The fluorescent hum was a dull throb, a steady, low-frequency buzz that felt less like productivity and more like an impending headache. I remember it acutely because it always accompanied these particular meetings. My left shoe, the one with the slightly worn sole, tapped a restless rhythm against the scuffed floor tile. Beside me, Sarah doodled intricate patterns on her notepad, a silent protest. Across the table, a newly hired marketing assistant, bless her hopeful spirit, held a freshly sharpened pencil aloft, ready for ideas to magically descend.
“Okay, team, no bad ideas!” the facilitator chirped, her voice a little too bright for the stale morning air. She gestured grandly at the pristine whiteboard, its surface an intimidating expanse of possibility. Thirty-one seconds later, I watched our manager, Mark, shoot down the marketing assistant’s suggestion of a customer loyalty program with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “Too much overhead, Carol. We tried that in 2011. What else?” The air, already thick with unspoken tension, solidified into a palpable discomfort. The pencil clattered gently onto Carol’s pad. The silence that followed wasn’t pregnant with genius; it was just… empty.
The Ritual of Inaction
This isn’t an isolated incident, is it? We’ve all been there. Trapped in a conference room, gazing at a heap of unused sticky notes, forced to perform collaboration under the watchful eye of someone who already has their preferred solution firmly cemented. It’s a ritual, a performance
