Meeting Prep (pre-meeting briefing)

Before a meeting, build a one-screen brief:

1. Who's in the room and what each likely cares about.
2. Where this sits — pull from ops/pipeline.md and any prior notes: last contact, open threads, commitments outstanding.
3. Your one goal for the meeting, and the single decision you want out of it.
4. The questions to ask — labels + calibrated questions (see below).
5. The one risk or objection to be ready for — name it first, before they raise it.

Pull context from ops/ and the relevant meeting notes; don't invent attendees or history you weren't given.

Asking the right kind of questions (Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference)

The questions decide the meeting. Two moves do most of the work:

• Label, then ask. Name the thing they're likely feeling before you question it: "It seems like…" / "It sounds like…" Then stop talking and let them respond. A label lowers the guard; the silence pulls out the real answer.
• Calibrated questions start with What or How — never "why" (which sounds like an accusation), never yes/no (which closes things down). They make the other person do the thinking and hand you the information.

Load 3–5 calibrated questions for the meeting. A reusable set:

• "What's the hardest part of that for your team right now?"
• "How does that show up in your week?"
• "What have you already tried that didn't work the way you hoped?"
• "What does that cost you today?" (time, rework, decisions made on partial information)
• "How would you know this had been solved?"
• "How does a decision like this usually get made on your side?" — surfaces the real process and who else matters
• "What would need to be true for this to be worth doing?"

Close two ways:

• A summary they confirm — play their situation back so well they say "that's right." (Not "you're right," which usually means let's wrap up.)
• The one question that surfaces the hidden thing: "Is there anything I should know that I haven't asked about?"

Replace on sight: "Why are you still using X?" → "What's kept X in place?" · "Do you have a process for X?" → "How do you handle X today?" · "Is that a problem?" → "What does that cost you?" · "Would you agree that…?" → delete it.

Call conduct — write down what the room used to enforce

In a physical room, attention is enforced by cues nobody has to state: everyone can see who is looking at their phone, who left, who stopped listening. Remove the room and every one of those cues disappears — so attention degrades silently while the call grid looks exactly the same. A remote meeting with no stated protocol is not a neutral meeting; its norms default to whatever the least-engaged participant does.

The fix is not exhortation ("please engage") — it is writing down the specific behaviors the room used to enforce for free, so the norm is explicit and correctable.

For any call with 4+ participants or a decision on the agenda, put one line at the top of the agenda itself:

Cameras on · one speaker at a time · side questions to the thread, not the chat · decision owner: <name>.

If a call is repeatedly held without it, the meeting owner cuts the invite list rather than adding more reminders — an unengaged attendee is a scoping problem, not a discipline problem.

Depth

• quick: the goal + one label + three calibrated questions.
• standard: the full brief above, with the label + 3–5 calibrated questions and a summary-to-confirm.
• deep: + a likely-objections list (named first, before they raise them), a fallback ask if the main one stalls, and the hidden-thing question to close.