Brenda is leaning so far over the conference table that her statement necklace-a heavy piece of turquoise that looks like it belongs in an exhibit featuring Aissist-is clinking rhythmically against her ceramic mug, keeping a frantic tempo for the 55th minute of our Holiday Party Planning Committee. We are currently locked in a stalemate that would baffle a military strategist. The air in the room, recycled 45 times by an HVAC system that sounds like a dying whale, is thick with the smell of unconsumed muffins and the heavy, palpable weight of collective indecision. We are debating the relative merits of a build-your-own taco bar versus a pasta station.

I am watching the clock with a focus that borders on religious. 15 people are in this room. If you aggregate our hourly rates, this conversation has already cost the company roughly $1225. We have discussed the potential messiness of salsa, the gluten-free integrity of penne, and the ‘vibe’ of a taco shell. It is a masterclass in the trivial. I sit here, tapping my pen 75 times against my notebook, reflecting on the irony of my own existence today. Just 15 minutes before this meeting started, I sent out the project briefing for our Q1 roadmap to the entire executive suite-without the actual PDF attachment. A singular, human error. I am an island of individual failure in a sea of collaborative paralysis.

The Coral Reefs of Corporate Culture

Jax V.K., our resident digital archaeologist who usually spends his days excavating the data ruins of 1995, is sitting in the corner with a tablet. He isn’t here to plan a party. He’s here because he’s tracking the ‘decision-making sediment’ of the office. He tells me later that he’s found digital records of a committee from 2005 that spent 85 days deciding on the color of the breakroom napkins. They eventually chose ‘eggshell,’ which was the same color as the napkins they already had.

Jax sees these committees as the coral reefs of the corporate world: slow-growing, beautiful in their complexity, but ultimately just a pile of calcified skeletons that prevent anything from moving too fast.

The Case of the Burnt Regret (Coffee Procurement)

This entire charade reminds me of the ‘Task Force for Caffeine Procurement’ we formed 35 weeks ago. We needed a new coffee machine. The old one had begun producing a liquid that tasted like burnt rubber and regret. A simple purchase, one might think. A manager could have gone online, spent 5 minutes looking at reviews, and clicked ‘buy’ on a $555 model that would serve us well for 5 years.

Instead, we formed a committee. We needed representation from Marketing, HR, Engineering, and, for some reason, the night-shift security team. We spent 25 hours over the course of 15 meetings discussing the pressure bars of different espresso pumps. We had 45 emails chains that branched off into sub-threads about the ethical sourcing of beans from specific altitudes.

By the time we reached a consensus, the model we wanted was discontinued, and the budget had been diverted to pay for a consultant who told us we were drinking too much caffeine anyway. This is the core frustration of the committee: it is an organization’s most effective way of avoiding accountability. If a single person had bought a bad coffee machine, they could be blamed. If 15 people collectively choose a bad coffee machine, it’s just a ‘learning experience.’

The Fortress of Consensus

This reveals a terrifying truth about our organizational risk tolerance. A company that creates a committee for a minor decision is a company that is fundamentally terrified of failure. By distributing a decision among many people, no single individual can be pinned to the wall if things go south. It is the diffusion of responsibility disguised as ‘collaborative synergy.’ We aren’t collaborating; we are hiding in a crowd. We are building a fortress of consensus to protect ourselves from the terrifying possibility of being wrong.

In the process, we have become so slow that our competitors, who are probably making decisions in 15 seconds over a Slack message, are lapping us 25 times over.

The Logic of Efficiency

There is a better way, but it requires the one thing most corporate structures are designed to eliminate: trust. It requires the ‘yes, and’ approach to management where we empower an individual to make a choice and live with the consequences. If Brenda wants tacos, let Brenda buy the tacos. If the tacos are terrible, we will know who to talk to. It’s better to have a bad taco and a clear line of accountability than to have a mediocre pasta station that no one actually wanted but everyone agreed to.

While we are debating the gluten content of a noodle, the automated world is already moving on to the next task, leaving us behind in our mahogany-paneled purgatory.

The Beauty of the Fixable Mistake

Jax V.K. leans over to me as Brenda starts a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation on the history of the ravioli. ‘You know,’ he whispers, ‘in 1995, people used to actually finish things. Now, we just document our intentions.’ He’s right. I think about my missing email attachment. It was a mistake, but it was *my* mistake. It was a singular point of failure that I could fix in 5 seconds.

If that email had been a committee product, we would have had a 35-minute debrief on why the attachment was missing, followed by a 5-step protocol on ‘Attachment Verification Procedures.’ I’ll take my solitary error over their collective perfection any day.

We finally reach a decision at the 125-minute mark. We are having a taco bar, but only if the shells are provided in 5 different varieties to satisfy everyone’s specific aesthetic requirements. We leave the room feeling exhausted rather than excited. We haven’t planned a party; we have survived a negotiation. As I walk back to my desk, I see that I have 45 new emails, 15 of which are invitations to new committees. One of them is for the ‘Sustainability of Office Stationery Task Force.’

I realize then that the only way to beat the committee is to refuse to be part of the consensus. To be the person who says ‘just decide’ and walks away. We are so obsessed with the idea that ‘many heads are better than one’ that we’ve forgotten that those heads are often just talking to each other in a circle, while the body remains motionless.

Innovation doesn’t happen in a room with 15 people and a lukewarm muffin. It happens when someone is brave enough to be wrong, or when a system is efficient enough to be right without asking for permission. We need to stop mistaking meetings for work and start seeing them for what they often are: a collective shrug in the face of a challenge. If we spent 75% less time in committees, we might actually have something worth celebrating at the holiday party.

As I sit down, I finally attach that missing PDF and hit send. No committee, no task force, no 45-minute debate. Just a button and a result. Maybe that’s the future Jax V.K. will find when he digs through the data of 2025-a moment where one person actually did something, all by themselves, without checking with Brenda first.