Decision Laundering

The decision was already made. The meeting existed to make it look collaborative.

I call this decision laundering: taking a private choice and running it through a public process to make it look participatory. It feels efficient to the person doing it. To everyone else, it feels like their intelligence was used as a prop.

The cost is cumulative. Each laundered decision trains the team to stop preparing, stop thinking, and stop caring about forums that claim to want their input.

“I have decided X, and here is why” takes thirty seconds and preserves trust. The laundered version takes thirty minutes and erodes it.

Honesty is faster than theatre.