Last week's article #25 Can This Meeting Be an Autonomous Decision? suggested that meetings aren't just a time problem; they're also an authority problem. When decisions have nowhere to land, they collect in meeting rooms. This experiment gives you a way to see that pattern in real time — not as a concept, but in the actual meeting you're sitting in next week. It takes under two minutes and requires nothing except your attention. This experiment gives you a way to test whether a single, small change makes that pattern visible — or starts to shift it. It takes less than two minutes, and you can try it in a situation you're already in.

What You're Exploring

The question: What happens when you ask, "Could someone in this room have decided this without us all being here?" - inside a meeting you're actually attending?

Set Up

When to try it: Your next team meeting. Any meeting. No preparation needed, no agenda change required, nothing to tell anyone in advance.

Before it starts, just notice one thing: what does this meeting appear to be for? Status update? Problem-solving? Making a decision? You don't need to write it down. Just hold the question lightly as you walk in.

Try It

At some point during the meeting — when a decision, question, or problem comes up for discussion — ask yourself this silently:

Can this meeting be an autonomous decision?

Not "should it be?" Just: could it? Does someone already in the room have the information, the role, the authority to make this call without us all gathering?

You're not looking for a definitive answer. You're just noticing whether the question has an obvious yes hiding somewhere in it.

That's it. One meeting. One question. You're not changing anything — you're just looking at something that's already there.

Notice

During and immediately after, pay attention to one specific thing: the moment of hesitation.

It shows up just before someone defers a call to the group — that small pause before "I think we should discuss this together" or "let's get everyone's view." Sometimes it's barely visible. Sometimes it's yours.

If you can, jot a sentence down right after the meeting — on your phone, in a notebook, wherever works. The hesitation will be clearer now than it will be tomorrow.

Make Sense

Here's the question to ask yourself:

When the answer to "could someone have decided this alone?" was probably yes — what do you think was actually stopping them?

Listen for the shape of the reason. Often it isn't "I didn't have the authority." It's closer to "I wasn't sure it was mine to call" — or "I didn't want to be seen stepping on someone else's patch." That's a different problem from a confidence problem. It's a clarity problem: the person couldn't tell, in the moment, where their authority ended and someone else's began.

If what you noticed surprised you — or if you found yourself recognising something you've been circling without naming — that's worth bringing somewhere. Try the question again in the next meeting, or bring what you noticed to Beyond The Machine: Live and hear what others have seen.

If it felt unremarkable — the pattern may genuinely not be present in your current context, or this particular meeting wasn't where the friction lives. That's useful to know too.

The Bigger Picture

If the hesitation you noticed was mostly about not being sure — not lack of nerve, but lack of a clear edge to act within — then you've found something useful. It points at the actual lever.

When people know what they own, what they don't, and what authority comes with each, the autonomous decision stops being a risk and becomes ordinary. You're not stepping on toes or waiting for implicit approval. You're just acting inside your role. Most teams have far less of this clarity than they assume — and the meetings quietly absorb the gap. Roles that are genuinely clear are one of the most direct routes to fewer meetings, because the decisions stop needing a room.

Share What You Noticed

The natural next step for this experiment is the live session on Wednesday 3 June. People who tried the autonomous-decision question come and compare notes — what the hesitation looked like, where the clarity gaps showed up, what surprised them. It's free, informal, and you don't need to have done the experiment to find it useful. If this article landed, this is where it goes next. Register here →

And if you're working with these questions beyond a single experiment — the deeper one about where authority lives in your organisation, and what role clarity it would take to change that — Beyond The Machine: Live is a monthly drop-in for exactly that. Details here →.