The Meeting That Should Have Been a Walk
Some conversations need a table and a document. The hard, human ones usually need a sidewalk.
Conference rooms are adversarial by architecture: two sides of a table, eye contact as confrontation, a clock on the wall. For status updates this is fine. For the conversation about what is actually wrong, it is the worst room in the building.
Walking fixes most of it. Side by side instead of face to face. Motion that gives silence somewhere to go. No screen to perform for. The difficult sentence that would not come out across a table often walks out on its own by the second block.