Journal · 12 Jan 2026
Why talk time is a lazy quality metric
A procurement workshop in Leeds once produced a beautiful airtime chart. Legal, finance, and operations each spoke for almost the same number of minutes. The sponsor framed this as fairness. By four o’clock the group had restated the evaluation criteria, restated the timeline, and restated a risk that everyone already knew. Nobody had accepted a trade-off.
Talk time is easy to harvest. In a recorded call it is nearly automatic. In a live room a junior colleague can tally with a kitchen timer. That ease is the trap. A metric that is cheap to collect will be asked to stand in for qualities that are expensive to judge: whether a disagreement was metabolised, whether a quieter expert was actually heard, whether the closing slide described a decision or a hope.
In Reading the Room we keep talk time as a diagnostic, not a score. If one person occupies forty minutes of a ninety-minute slot, you have a clue. The clue might be domination. It might also be the only person in the room who had read the papers. You cannot know from the tally. You need the contract of the session — who was invited to decide — and a sample of what those minutes contained.
The Leeds room failed on decision density. We counted commitments, reversals, and parked items from the shared notes (no recording). There were two parked items and zero reversals, which sounds tidy until you notice there were also zero commitments that named an owner and a date. Equal talk had purchased the feeling of inclusion and spent the afternoon’s only scarce resource: attention that could have been used to choose.
If you still want an airtime chart, print it on page two and put the unresolved-question log on page one. Sponsors who care about quality will start on page one. Sponsors who wanted a fairness theatre will complain. That complaint is information too.