We Agreed. We Just Didn’t Mean the Same Thing.

“Are we all agreed, then,” says the CEO, “that we need to simplify the approval process?”

Around the table, everyone nods. They have spent almost an hour on the delays, the customer complaints and the time the team loses chasing signatures.

“Good. Let’s move ahead with that.”

The meeting ends five minutes early.

Back at her desk, the commercial director writes to her team: we are going to have more autonomy to approve discounts. The head of Finance asks for a proposal to centralize approvals with a single person. The technology director opens a request to automate the current workflow.

None of them believes they are taking a different direction from the one agreed.

Two weeks later, when they meet again, each arrives with progress. The first argument starts when they try to put it together.

“But that’s not what we agreed.”

All three say it.

I have been in that meeting more times than I can count, sometimes chairing it, sometimes leaving it convinced I knew what we had agreed. What strikes me is not that people disagree. Organizations are full of disagreement, and most of it is useful. What strikes me is how long a disagreement can live inside a word that everyone accepts.

“Simplify” meant speed to the commercial director, control to Finance and efficiency to Technology. Each reading was reasonable. Each understood the instruction in a way that made sense within their own responsibilities. They filled the same word with different content, and the meeting gave them no reason to check.

The same thing happens with numbers, and there it is harder to see, because a number looks like the end of a discussion rather than the start of one.

Imagine a company that reports 96 per cent of deliveries on time. Operations compares the dispatch date with the planned dispatch date. Sales compares the actual arrival date with the customer’s original requested date. The customer asks whether the goods arrived when they needed them. Each figure may be calculated correctly. They are answering different questions. Only one of them is in the board pack, and it is not the one the customers are complaining about.

When this is finally noticed, the usual response is a definition. A working group agrees what “on time” means, writes it down, has it signed off and publishes it. For a while, the numbers line up.

Then a process changes. A new warehouse opens, a carrier is replaced, an exception becomes routine. Nobody updates the definition, because nobody was asked to look after it. The document is still there, still signed. It simply describes an organization that no longer exists.

Meeting minutes have the same weakness. They record the word that was agreed. They rarely record what each person understood by it, because at the time nobody thought the question was necessary.

This matters more now than it did a few years ago.

When organizations bring artificial intelligence into their decisions, they bring their words with them. An AI assistant asked about delivery performance may retrieve the official figure and report it as evidence that deliveries are going well. It will do so with confidence, in good prose, within seconds. The figure will be correct. The answer will also inherit, at scale and without hesitation, the ambiguity the organization never resolved.

In an earlier piece I wrote that a correct answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer, only more convincing. A word that means three things is one of the most common ways an organization asks the wrong question without noticing.

What helps, then?

Not, I think, definitions alone. Definitions are useful, but they decay, and they give a false sense that the matter is settled.

What helps is smaller and harder: making the difference visible before a decision is taken, not after. Asking, at the moment of agreement, what each person will actually do differently on Monday morning. In the meeting above, that question could have exposed the three different plans before anyone started implementing them.

It also helps when meaning has someone who looks after it. Not a committee that defines a term once, but a person who notices when a process changes and asks whether the word still means what everyone thinks it means.

And it helps when the person who closes the meeting sees that as part of the job. The most senior person in the room usually asks whether we agree. It is a reasonable question. It is just not the most useful one.

The next time a meeting ends five minutes early, it may be worth spending them on one more question: what, exactly, is each of us going to do next?