Tuesday morning, third video call before eleven, and the client lead opened with the sentence I have now heard four hundred times. I sent the deck yesterday, so I'll assume everyone's had a chance to look.
Nine faces nodded. Two of them were visibly scrolling. One had the file open in a tab she found four seconds earlier, which I know because she said the file name out loud while hunting for it.
Nobody had read it. Everybody said they had. And because everybody said they had, we spent the next fifty minutes agreeing with a document half the room was reading in real time, one slide behind me.
Which is exactly the problem.
The pre-read arrived as a kindness. Sixteen months of back-to-back calls made everyone allergic to being walked through slides, so we started sending the thinking ahead and treating the meeting as the conversation. Good instinct. Terrible execution, because we changed the artifact and never changed the meeting.
A pre-read nobody has read does not save you time. It converts an open disagreement into a silent one, and silent disagreements always come due later, usually in week six, usually by email.
Here's the part that gets lost. The pre-read does not merely fail to inform people. It actively suppresses the objection, because admitting you have a question means admitting you skipped the homework. So the CMO who does not believe the positioning says nothing. The product lead who thinks the segment is wrong says nothing. Everyone banks their doubt and spends it privately, later, on a thread you are not on.
Three things have worked on the projects I am running this summer. One, stop calling it a pre-read and start calling it the record, sent after, not skimmed before. Two, open the meeting by reading the single most contested slide out loud, together. It takes ninety seconds and it gives everyone permission to be seeing it for the first time. Three, ask for the objection by name. Not any questions, which buys you silence, but who here does not buy this, which buys you the actual meeting.
Everyone banks their doubt and spends it privately, later, on a thread you are not on.
The strategy work is not the deck. It is the argument the deck is supposed to start. If you have built a process where that argument never happens out loud, you have not run a strategy process. You have run a very polite scheduling exercise, and you will pay for it in the summer when the work goes sideways and everyone remembers they always had concerns.
Barnaby reads everything I leave on the table. Then he sits on it. Truffles has never once pretended.