Stop Being a Witness to Decisions That You Should be Helping to Shape

Have you ever walked into a meeting (design review, planning session, phase gate) only to realize the decision was already made? That the discussion was just theater, not dialogue? You weren’t there to shape the outcome. You were there to witness it.  If that’s happened to you, you’re not alone.

In this episode, Dianna explores why this happens, why it feels so frustrating, and most importantly how to fix it. 

In this episode:
• Design reviews are often theater because of the system: decisions are made before the meeting, not during
• Real influence happens upstream, not in the formal meeting
• Three practical steps to shape decisions before they’re locked in 

Stop waiting for your moment to shine. Start shaping the moment before it happens. Share this with someone who’s been a witness too many times.

Visit the blog post for additional notes and transcript: https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/stop-being-a-witness

Transcript

Dianna Deeney 0:00

Have you ever walked out of a meeting- it could be a design review, a planning session, a phase gate- and realize the decision was already made before you walked in? That the whole thing was a formality, that you were there to witness a conclusion, not contribute to one. If that's happened to you, stick around because that feeling has a name, and more importantly, it has a fix. I'd like to start with a story. It's not about a product, but stick with me. It connects directly to your work. A few weeks ago, I attended my first in-person public congressional hearing- state level. The topic was education financing, something that matters to me personally. I decided it was worth a five hour round trip and a lost day of work to be there. I went in with certain expectations. I've watched hearings on C-SPAN. I know they're imperfect, but I expected some version of open discourse, opposing viewpoints, real dialogue, maybe a path forward on a complicated issue. That's what these meetings are supposed to be for, right? What I got was something else entirely. The location of the hearing itself was a signal that I missed at the time. It was a remote public school under construction scheduled at one o'clock in the afternoon, right when the cafeteria was full of kids eating lunch. When you checked in, you were escorted through security, past all those children and ushered into the school auditorium. And every detail of it was deliberate. And then the hearing started and I realized I wasn't at a discussion. I was at a theatrical production. There was a script, dramatic panelists. The opposing viewpoint was represented by someone clearly cast to look foolish. The panelists were set up to goad the crowd, and the crowd reacted right on cue. The congressman who organized it was honestly masterful or had the right production team. Lights, camera, action. No real opposition had been invited. There was no path forward. Just a mic drop. On the drive home, I was unusually frustrated and I felt something I couldn't quite name. I felt"used", which was strange because nobody had done anything to me. I chose to go. I sat quietly. The Congress people barely looked at me, so I sat with that feeling for a few days, and then it hit me. I'd been to this meeting before. It just had a different name on the door. As a process engineer, as a quality engineer, I had shown up to design reviews like that, ready for dialogue, ready for opposing viewpoints, and real problem solving, and more often than I'd like to admit, I was there to witness a conclusion that had already been reached. The review was curated. The evidence was lined up, the testimony was prepared. There was a general unspoken understanding in the room unless someone found a gaping hole, this was happening. Sometimes I was even asked to sign off on the results, which made made it personal. Now, I wanna be fair. The project manager wasn't a bad person. They were a person operating inside a system where they were being held accountable for outcomes. Of course, they pre-vetted everything. Of course, they lined up the yeses ahead of time. That's rational behavior inside a broken structure. It wasn't a bad person making a bad decision. It was a good person responding to a broken incentive. And here's what I really want you to hear. My frustration at that hearing and at these design reviews wasn't irrational. My expectation of real discourse wasn't silly. The system was broken, not my expectations. So what do you do about it? Here's the mindset shift I want to offer. Design reviews and formal phase gates are the wrong time to try to affect product design, especially if you're not part of the core engineering team. If your role is quality, reliability, marketing, manufacturing, or sales, by the time the design review is on calendar, the story is largely written. The decisions are calcified, the team has momentum, sunk cost, and a timeline. Walking in with concerns at that point isn't influence. It's friction. And honestly, most of us have felt that. You raise something, you get the polite nod, and two weeks later, nothing changed. Not because your point was wrong, but because you raised it too late for anyone to do anything about it. The shift is this, we need to stop waiting for our moment to shine in the meeting. We need to start having the conversations that shape the meeting before it happens. The professionals who have real influence at design reviews, they earned it in the hallway conversations three months earlier. They showed up before the agenda was set, before the prototypes existed, before the direction was locked. They were intentional about getting upstream, and they didn't wait to be invited. Think of it this way. The goal isn't to be in every room. It's to have already influenced what happens in that room. And if you're part of the core engineering team on a project, realize that it can also be part of your responsibility to ensure that their input and feedback on the cross-functional team gets wrapped into those important decisions. Outside of design reviews and phase gates. Okay, so what does this actually look like in practice? Let me give you three concrete things you can do. The first one is what my reliability engineering friends like to consider, which is"what is new, different, or unknown?" Or some of my friends call it NUDS: new, unique, difficult, or special. Before your team gets into execution, before scope is locked, before anyone opens a CAD file, convene a cross-functional conversation and ask, what is new, unique, difficult, or special about this project? That question does a few things. It forces assumptions to the surface. It surfaces real risks before inertia takes over. And it gives members of the cross-functional team-the quality engineer, the reliability engineer, the manufacturing rep- a legitimate reason to be in the room before the first prototype exists. It's a conversation starter that can drive design, and in my experience, it opens doors to much deeper involvement If you follow the thread. The second thing, get your team aligned before the design starts, not after prototypes fail. This is the heart of what I teach. One of the biggest sources of late stage firefighting, especially with validation, isn't bad engineering, it's that the team never had a shared understanding of the problem in the first place. Marketing has one picture of the customer. Engineering has another. Manufacturing finds out what they're building when it's too late to change it. The work I do is specifically designed to close that gap before it becomes expensive. And the key word there is before. Before detailed design begins, before the story is written. If your team is skipping that structured cowork upfront, you're not saving time. You're borrowing it from your future self at a very high interest rate. The third thing. Explore the problem space before you jump to solutions. This is where I see teams lose the most ground. There's pressure to get to a concept, to show momentum, to have something to put in front of stakeholders. So teams rush past the most important question. Do we actually understand what the customer experiences: the benefits they're after, the symptoms they're trying to avoid, the steps they go through when they use a product like this. This is not a lengthy research project. It's a structured conversation with the right people in the room, and it changes what gets designed. And one more thing because it's practical: build the relationships before you need them. The design engineer who has real credibility with the quality team, built it over coffee, over informal check-ins, over showing genuine curiosity about what the team was working on long before the project hit a critical milestone. You can't parachute into upstream conversations with people you've never invested in. And that's true in product development. And as I learned on a long drive home from a congressional hearing, it's true everywhere else too. Here's the bottom line. A few hours of upstream clarity saves multiple hours of downstream rework. That's not a theory, that's a pattern I've watched play out over and over in product development. The teams that treat early alignment as their acceleration strategy, not as delay, consistently outperform on time, margin, and customer outcomes. That frustration you feel walking out of a meeting that was already decided, that's a signal. Not that you're in the wrong role, but that you're entering at the wrong moment. So here's your challenge this week: identify one decision your team's about to make, mid- project, that should have been made at the beginning. One decision that's about to get locked- in behind closed doors or ratified in a design review that's really just theater. And go have that conversation before the meeting, before the agenda is set. Before the story is written. Stop waiting for your moment to shine. Start shaping the moment before it happens. Thanks for listening. If this one resonated, share it with someone on your team who's been a witness one too many times. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. I'll see you in a couple weeks with an interview with a marketing expert.