Meeting After Meeting, and the Problem Still Isn't Solved? Here's What to Check First

Meeting after meeting, and the cause still isn’t clear. Different people tell it differently. There’s no shortage of documents, but you still can’t see what’s actually happening. Sound familiar?

The bigger the job, the more processed the information is by the time it reaches you.

An email someone summarized. A deck tidied up for a meeting. A table with only the numbers pulled out.

All of it is necessary. But if that’s all you look at, you drift, little by little, further from what actually happened.

So I think it matters most to go back to the primary source exactly when things stop making sense.

Ask the person who actually experienced it. Look at the original data. See the situation with your own eyes, if you can.

That’s when you sometimes find the small discrepancy that got smoothed away in the summary.

“That was a little different from usual.” “This only happens under this one condition.” “That’s actually not what the original explanation said.”

Details like these are the first to fall out during summarizing.

Of course, you can’t go see everything yourself.

But for the decisions that matter, I want to get close to where the information started at least once.

Don’t assume you understand the problem just because you understood it inside the meeting room.

Next time another round of meetings isn’t going anywhere, I want to ask, before scheduling one more, whether I can go talk to the person actually involved instead. Making a habit of going to the primary source is, I think, a genuinely strong way of working — regardless of industry or role.

And once you’ve gotten that close, the last thing worth checking is whether the other person’s problem has actually gone away.