The bottleneck might be the air in the room
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
I now travel with a portable CO 2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.
That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO 2 . At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO 2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.
Here is the uncomfortable part. 1,000 ppm is not an extreme number. A closed room with a few people breathing in it reaches that inside the first hour. Your all-day planning session, your architecture review, your quarterly strategy offsite in the windowless boardroom: those are precisely the conditions that push CO 2 into the range where decision quality measurably falls. You are running your highest-stakes thinking in the environment least suited to it.
And it is invisible from inside. Nobody in the room feels impaired. They feel a little tired, a little foggy, a little checked out, and they put it down to the length of the meeting, a bad night’s sleep, or the person who won’t stop talking. The one variable almost nobody checks is the air.
This is not only a boardroom problem. With so much work now remote, your people spend their days in small home offices with the door shut. Same physics, same climb, same afternoon fog. The dip your team hits mid-afternoon may owe less to motivation than to a room that hasn’t exchanged its air since morning.