Cards on the Table
Every meeting room has its regulars. A book — and a card game — for reading them, and getting the room back to a decision.
Every meeting room has its regulars: the person who cannot stop worrying, the one who already knows the answer, the quiet strategist who says nothing until the follow-up email, and the facilitator trying to turn all that energy into a decision.
In Cards on the Table, Paolo Falcioni draws on more than twenty years of European boardroom experience to identify eight recurring meeting personas: from the Skeptic and the Data-Driven to the Advocate, the Disruptor and the Quiet One. This is a practical, sharp, and often funny guide to understand what each persona is protecting, how meetings derail, and what exact moves can return the room back to its purpose, clarity, and action.
Eight personas. Five to start with:
The eight personas didn't start on the page.
Cards on the Table combines the book's framework with a practical card-game method, first tested with association executives. Play a hand, and you'll recognize the room.
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Paolo Falcioni
Paolo Falcioni is an association executive based in Brussels, with more than twenty years of experience chairing European boards, leading industry coalitions, and guiding complex decisions through rooms full of competing priorities. Trained as an electronic engineer, he moved from software and business planning into the world of formal meetings, governance, and decision-making. That shift from code that either works or does not, to rooms where people debate, resist, persuade, and delay, became the raw material for this book.