept going for hours.
Sometimes the best argument wins. More often, the one that wins is the one still being made when the decision forms. That is not a moral failing in anybody.
I executed the decision, because executing decisions you disagree with is the job.
I do not think anybody in that room set out to skip a meeting. The conversation kept going, and at some point it had become the decision.
We had a rule for exactly this. Budget meetings and the like, we meet in person. I left that call thinking the topic was settled. It was not. It needed more time, and we let the rule slip: one call with all of us, and then three of them went to dinner.
So the rule was right, and flying in for that kind of meeting is still the right choice. The challenge is identifying that meeting. That call was in the calendar as a normal call, at a normal hour, with a normal agenda, and by the time it turned into a change to the year plan, I had already treated it as a Tuesday.
The meetings that matter almost never announce themselves. I do not have a clean way to tell them apart in advance, and I still get this wrong.
Cafe on Saphan
I ordered a hot latte, sat down and looked over the water for a while.
It is not only that one meeting where we should have been together in the same room. It is every meeting, in a call or in a room, where the people who belong to the topic are not all in it.
The dinner makes this easy to see. It does not cause it.
A company with no office at all does the same thing. Two people finish a call about something else, stay on, and the topic comes up. By the time they hang up it is settled between the two of them, and the person who owns the other half of it hears about it later. Nobody meant to leave anyone out. It is so human.
I could put this on the CEO. But a lesson addressed to someone else is not a lesson. It is a complaint.
It is not only the CEO's job anyway. Most people at that level own topics, and owning a topic includes making sure the people who belong to it are in the conversation when it moves.
That includes me. I let a few of my own calls replay in my head, and my reaction was: shit, I do the same. I call the person I am closer with. I stay on a bit longer after a meeting and settle a quick topic. My own small versions of the dinner.
Today I pay more attention to exactly that.