The committee meets on schedule. Attendance is recorded, slides are
circulated in advance, minutes go out the same afternoon. Twelve
sittings later, the direction of the programme is where it was in
January.
Nothing failed. Every individual meeting did what it was set up to do,
which was to inform.
An agenda made of status items produces a briefing. People report
through, the committee takes note, and the item returns next time in
an updated version. This can run for a year without anyone noticing
that no decision has been taken, because the thing that would be
missing — a decision — was never on the agenda in the first place.
Two mechanisms keep it stable.
The first is attention. Where no question is addressed to a named
function, listening is optional. Nobody in the room is due to say
anything, so people follow with half an ear. This gets described as
discipline, and it is not: a meeting that asks nothing of you has no
claim on you. Attention follows accountability, and the agenda handed
out none.
The second is absence, and it is the one worth studying.
When a decision is finally scheduled, the person who does not want it
has no time that day. Sometimes there is a genuine conflict. Often the
conflict is the instrument. Either way the effect is identical: the
item cannot be resolved without them, so it moves to the next sitting.
In the minutes this reads as a scheduling matter.
What makes it work is not the absence. It is the missing rule.
• no quorum that defines when the committee can decide anyway
• no default that takes effect if the decision is not taken
• no deadline after which deferral itself has a consequence
Without those, staying away costs nothing and delivers exactly what
the absent party wanted. It is the cheapest and most reliable veto in
any organisation, and it never has to be argued for. Anyone who has
sat through the same agenda item four times has watched it work.
The correction is not moral. Attendance rules and appeals to
commitment address behaviour that is already rational. The structural
question is narrower: what happens in this committee if the decision
is not taken?
Where the answer is nothing, you do not have a steering committee. You
have a reporting forum with senior participants, and the actual
steering is happening somewhere else, by other means, without minutes.
So the question for your next sitting is not whether everyone will
attend. It is what your committee is entitled to decide when they do
not.
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C / Helping finance and programme leaders build
steering logic that works.