From a term on how organisations actually change — a week that handed us a stack of practitioner tools instead of a reading list. This is the smallest one, and the only one I still use weekly.
Everyone has sat in a meeting that was busy and pointless at the same time. Thirty minutes, full attendance, a shared screen, genuine effort from everyone in the room — and nothing afterwards that you could point to and call a result. Nobody was slacking. The meeting simply had no idea what it was for.
I used to think those meetings failed because of bad agendas. They fail earlier than that.
The tool
Seven pages, published free, sitting in a folder of change-facilitation resources I’d downloaded and mostly not read. It’s called the POP Model, and it is three questions you ask before you start anything — a phone call, one agenda item, a training module, an entire programme.
Quoted from the tool itself, because the phrasing is doing work:
Purpose: Why? Why are we undertaking this? What is the purpose?
Outcomes: What are the specific outcomes we want to accomplish as a result of this action?
Process: What steps will we take to achieve these outcomes and fulfil the purpose?
And the line underneath, which is the actual argument:
“Help instil in individuals, teams and organisations an ongoing discipline of focusing on results rather than activity.”
Results rather than activity. I have spent my working life as a quality engineer, and that sentence is close enough to my job description that I read it twice to check it wasn’t. Then I went and looked at my own calendar.
The audit
Here is what I found, and it is embarrassing in a specific way rather than a general one.
I am good at process. Process is the part of me that people rely on. Across a stack of recurring meetings I ran, every single one had a written agenda — ordered, timed, circulated in advance, often the night before. If you had asked me whether I prepared for meetings I would have said yes, confidently, and produced the artefacts to prove it.
An agenda is Process. Only Process.
Of the three questions, the one I always wrote down was the third. Purpose lived in my head, where it was usually some version of because we said we’d meet weekly. Outcomes did not exist in any form at all — not written, not spoken, not agreed. I was running the steps without stating the result the steps were supposed to produce, and because the steps were tidy, nobody noticed. Least of all me.
POP is writing the expected result before you run the test. That’s the whole thing, and it took me an unreasonably long time to see it in those terms.
The question everyone gets wrong is the middle one
Purpose is easy — most people can say why something exists if you make them. Process is the one we over-prepare. Outcomes is where it collapses, and it collapses in a predictable way: people write activities and call them outcomes.
Three lines from my own invites, and what they should have said:
| What I wrote | What it actually is | An outcome |
|---|---|---|
| ”Discuss the documentation gaps” | Process wearing an outcome’s clothes | ”A named owner and a date against each of the six gaps" |
| "Align on priorities” | A feeling, unfalsifiable | ”The top three agreed in order, written in the channel before we leave" |
| "Get everyone up to speed” | Activity, no finish line | ”Each of the four can describe the change to their own team without me” |
The tell is the verb. Discuss, align, review, touch base, sync, explore — things you do, not things you have afterwards. So the filter I’ve landed on is one question, and an intention that fails it tends to produce a follow-up meeting.
What actually changed
I want to be precise about the size of this, because it is a seven-page PDF and not a religion.
I stopped writing agendas cold. Now three lines go in the invite description, where people see them before they accept rather than after they’ve committed the hour.
Calendar invite · description field
PURPOSE The six documentation gaps are unowned and the release date isn't moving.
OUTCOMES A named owner and a date against each of the six, in the channel before we leave.
PROCESS 5 min recap · 20 min gap-by-gap · 5 min read-back.
Two sentences longer than the agenda I used to send. The second line is the one that occasionally cancels the meeting.
The Process line was already written, so the cost is two extra sentences. What it buys is not a better meeting — it’s the occasional cancelled one. Some of my recurring invites could not survive the Purpose question at all: the only sentence I could write for them was circular, this meeting exists so that this meeting can happen, and once that’s on the screen in front of everyone it’s difficult to keep defending the slot.
Why the small tool beat the big ones
The same folder contained models with wheels and phases — genuinely good frameworks for changing an organisation. I’ve used none of them since. I use this one weekly.
The difference is scale. I don’t get to redesign an organisation on a Tuesday. I do get to decide, on a Tuesday, whether the thing I’m about to book has a stated result. A framework that only applies in a workshop is one I apply roughly never; a framework that applies to a phone call is one I apply all day.
Which makes me suspicious of how I judge tools generally. I rated that week’s material by how ambitious it was, and the ambitious ones are still in the folder, unread, while the seven-page afterthought rewrote my calendar. Ambition is a property of the framework. Frequency is a property of my life, and it’s the one that decides what actually changes.
The POP Model was created by Leslie Sholl Jaffe and Randy Alford; the version I worked from is one of the free tools published at atctools.org. Seven pages, and most of them are examples.
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