The Meeting after the Meeting – Why Your Strategies and Plans Keep Losing Support
The Meeting after the Meeting – Why Your Strategies and Plans Keep Losing Support
Issue 252, February 19, 2026
You were in a meeting where you presented a project roadmap seeking to develop new revenue for your department. The meeting ended with apparent consensus, and the project roadmap got the green light. Heads nodded; verbal agreement and support came from most who were in attendance. Action items were assigned. Everyone left the conference room. And then, you learned later that within forty-five minutes, three of the leaders who were in attendance at the meeting reconvened in the office of a peer to further discuss the project. This small group has both influence and power across the organization. Their “discussion” reframed the project in a variety of ways. It seems to look very different from what you presented earlier in the day. The priorities and targeted outcomes shifted. Some of the strong commitments you asked others for have been softened significantly. The project timeline is now significantly extended, removing all the urgency you thought you created in the presentation. It seems the formal presentation you gave was simply the performance. The real decisions about the project, its structure, and details happened in the shadows without you involved.
If you just recognized your organization or an experience you have had before, you are surely not alone. If you haven’t experienced this before and you are leading an initiative, planning a new project, or even hoping to simply make improvements in your current operations, without taking some time to account for this very real phenomenon, you are building your strategies, plans, and efforts on a foundation that doesn’t actually exist.
Regardless of the structures and processes we put in place to create expectability, detailed workflows that follow the steps we must take, or the formats of business plans and related financial information to ensure acceptance, the human factor always remains first and foremost at the forefront. It is our greatest asset as well as our greatest challenge.
The Informal Power and Influence Structure
Every organization, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise, has two governance structures. The first is the one on the org chart, the one with defined roles, reporting lines, meeting cadences, and documented decision structures. The second is the informal network of relationships, alliances, and influence patterns through which actual power flows. Organizational network analysis research from Rob Cross at the University of Virginia has consistently demonstrated that these informal structures predict outcomes far more reliably than formal hierarchies. His work with over 300 organizations found that the people with the most influence over operational decisions often hold titles that would never suggest that level of power.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent time inside a complex organization. We all know that certain people have outsized influence, and therefore power, regardless of their position. Maybe they speak up more often than others, maybe they took a series of risks that paid off for the organization in the recent past, resulting in genuine respect for what they think, or maybe they are so well networked that they have more access than others. Regardless, they surely hold the cards to your success.
What isn’t often recognized or commonly discussed is how these informal networks of informal influence and power feed and create a parallel decision structure that actively competes with formal and set governance. And in the competition between the formal and the informal, the informal network almost always wins.
Why the Shadow Structure Prevails
The meeting after the meeting isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a natural human response to several organizational realities.
First, formal meetings create performance pressure. Research from Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson on psychological safety has shown that the larger and more formal the setting, the less likely participants are to voice concerns, raise objections, or share the unvarnished assessments that actual decision making requires. People self-censor in formal settings and then speak freely in informal ones. The meeting after the meeting is often where honesty finally shows up.
Second, informal channels carry trust that formal structures can’t replicate. Decades of social capital research, including foundational work by Robert Putnam and James Coleman, confirms that decision makers rely on trusted relationships over institutional processes when stakes are high and uncertainty is present. Change and transformation, regardless of the span, impact, or duration, by definition, are high stakes, filled with risk and uncertainty. As a result, the leaders in the organization making “real” decisions aren’t circumventing the system out of malice. They aren’t ignoring your competency or contributions. They’re doing what humans have always done under pressure, particularly in subjects or challenges where they have no expertise or experience: turning to the people they trust.
Third, formal decision-making structures and governance tend to be optimistic by design. Business cases get approved. Timelines get compressed. Risk assessments get minimized to maintain momentum. The meeting after the meeting is where the reality check happens, where experienced operators quietly recalibrate expectations based on what they actually know about the organization’s capacity for change.
The Problem This Creates
When real decisions happen outside established formal channels, leaders can lose visibility into three critical dynamics.
They can lose visibility into actual commitment levels because the consensus expressed in formal meetings doesn’t reflect the reservations voiced afterward.
They can lose visibility into the resource allocation realities because informal agreements about priorities often override formally approved resource plans.
And they can lose visibility into the real pace of change because the informal network sets its own timeline based on operational feasibility rather than strategic aspiration.
This creates what organizational psychologists might call “phantom alignment,” a state where everyone appears to be moving in the same direction based on formal indicators, while the informal network has already negotiated a different trajectory. Research from the Strategic Management Journal has documented how this misalignment between formal and informal governance structures accounts for a significant portion of change and transformation implementation failures, particularly in organizations with strong relationship cultures and long-tenured leadership teams.
The most damaging aspect isn’t that informal decisions get made. It’s that leaders don’t know they’re being made. They continue operating on the assumption that the formal process is driving behavior, allocating resources and measuring progress against commitments that were quietly revised in a hallway conversation three weeks ago.
Mapping the Invisible
The first step in addressing shadow decision-making is acknowledging it exists without treating it as pathological. Organizations that try to eliminate informal networks misunderstand their function. These networks exist because they serve real needs that formal structures don’t adequately address: the need for candor, the need for trusted counsel, and the need for operational pragmatism. The goal isn’t elimination. It’s integration.
Organizational network analysis provides practical tools for making the invisible visible. By mapping communication patterns, decision influence, and information flow, leaders can identify who the informal decision makers actually are, what topics get redirected through informal channels, and where the gaps exist between formal and informal governance. Cross’s research has shown that simply making these networks visible changes behavior because people become more conscious of how informal dynamics affect organizational outcomes.
Three Strategies for Bridging the Gap
The first strategy is to bring the informal voices into the formal process before decisions are made. If you know that three specific people will reconvene after every strategy session to recalibrate, invite them to share their perspective during the session. This requires creating conditions where candid assessment is rewarded rather than penalized. It means smaller working sessions, explicit permission to challenge assumptions, and leaders who demonstrate that disagreement in the room is preferable to agreement in the room followed by renegotiation in the hallway.
The second strategy is to build decision checkpoints that account for the informal recalibration cycle. Instead of treating formal decisions as final, build in a deliberate 48-to-72-hour window where stakeholders can surface concerns through structured channels. This essentially formalizes what was already happening informally anyway, but it does so transparently. Organizations that implement this approach report higher decision durability because the concerns that would have eroded commitment through backchannel conversations get addressed before implementation begins.
The third strategy is to explicitly acknowledge the difference between strategic aspirations and operational commitments. Much of what happens in the meeting after the meeting is operational leaders translating ambitious strategy into feasible action. When actual structure and governance processes pretend this translation isn’t necessary, it pushes the work into informal channels. When it builds translation into the formal structure and process, the shadow structure loses its primary function.
The Human Reality
Here’s what most management and change management frameworks miss about the meeting after the meeting: it exists because people care. They care enough to have an honest conversation. They care enough to protect their teams from unrealistic commitments. They care enough to quietly ensure that what actually gets implemented has a chance of working. The shadow decision structure isn’t a symptom of dysfunction. It’s a symptom of people trying to make things work despite formal processes that don’t create enough room for reality.
The challenge for leaders is learning to see this caring as a resource rather than an obstacle. The informal network carries intelligence about organizational capacity, cultural readiness, and implementation feasibility that no formal assessment process can fully capture. The question isn’t how to eliminate the meeting after the meeting. It’s how to make the meeting become the meeting, how to create formal spaces where the honesty, trust, and pragmatism that characterize informal networks become the foundation for decision-making.
Achieving the desired outcome, of course, is not easy. It requires not only management of the processes, but the very human factors and behaviors of all of those involved, regardless of their power and influence in either the formal or informal network. As I have often written, it takes courage, it takes acceptance of criticism, it takes active listening to really hear the reality others believe, and it takes critical thinking to see the patterns and how the patterns need to evolve.
The next time you walk into a decision-making meeting, the real question isn’t who’s in the room — it’s whether this is where the truth will actually be allowed to show up.
This Week’s Reflection
Think about the last major decision your organization made. Who was in the formal meeting where it was decided? And who had the real conversation afterward that shaped what actually happened? If those are different groups, your future efforts will surely be challenged.
Connect with Us
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