There is never a need for this opener

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It's hour two of the convening and I can feel my soul trying to leave through the ceiling vent.

Forty of us penned in a hotel function room the color of weak tea, lanyards swinging, coffee gone cold in cups built for a doll's tea party.

Then the hand goes up at table three. Gray quarter-zip. The particular calm of a man who has never once been wrong out loud. Then he says it: the opener I have heard in a hundred rooms yet have never watched come to anything.

"There is a need for…"

And honestly it doesn't matter what comes next: Greater coordination. Bolder leadership. A whole-of-system approach.

It's the MadLibs of futility: you could fill that blank with anything—sandwiches, eye drops, tambourines—because the trouble isn't the noun, it's the subject.

Sure there might be a need, but who is the person or thing performing the action to meet it?

The sentence is built not to say. Passive voice is the mother tongue of the room where nothing happens: a sentence with no subject, for a job with no owner. The need floats up, unclaimed, and dies somewhere in the ether.

The fix is not a better speaker. It is a small rule, applied without exception. Every what arrives with a who. Every who arrives with a by-when.

Abstraction feels intellectual, but it’s often cowardice. To name no one is to risk nothing. Saying I’ll do this by Friday is skin in the game.
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Try this

Unless it's an ideation session (where this format can kill creativity) the rule is: Action. Owner. Date.

Use it as a speaker, enforce it as a moderator.

🌿 Passive is piffle, active is action!