Present an article. To a committee.

That was the request.

In another lifetime, while working in employee communications for an airline, I wrote an article introducing a new employee benefit program. A manager asked me to present it to a committee for approval.

So there I was in a boardroom with eight colleagues, my article projected onto the wall.

The first comment came quickly. Then another. Then someone disagreed with that suggestion.

Before long, we were discussing alternative adjectives and verbs. One proposed change created the need for another. Then another.

At one point, the room split into two separate debates about different parts of the article.

Eventually, I began explaining the reasoning behind the original draft, point by point. Slowly, we worked our way through it.

Almost 90 minutes later, the committee reached a decision.

We would publish essentially the article I had walked in with, minus a few minor changes.

I walked back to my office mentally drained, doing some rough math on eight corporate salaries and the cost of that meeting.

That was an expensive way to end up almost exactly where we started.

The interesting part is that nobody had done anything wrong.

They were great people, and everyone had been invited to contribute, so everyone contributed.

And input matters. Buy-in matters. Different perspectives can absolutely make the work better.

But there’s a big difference between useful feedback and a room full of opinions. At some point, we stopped focusing on what the article needed to accomplish and started debating personal preferences.

I thought about that meeting recently after finishing website content projects for a law firm and a dental organization.

Both were straightforward. They provided the information I needed, reviewed the work, suggested a few changes and we wrapped things up.

There was still discussion, feedback and revision, but the process stayed focused and every change had a reason to exist.

That, to me, is the better measure of an approval process:

Is it improving the outcome, or simply increasing the effort required to reach one?

Because sometimes the committee does reach a unanimous decision.

It just takes 90 minutes to agree with where you started.

By Rick Sloboda, founder of Webcopy+ and website content strategist.

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