The Quorum Revolution

“Thirty Years of Meetings (and My Escape to The Quorum)”

If you’ve ever stared at the clock in a meeting and felt your soul quietly slide out of your body, I understand. I did that professionally for three decades.

Thirty years in and out of companies, industries, continents — all of them united by one peculiar ritual: the meeting. A place where time went to die, along with ideas, enthusiasm, and occasionally, hope.

You’d think after so long, I’d have developed immunity. But no — the symptoms got worse.

There were the Monday morning status updates, where people spoke in acronyms no one understood. The Wednesday strategy sessions, where we’d debate a PowerPoint slide for forty minutes and emerge no wiser. The Friday wrap-ups, which always ended with, “Let’s take this offline,” the corporate-speak for “Let’s bury this quietly.”

If meetings were a country, I’d qualify for citizenship by now. I’ve done time in every species of it: the “quick sync” that lasts an hour, the “alignment call” where no one aligns, the “open brainstorm” where everyone closes their minds, and the “town hall” where a single PowerPoint slide somehow lasts forty-five minutes.

Some meetings were physical, some virtual, some in the strange limbo of “hybrid,” where half the faces were real and half pixelated into mild despair. But they all shared one unmistakable trait: the gradual erosion of will to live.

I began to recognise the different species of meeting participants too.
The Dominant Extrovert, who spoke like they were being charged by the word.
The Silent Observer, whose only contribution was blinking thoughtfully.
The Laptop Warrior, pretending to take notes while clearly shopping for a new bicycle. And of course, the one who arrives late, unprepared, and proceeds to ask all the questions that were answered in the pre-read they didn’t read.

Meanwhile, I sat there wondering: Is this it? Is this what work is supposed to be — a long chain of conversations that lead nowhere, linked together by biscuits?

If Dante were alive today, he’d have added a tenth circle of Hell: Recurring Meetings Without Purpose.

The Breaking Point

It was a Thursday — that grim twilight of the week when everyone’s too tired to hope.
We’d been in the conference room for two hours debating whether a “launch” should be called a “go-live.” No one had made a decision. Someone suggested another meeting to decide how to decide.

At that exact moment, I realised: we weren’t broken people in a functioning system.
We were functioning people trapped in a broken ritual.

I left the room that day feeling like I’d survived a near-death experience — not dramatic, just bureaucratic. I swore to myself I’d never sit through another meeting that could have been prevented by common sense and a couple of decent pages of preparation.

So I started experimenting.

The Quiet Revolution

I began to notice the small absurdities: how most meetings didn’t have a clear title, for instance. You’d see something called “Update” on the calendar and think, update on what? The weather? My will to live?

So, before each meeting, I’d try to write what the meeting was actually for. I’d write a Title—a real one. Not “Status” but “Decide Launch Date for Product X.” It felt scandalously specific. That one sentence was harder than expected. Half the time, I couldn’t — which was my cue to cancel it.

Then I changed when I called meetings. Mondays were spent resuscitating post-weekend motivation. Fridays, pretending to care until the clock hit beer o’clock. Which left Wednesdays, the only day when humans are remotely useful.

And the objectives. Oh, the glorious lack of them. We’d spend two hours discussing “ideas” without once agreeing on what success even looked like. It was like going on a road trip without deciding the destination—and somehow being surprised when you end up lost at a petrol station arguing about sandwiches.

So, I’d set a clear set of Objectives—what must be true by the end for this meeting to have been worth existing. It should be no more than 3. I’d have a separate meeting if I needed to accomplish more.

And I’d plan an Agenda like a route map: 5 minutes for risks, 10 for options, 10 for debate, 5 for decisions.

Suddenly, meetings started to move—like a well-oiled bicycle instead of a square-wheeled cart.

I began choosing attendees carefully. I stopped inviting spectators and started inviting contributors. I trimmed the Attendee list down. Eight was my upper limit. Enough to spark ideas, not chaos. A funny thing happened — the discussions suddenly made sense. The others—those who merely needed to be “kept informed”—received a summary afterwards. No one complained. They were too relieved.

I started writing Context in my preparation notes and spelling them out to the participants. You’d be amazed how quickly confusion vanishes when people understand the background saga of why they’re there. What seemed bizarre often turned out to be rather reasonable, given the context.

Then I realised that half of every meeting was spent catching people up because no one read the Pre- Read—mainly because there was no pre-read. So I started requesting them to read up before the meeting.

And when people hadn’t read the materials? I simply cancelled the meeting. Radical, yes, but after a few repetitions, a miraculous thing happened: people actually started preparing.

The rule was simple: No agenda, no prep, no meeting.

During the meeting itself, I took short, sharp Meeting Notes — not the kind that record every wandering thought, but the kind that make future-me grateful.

Within a month, my colleagues thought I’d either joined a cult or had a midlife breakthrough. Meetings began to feel… pleasant. People arrived prepared. Conversations converged instead of meandering. Even the habitual ratholers—the ones who start every tangent with, “This might be slightly off-topic, but…”—found their natural home in a section I called Deferred Items.

It became a kind of holding pen for epiphanies—so people could be creative without derailing the agenda.

And when it was time to finish, I stopped letting things “float.” Every decision had a name next to it. So did every action. Decisions were the what, Actions Required the how. If both didn’t exist by the end, it wasn’t a meeting. It was group therapy.

Then, after everyone left, I’d write one simple question at the bottom of the page:

“Was this Meeting Worth It?”

Sometimes the answer was “not quite.” Sometimes, “God no.” But over time, those scribbles became a compass. Each reflection made the next meeting sharper, shorter, saner.

That single reflection became the most transformative step of all. Because improvement, it turned out, wasn’t a one-time act—it was a habit.

I began noticing something odd.
People started smiling when meetings ended.
Some even said, “That was actually productive.”
One colleague told me, “I don’t dread your meetings anymore.”

Work became calmer. My inbox shrank.
I nearly cried.

The Birth of The Quorum

Somewhere along this path of scribbles and sanity, The Quorum was born.
A notebook that doesn’t just record meetings — it trains them.
It became my quiet rebellion against chaos, my manual for civilization at the office.

It’s a state of work where people gather and something real happens. Where decisions stick. Where ideas grow legs. Where time is not wasted, but invested.

The first time I experienced it, I didn’t even notice at first. The meeting had started, decisions were made, actions were assigned, laughter erupted, and then — it ended on time. People left lighter than they arrived. That’s when I realised: I’d escaped the old world of meetings and stepped into something altogether rarer.

The Afterlife of Better Meetings

Life after The Quorum is… unnervingly peaceful.
I walk into meetings calm, because I know exactly what needs to happen.
People come prepared.
The loud ones listen; the quiet ones speak.
We make decisions without three rounds of existential debate.
No one says, “Let’s take this offline.”
And when we finish, we actually finish.

The funny thing? Work itself feels better.
Projects move faster. Relationships deepen.
There’s more trust, less tension.
And when someone suggests a meeting now, I no longer feel a twinge of dread.
Instead, I think — right, let’s make this count.

I’ve spent thirty years in rooms where nothing changed.
Now, in every meeting, something does.
And once you’ve been there, you’ll never settle for less again.