Shorter How?

The story: They agreed to shorten meetings. He crammed five topics into thirty minutes — efficiency keeps it short, he said. She pushed back — focus keeps it short. They had agreed on the symptom to fix but not on the diagnosis. He thought meetings were too long because they moved too slowly. She thought they were too long because they covered too much.

What it means for organisations: Process improvements agreed without a shared diagnosis almost always fail. When a team agrees that something needs to change — meetings, reporting, decision-making — but each person has a different theory of why it's broken, they will each implement a different fix. The agreement produces parallel reforms that sometimes contradict each other.