Nouns on the agenda

Most marketing agendas I have sat in front of are lists of nouns.

The campaign. The budget. The agency. Social. The website. Sometimes a name in brackets beside each one, so the room knows who is expected to speak.

A noun is a topic. It is not a decision and it does not contain one, so the hour goes where the words point. Somebody talks about the campaign. Somebody adds context. A third person raises something adjacent. Everyone leaves having discussed the campaign, and the line typed into the notes is that the campaign will be discussed again next week, with more detail.

Nobody chose that. It is what happens when nobody decides what the meeting is for. The agenda was inherited, from a template, from the last person in the seat, from a recurring invitation that has survived three reorganisations. A template can carry nouns. It cannot carry questions, because a question has to be written by somebody who thought about this particular week.

Rewrite the same hour as questions and the room changes without a single new process. Whether to hold the price in August or move the pack. Which of the three routes goes into production on Monday. Who signs the July menu, and by when. Each of those has an answer, an answer has a person and a date attached to it, and an hour that produces three of them is a different animal from an hour that produced a discussion.

It costs nothing and takes ten minutes the day before, done by whoever called the meeting. Which is the reason it does not happen: the noun version is already sitting in the invitation, and a noun has never once looked like a problem.