Before recurring meetings, list five things that never get…
Before any recurring meeting or code review, spend 5 minutes writing down what topics never get discussed, what people never speak, and what failure modes are never mentioned—listing at least five absences.
When This Fires
- Before any recurring team meeting, standup, or retrospective
- Before code reviews, design reviews, or architecture discussions
- Before board meetings, executive reviews, or stakeholder updates
- Any time you've attended a meeting type 5+ times and it "always goes the same way"
Common Failure Mode
Listing obvious absences and stopping: "We never talk about the budget" or "We never discuss long-term strategy." These are surface-level absences everyone already knows about. The valuable absences are the ones that surprise you — the person who used to push back but stopped, the failure mode that's too uncomfortable to name, the topic that gets raised and then quietly dropped every time. Push past the obvious five to find the genuinely hidden.
The Protocol
5 minutes before a recurring meeting, write answers to three questions: (1) What topics never get discussed in this meeting? (2) Who never speaks, or who stopped speaking? (3) What failure modes or risks are never mentioned? List at least five absences total. During the meeting, notice which absences you can verify. After the meeting, update your list. The absences that persist across multiple sessions are the ones worth raising — carefully and deliberately.