ECONOMIST: The excruciating quest for a meeting room — territorial ambition, power dynamics & water bottles

What’s the scarcest resource in business? Good people? Patient capital? Uncontested markets? The correct answer is meeting rooms. (Or, more accurately, meeting rooms when you actually want to have a meeting; when you have no need for one, they are always completely empty.) —

When rooms are in demand, the top of every hour ushers in the same scene. First, lots of people rise from their desks and start to walk around with water bottles. The risk of dehydration is not high if you are sitting in a conference room for an hour. But you never know.

Someone asks a colleague which meeting room has been booked, a reminder that rooms should not be given names. “Are we indecisive?” “What?” “Are we in Decisive?” “Oh. No. We’re incapable.” “What?” And so on, until someone reverts to normal speech: “It’s the big one by the lift.”

As the participants gather outside Capable, the people inside practise an important office skill: pretending not to notice that their time is up. Room bookings are like motorway speed limits. In theory, everyone should stick to the rules, and be out on the dot. In practice, you can stay a little longer than the allotted time but you don’t know exactly when you will get into real trouble.

As the seconds tick past, the group outside stop talking among themselves and edge closer to the threshold. Finally, someone knocks on the door, opens it and says: “I’m afraid we’ve got the room now.” There is a brief moment of tension. But the game is up. The people inside pack up and slope off. Capable is in different hands. A faint air of exultation takes hold as people sit down. Someone from the previous meeting creeps back in to retrieve their water bottle, a final capitulation. “Does anyone know how to make the screen work?” someone asks, and the mood darkens.

The new rulers of Capable knew where they were headed. Less organised groups are still walking around trying to find a place to meet. These people all forgot to book a room, and are now competing for whatever space might be available.

One group heads to Effective. The display panel outside says that it has been booked but the room is empty. It could be a no-show: some colleagues are known for booking rooms weeks in advance just in case. The booking will be cancelled automatically after 15 minutes, as though this were not a meeting about the budget assumptions but a table at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Another cluster of people is approaching. Are these the people who booked or just interlopers? The group decides not to wait to find out, and stampedes into the room. “We’re ineffective!” someone calls to a latecomer.

The approaching group had not booked the room. They now scurry off to Considerate. There’s only one person in there, when the room can hold ten, but that one person has clearly worked out how to use the automated booking system. The bigger group could ask her to move, but rules are rules. Someone belatedly tries to download the meeting-room app. Despite ten years of service, the system insists that he does not work at the company. He gives up.

Energy levels are running low: people take swigs from water bottles. The group next heads to Tolerant. They find to their relief that the display panel outside is a welcoming green. But the participants in the previous meeting, which is now over-running by several minutes, include two very senior executives. Rules are rules, but feudal systems are feudal systems. So the group outside doesn’t edge towards the door, let alone open it. They just try to get in people’s eyelines and hope for the best.

Someone sends a quick message to the people who are dialling into their meeting remotely, to explain that they are just finding a room and won’t be a moment. The virtual participants are too absorbed in a conversation about the Winter Olympics (“curling is surprisingly fun to watch, isn’t it?”) to notice.

While the group waits outside Tolerant, the display panel on the door suddenly changes from green to red. Someone else has managed to get into the meeting-room app and jumped ahead of them. The culprits round the corner. Fingers clench around water bottles. But the group that hasn’t booked the room eventually backs down, as it must, and reluctantly heads to the kitchen area. It will take them 15 minutes to accept that no one online can hear anything over the noise of everyone else. They agree to meet again next week. Same time, same lack of place.