Do Your Meetings Go Nowhere? (Me Too!) 😩
Do Your Meetings Go Nowhere? (Me Too!) 😩
Written by
Sterling Higa
4 min read
4 min read
4 min read
The year is 2025. You're in a meeting. The agenda is unclear. The participants are distracted. The decision-making process is opaque. It feels inefficient–not because anyone is lazy, but because the structure is wrong. Now consider this: politics is how we meet, decide, and act together. And the core architecture of politics–the meeting–was invented before electricity. Before the printing press. Before Jesus. Meetings, BCE 🏛️Ancient Greeks invented parliamentary procedure. Romans had agendas (the word is Latin). Robert's Rules? Written by an American Civil War veteran. Your meeting? Basically the same as the Greeks. But now, there’s a million times more information — and everyone’s distracted. Smartphones beam your location to satellites in orbit. We're about to invent artificial general intelligence. And your meeting is the same as 2,000 years ago. Everything’s Upgraded — Except How We Decide ⚖️Actually, your meeting is worse. Worse because there's 1,000,000x the information (see our last newsletter). Worse because there's 1,000x the complexity. And worse because everyone in the meeting is distracted. Meetings favor a small group of participants – people who knew each other well. Ancient Athens? 6,000 people out of 250,000 in politics. Bound by family, business, and geography. No social media. No video games. Just mixed wine. Plus, it's not clear that their meetings worked to achieve alignment and make decisions. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome suffered civil war. The English, too. And the Americans. Given how outdated our technology is, it's a wonder anything gets done at all. What To Do? 🧠We’re trying to govern a modern world with ancient tools. That’s not just inefficient — it’s dangerous. It's time to build something new. Cybernetics shows us how. Stafford Beer proposed that organizations need five systems to survive, adapt, and evolve: 🛠 System 1: Operations
🤝 System 2: Coordination
📊 System 3: Control
🔭 System 4: Intelligence
🧭 System 5: Policy
Legacy meetings can handle System 1, System 2, and System 3 goals. Everything breaks down around System 4 because it's hard for us to deal with information overload. At System 5, we struggle to find alignment and make decisions about what matters most. This is the basic dysfunction of government. The Polcom Way 🧭At Polcom, we believe better coordination isn't just possible–it's essential. Organizations (and organisms) survive by sensing their environment and responding. When communication clogs or coordination breaks, everything stalls. That's where we come in. |
The year is 2025. You're in a meeting. The agenda is unclear. The participants are distracted. The decision-making process is opaque. It feels inefficient–not because anyone is lazy, but because the structure is wrong. Now consider this: politics is how we meet, decide, and act together. And the core architecture of politics–the meeting–was invented before electricity. Before the printing press. Before Jesus. Meetings, BCE 🏛️Ancient Greeks invented parliamentary procedure. Romans had agendas (the word is Latin). Robert's Rules? Written by an American Civil War veteran. Your meeting? Basically the same as the Greeks. But now, there’s a million times more information — and everyone’s distracted. Smartphones beam your location to satellites in orbit. We're about to invent artificial general intelligence. And your meeting is the same as 2,000 years ago. Everything’s Upgraded — Except How We Decide ⚖️Actually, your meeting is worse. Worse because there's 1,000,000x the information (see our last newsletter). Worse because there's 1,000x the complexity. And worse because everyone in the meeting is distracted. Meetings favor a small group of participants – people who knew each other well. Ancient Athens? 6,000 people out of 250,000 in politics. Bound by family, business, and geography. No social media. No video games. Just mixed wine. Plus, it's not clear that their meetings worked to achieve alignment and make decisions. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome suffered civil war. The English, too. And the Americans. Given how outdated our technology is, it's a wonder anything gets done at all. What To Do? 🧠We’re trying to govern a modern world with ancient tools. That’s not just inefficient — it’s dangerous. It's time to build something new. Cybernetics shows us how. Stafford Beer proposed that organizations need five systems to survive, adapt, and evolve: 🛠 System 1: Operations
🤝 System 2: Coordination
📊 System 3: Control
🔭 System 4: Intelligence
🧭 System 5: Policy
Legacy meetings can handle System 1, System 2, and System 3 goals. Everything breaks down around System 4 because it's hard for us to deal with information overload. At System 5, we struggle to find alignment and make decisions about what matters most. This is the basic dysfunction of government. The Polcom Way 🧭At Polcom, we believe better coordination isn't just possible–it's essential. Organizations (and organisms) survive by sensing their environment and responding. When communication clogs or coordination breaks, everything stalls. That's where we come in. |
The year is 2025. You're in a meeting. The agenda is unclear. The participants are distracted. The decision-making process is opaque. It feels inefficient–not because anyone is lazy, but because the structure is wrong. Now consider this: politics is how we meet, decide, and act together. And the core architecture of politics–the meeting–was invented before electricity. Before the printing press. Before Jesus. Meetings, BCE 🏛️Ancient Greeks invented parliamentary procedure. Romans had agendas (the word is Latin). Robert's Rules? Written by an American Civil War veteran. Your meeting? Basically the same as the Greeks. But now, there’s a million times more information — and everyone’s distracted. Smartphones beam your location to satellites in orbit. We're about to invent artificial general intelligence. And your meeting is the same as 2,000 years ago. Everything’s Upgraded — Except How We Decide ⚖️Actually, your meeting is worse. Worse because there's 1,000,000x the information (see our last newsletter). Worse because there's 1,000x the complexity. And worse because everyone in the meeting is distracted. Meetings favor a small group of participants – people who knew each other well. Ancient Athens? 6,000 people out of 250,000 in politics. Bound by family, business, and geography. No social media. No video games. Just mixed wine. Plus, it's not clear that their meetings worked to achieve alignment and make decisions. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome suffered civil war. The English, too. And the Americans. Given how outdated our technology is, it's a wonder anything gets done at all. What To Do? 🧠We’re trying to govern a modern world with ancient tools. That’s not just inefficient — it’s dangerous. It's time to build something new. Cybernetics shows us how. Stafford Beer proposed that organizations need five systems to survive, adapt, and evolve: 🛠 System 1: Operations
🤝 System 2: Coordination
📊 System 3: Control
🔭 System 4: Intelligence
🧭 System 5: Policy
Legacy meetings can handle System 1, System 2, and System 3 goals. Everything breaks down around System 4 because it's hard for us to deal with information overload. At System 5, we struggle to find alignment and make decisions about what matters most. This is the basic dysfunction of government. The Polcom Way 🧭At Polcom, we believe better coordination isn't just possible–it's essential. Organizations (and organisms) survive by sensing their environment and responding. When communication clogs or coordination breaks, everything stalls. That's where we come in. |
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