The Monday meeting

It started at nine. It lasted two hours. They held it in the big room, the one with windows onto the inner courtyard. Eight people sat around a long table. Every Monday the same.

The manager began. He passed the word to Sonia, in sales. Sonia opened a green folder with the week's figures. She read. "We closed fourteen orders. Three below target." The others took notes. Then it was Toni's turn, operations. Toni brought a printed Excel. He read it out. Production: four hundred and thirty units. Average delivery time: nine days. Returns: four. Everyone took notes. Then Eva, from marketing, with the Instagram campaign, the new followers, the clicks. Then Mariví, from admin, with outstanding receivables. Then the service technician, with the open tickets.

When they finished — one hour and ten minutes, by careful count — the second part began. What they were going to do this week. But since each one had come with their own list for the week, and since nobody had been able to think about the others' data before the meeting — because each one brought their data in their own folder, their Excel, their printout — decisions were difficult.

—Toni, could we produce two hundred more this week?

—I don't know. Depends on last week's returns. How many were they?

—Four.

—Then no. If it's four, I have to dedicate people to reviewing the cause. There's no margin left.

—And next week?

—I'll look into it and let you know.

"I'll look into it and let you know" was a frequent sentence. So was "I'll send it to you by email later". And the manager's favourite, when the numbers didn't quite add up: "Let's look at that next week".

At eleven sharp they stood up. The room smelt of cold coffee. On the table there were sheets with handwritten notes, underlined figures, doodles. The manager gathered them and put them in a folder called "Mondays". The folder held two and a half years of Mondays.

What the meeting did and what it didn't

The meeting served a purpose, no doubt. It was the time when eight people sat together. They saw each other's faces. They talked. They joked. They had a coffee together. After the meeting everyone left with the feeling of having done something, of being up to date, of being coordinated.

The meeting did not serve the purpose it was officially held for. It didn't serve for deciding. Because to decide you needed the others' data, and the others' data arrived raw, read out loud, with no time to process it.

It served, really, to inform. To know how the rest were doing. It was an update meeting, not a decision meeting, even though everyone called it "the decision meeting".

The manager knew this. He didn't say it, but he knew. When a client asked him, over lunch, how he ran the company, he said they had weekly strategic follow-up meetings. It sounded good. In reality they were two hours of reading Excels out loud and promising to look into things for the next week.

The intern who asked something odd

An intern started in September. A young man from economics, from Murcia, who came in the afternoons. He had to attend the Monday meeting. The first time he said nothing. The second time, nothing. The third time, at the end, he raised his hand.

—Can I ask something?

The manager invited him to speak.

—All these numbers… are they anywhere where you can see them together?

Silence. Sonia looked at Toni. Toni looked at Eva. Eva looked at the manager.

—Together how?

—Yes, on a screen. So anyone can look at it on Monday at eight thirty and already have them.

—Each one has their own —Sonia said—. In their Excel.

—Right, but mine don't tell me much without yours.

The intern said it without any edge. He said it as if it were a practical question, not a criticism. But the question hung over the table longer than he had wanted.

The manager, at the end, said:

—Let's look at that next week.

He said it laughing, because for once he caught himself in the sentence. They all laughed. The intern too. But the manager, that afternoon, kept thinking about what the kid had said.

What the intern had seen

What the intern had seen was something simple. That the company had data. That the data was in Excels, in green folders, in printed reports, in CRMs, in marketing spreadsheets. But that the data lived each one in its own place, without seeing each other. And that the Monday meeting was a tired, expensive human attempt to bring them together: to make them, for two hours, exist in a single space — the heads of the eight people around the table.

The intern, who had read something about dashboards in class, sensed that the data could live together on a screen, all the time, not just two hours on Mondays. And that if the data lived together, the meeting could be something else. It could be, at last, a meeting to decide, not to inform. Because to inform, it would be enough to open the screen.

The manager, the next day, called an acquaintance. They had lunch. He asked if there were people who did this kind of thing. His friend said yes, and gave him a couple of numbers.

Four months later

The dashboard was on the big screen in the room. Each morning, at eight, it updated by itself. It had four zones. Sales: orders, amount, comparison with last month, funnel. Operations: production, lead times, returns, bottlenecks. Marketing: traffic, conversion, cost per customer. Admin: outstanding receivables, average days to collect.

On Mondays at eight thirty, before the meeting, each person came into the room, poured a coffee and looked at the screen. When they sat down at nine, they already knew how everyone else was doing. They didn't need to be read to. The meeting now started with a question from the manager:

—What are we doing this week?

The question — which used to arrive at ten thirty, after an hour and a half of Excels — now arrived at five past nine. The meeting lasted forty minutes. At nine forty-five, eight people stood up with a clear decision and time in the day to carry it out.

The intern, who had gone back to university, didn't see it. The manager sent him a message on a Saturday, shortly before Christmas: "The question you asked on day three has saved us, this year, an hour and a half a week per committee member. Twelve hours a week. Four hundred and eighty a year. When you finish your degree, come and see us."

The intern took three hours to reply. He wrote: "Thanks. I just asked what I didn't understand."

The manager read the message sitting on the sofa. He thought that was exactly it. That most things in a company change when someone asks what they don't understand. And that the problem, in his company and in many others, was that people had been there too long to not understand anything.