In practice it is a meeting of about ninety minutes, once a week. The person responsible for each activity attends, and nobody sends a deputy. The agenda has three standing parts: the decisions that cross activities and need a call, the updates the other activities need to hear, and the running list of decisions taken and still open. The note is written the same afternoon and circulated before the end of the day.
What it decides is specific and short. Commitments above an agreed size. Whether a piece of work carries the company name publicly. Conflicts where two activities want the same supplier, or where one activity would be advising on something another is party to. Changes that touch more than one activity. Senior hiring.
What it deliberately does not decide is anything that belongs inside an activity. The marketing practice decides which channels to weight. The trade desk decides which order goes to which mill. The consultancy decides which engagements to accept. When those decisions drift into the weekly meeting, the responsibility that makes each activity work quietly disappears, and the meeting becomes the bottleneck it was created to prevent.
The rhythm is what makes it work. Once a month is too slow when activities trade with each other, because the problems compound between meetings and arrive together. Every day becomes operational by default, and then nobody is running anything. Once a week is long enough for an agenda to have substance and short enough that nothing waits more than five working days for an answer.
The discipline that matters is not the format. It is preparing in writing, turning up, and recording the decision before anyone leaves the room. A meeting whose note is written two days later is a meeting whose decisions will be remembered differently by everyone who attended, usually in the direction each of them preferred.
Our own version has run since the business took its present shape in Dubai in 2019. It is not a board and it is not a committee with a constitution. It is the people who run the activities, in one room, once a week, with a written record and an agenda short enough to finish.
If you are setting one up, three things are worth deciding before the first meeting. Who attends, which should be the people accountable rather than the people available. What it is allowed to decide, which should be written down and kept short. And who writes the note, which matters more than it sounds, because the person who writes the note decides what the meeting agreed.
The test of whether it is working is simple. Ask anyone in the room what was decided last week. If three people give three answers, the meeting is a conversation, and a conversation is not a decision.
