Don't COP To Static Loops

It's the latest COP. Didn't you know? Well, six of the G7 leaders haven't bothered to pitch up. Likewise the dictators of Russia and China, not to mention India's premier.

Still, 93 private jets apparently flew into Antalya. Nice Turkish beach break for all those corporate lobbyists and climate change 'activists' alike.

Perhaps one small yet potentially huge reason no-one of note turns up anymore, is that the wizards are exposing the prophets. Those using their own innovative, competitive, purposeful drive to fix any fossil-fuelled imbalance in their quiet, iterative, determined way. And not a placard in sight.

Yet turn up many, many certainly continue to do. As Viscount Ridley witheringly reports;

"COP meetings are an entirely self-sufficient enterprise in their own right, now largely cast adrift from any real-world issue.
The purpose of each meeting is to prepare for the next meeting. The process, you might say, is the product.
Bureaucrats can devote entire careers to writing obscure papers for such events.
...
The whole thing could be done on Zoom, of course, but that would spoil the fun.
The truth is that vested interests now keep the COP process afloat."

The process is the product. The meeting exists to prepare for the next meeting. Sound familiar?

Every solution seller has sat in that call. Failure mode of a stalled deal. Same faces, same slides, a “great session, let’s reconvene” at the end. Nothing decided, nothing owned, and a diary entry for the same conversation next fortnight. That’s a static loop, and it suffocates deals just as surely as it’s suffocating COP.

There are tactics that can help suture such wound. As well as try stave it off.

The meeting purpose explicitly defined as a question, that must be answered at the end, is a perennial favourite of mine (works especially well with video meets).

I've used some fairly brutal lines in my time. As cubrep it was because I was, ahem, green. Then I tried to be smoother. Before returning to the up-front as it was a sure-fire qualifier move.

Are we kicking this into the long grass here?
How far down the road is this can being kicked?
Am I alone in sensing the momentum is being sucked out right now?
What about the status quo is so precious?
This isn't going to happen, is it?

This makes you the quiet wizard the room sorely needs, exposing the dithering, deferring, obfuscating prophets for what they are.

You’ve got to be confident to go down this route. But whatever backs get up, nothing is ever irretrievable. The alternative is another loop, and you’ll be back in the same meeting a week or so on, still looking for a reason to be there.