I Sat Through Manager OTG's All-Hands About "Q3 Vision." Here's What I Learned.

The meeting was titled Q3 Vision: A Working Session. It was not a working session. There was no work. The session ran 53 minutes, started seven minutes late, and ended with Manager OTG saying "okay so just to ladder this up" and then talking for another four minutes.

I took notes. Here is what I learned.

The deck

The deck was 47 slides. The deck had been updated at 11:47 PM the night before. I know this because the file name was "Q3 Vision v4 (FINAL final).pptx" and the modified timestamp was visible in the share preview Manager OTG clicked through to find the file. He clicked through it for ninety seconds. We watched him scroll past v3. We watched him scroll past v2. v2 was titled "Q3 Vision (DO NOT USE)." We saw it. He did not address it.

Of the 47 slides, four were used. The other 43 were appendix. Manager OTG mentioned the appendix three times. He said, "I won't go into the appendix here, but it's there for reference." Nobody looked at the appendix. The appendix exists for the same reason a peacock has a tail.

The slide titled "Where We've Been"

This was Slide 3. It contained a horizontal arrow. The arrow had four bumps on it. Each bump had a label: Q1 Foundation, Q2 Momentum, Q3 Vision, Q4 Execution. We are in May. Q2 has not concluded. The momentum has not, by any internal metric I am aware of, occurred. Manager OTG spoke about the momentum in the past tense.

Marcus, who joined us from Crestmark, asked what specifically constituted Q2 momentum. Manager OTG said, "Great question, Marcus — let's take that offline." Marcus has been working here long enough now to know what this means. He nodded. He muted himself. He opened LinkedIn.

The polling tool

At minute 19, Manager OTG launched a poll. The poll asked: "What's the ONE word you'd use to describe our Q3 opportunity?"

The poll was launched in a tool called Mentimeter. Nobody on the team had used Mentimeter. Manager OTG had set it up that morning. There was a QR code on screen. We were on Zoom. The QR code was, from a Zoom window, the size of a postage stamp. It did not scan.

Greg typed "alignment" in the chat. Three people thumbs-upped Greg's chat message. Manager OTG could not see the chat because he was sharing his screen. He waited 87 seconds for poll responses. None arrived. He said, "I think people are still thinking." We were not. We had answered. We had answered in the chat. The chat was a phantom limb.

Manager OTG eventually shared his own response, which was "courage." He had typed it on his phone. He said, "Honestly, I was inspired by something I was reading this weekend." A second slide appeared. It was a Marcus Aurelius quote, attributed to Marcus Aurelius. The font was Calibri. The quote was about death.

The initiative name

At minute 31, the initiative name was revealed. Initiative Compass. The previous name had been Initiative Orange. The name before that had been Initiative Blue. The name before that had been Project Northstar.

The new name was selected, Manager OTG explained, because "compass" implied direction without prescribing a destination. He paused after this sentence as if he had said something. Priya, who runs design and has been at this company for six years, did not look up from her notebook. She was sketching what appeared to be a compass with a question mark where the needle should be.

The deliverable, Manager OTG clarified, was "to be defined." The owner of the deliverable was "TBD." The timeline was "this half, ideally Q3." When asked who was leading Initiative Compass, Manager OTG said, "Honestly, I think we all are."

The breakout rooms

There were three breakout rooms. The breakouts ran for nine minutes. The prompt was "What does success look like for you in Q3?"

I was in the room with Greg, Sarah, and a Senior PM I had never met. Sarah did not turn her camera on. Sarah never turns her camera on. Greg said, "I think the prompt is supposed to be more of a journaling thing than a discussion thing." We sat in silence for four minutes. The Senior PM, whose name I learned in the bottom corner of his tile, said, "Yeah I'm just gonna mute and finish a thing real quick." Greg muted. Sarah was already muted. I closed my laptop screen partway. The breakout timer ticked down. At 0:30, Sarah's camera went on for the first time in fourteen months. She said "okay see ya" and the camera went off.

We returned to the main room. Manager OTG said, "Wow, so much great energy in the breakouts." There had been no energy. The breakouts had been a vigil.

The action items

Manager OTG said, before closing the meeting, that he wanted to "leave us with three clear action items." There were five action items. None were clear. They were:

1. Each of us would "spend some time" thinking about what Initiative Compass meant to us personally.
2. Greg would "drive" the next deck.
3. Priya would "loop in" the design team, though she is the design team.
4. Marcus would "ladder up" with his counterpart at the partner org. Marcus has no counterpart at the partner org. The partner org is also Crestmark.
5. We would all "double-click on the framing" before our next sync.

Manager OTG said, "I'm sending good vibes." Then he said, "I have to hop into another meeting." Then he stayed on the call for six more minutes, with one other person, who was Greg.

What I learned

I learned that Greg has, in his Zoom background, a stack of three books I have never seen him read. I learned that Manager OTG owns a copy of Meditations placed on his shelf at a thirty-degree angle. I learned that the Mentimeter poll, when no one answers, simply displays "Waiting for responses…" indefinitely, like a sad screen-saver. I learned that the meeting after this one was titled Q3 Vision: Working Session (Continued).

Marcus declined the next one. Marcus said he had a conflict. Marcus does not have a conflict. Marcus has, this afternoon, applied for a job at Crestmark, which is the company he is theoretically laddering up with, and which would, if Marcus succeeded in getting the job, finally explain to him what Q3 Vision had been about.

The all-hands ended at 12:53 PM. The Mentimeter screen was still waiting for responses. Manager OTG hit "end for all" without dismissing it. The "courage" remained on screen for fourteen seconds before the call closed. I screenshotted it. I have not yet figured out what to do with the screenshot.