Items parked in this meeting without a next step — they look closed but they'll be back.
Direct Answer
Zombie Topics are items that were parked during a meeting without a defined next step. The group set them aside — consciously, with intent to return — but nobody specified when, how, or who would bring them back. They are not dead. They are suspended. Without a named owner or a defined re-entry point, a zombie topic has no mechanism to be resolved. It will resurface in a future meeting, consuming the time of everyone in that room again, in a context further removed from the original conversation. Zombie Topics are the forward-looking version of Recurring Coordination Debt: the debt being created right now that will be called in later.
Parking a topic is healthy facilitation. Sam Kaner, in Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Jossey-Bass, 2007), recommends using a "parking lot" or "Side Issues" chart precisely for this purpose: conversations surface things that belong in a different forum, and a designated container lets the group acknowledge them without derailing the current discussion. The parking lot validates the tangent without surrendering to it. The critical variable is what happens when the topic goes in: does it get a named owner? A specific re-entry forum? A date or trigger for when it will come back? A topic parked with those elements is a managed deferral — set aside, but with a defined path forward. A topic parked without them is a zombie: technically set aside, structurally unresolvable, guaranteed to resurface.
Zombie topics come back because the underlying question hasn't gone away. Kaner gives the precise mechanism: a group says "let's put this on next month's agenda and pick up where we left off." No owner is assigned. No preparation is specified. The following month, the item is superseded by urgent new business — or simply lost. When it does return, it enters in a context further from the original conversation, requiring the group to reconstruct the background before it can address the substance. The time cost scales with how long the item has been suspended.
Research on distributed team coordination adds a compounding factor for remote and hybrid settings. Without the ambient follow-up that happens naturally in shared physical space, a zombie topic has no informal channel through which it might resolve between meetings. It sits in exactly the state it was left in until the next scheduled touchpoint — by which point context has faded and relevant participants may have moved on to other priorities.
A single zombie topic is a minor inefficiency. An organisation that consistently parks topics without next steps accumulates a library of them — open questions that cycle through meeting after meeting, never quite resolving, consuming partial attention every time they surface. Research on distributed teams identifies this pattern as "decision churn": the repeated discussion of the same items across multiple meeting transcripts, driven by misaligned action items where owners and deadlines were never specified before the meeting ended. Each individual item seems manageable. Collectively they represent a significant fraction of meeting time spent revisiting things rather than deciding things.
When a topic is parked, the act of parking is itself a decision that requires closure. De Smet et al.'s Team Effectiveness Indicators framework (McKinsey, 2024) defines healthy decision closure as ending with a definitive summary of who owns the next step. Applied to parking: the facilitator must explicitly assign what McKinsey's framework calls the "transmission burden" — asking, before moving on, who will own bringing this back, and to which specific forum. Kaner similarly asserts that follow-through only happens when a group spells out exactly "what needs to be done, who will do it, by when, and with what resources." Without that, nobody takes responsibility and nothing happens.
The intervention takes less than a minute while the topic is fresh and the relevant people are still in the room. It takes significantly longer in a future meeting when context has faded and someone must reconstruct who was supposed to do what before the group can address the underlying issue.
Two limits are worth noting. First, a domain-specific one: David Snowden's Cynefin framework identifies a Complex domain — environments where cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect. In genuinely complex situations, a topic resurfacing may not represent a failure at all. It may be necessary iteration: a Probe-Sense-Respond cycle where returning to the question with new information is the right process, not a coordination breakdown. Teams working in complex environments should interpret Zombie Topics counts with this in mind, distinguishing structural deferrals from iterative inquiry.
Second, a scope limit: Kaner notes that enforcing full mechanical scaffolding is primarily necessary for high-stakes or difficult decisions. Demanding a named owner and a re-entry date for every minor tangent parked during a meeting can create unnecessary administrative drag. The Zombie Topics metric is calibrated for items where the lack of a next step creates genuine execution risk — not for every passing thought that gets acknowledged and set aside.
Zombie Topics are the debt being created: items parked in this meeting that will come back. Recurring Coordination Debt is the debt being called in: items that already came back in this meeting because they were parked without resolution in a prior one. The same item that is a Zombie Topic today becomes Recurring Coordination Debt the moment it resurfaces. Tracking both gives a full picture of the cycle — where the debt is forming and where it is already compounding.
Kaner, S., Lind, L., Toldi, C., Fisk, S., & Berger, D. (2007). Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
De Smet, A., Hewes, C., & Weiss, L. (2024). Team Effectiveness Indicators. McKinsey & Company. (Decision closure; next-step ownership.)
Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76. (Cynefin framework; Complex domain; Probe-Sense-Respond.)
"No one takes responsibility, and nothing happens — unless the group spells out exactly what needs to be done, who will do it, by when, and with what resources." — Sam Kaner
Zombie Topics are items that were parked during a meeting without a defined next step. The group set them aside — consciously, with intent to return — but nobody specified when, how, or who would bring them back. They are not dead. They are suspended. Without a named owner or a defined re-entry point, a zombie topic has no mechanism to be resolved. It will resurface in a future meeting, consuming the time of everyone in that room again, in a context further removed from the original conversation. Zombie Topics are the forward-looking version of Recurring Coordination Debt: the debt being created right now that will be called in later.
A parked topic becomes a zombie when it lacks the elements that would allow it to resolve: a named owner responsible for bringing it back, a defined re-entry point (a specific forum or date), or a next step that would move it toward resolution. A topic parked with those elements is a managed deferral — it is set aside but has a path forward. A topic parked without them is structurally suspended: the group intends to return to it, but there is no mechanism that will make that happen.
Zombie Topics are forward-looking: they are items parked in this meeting that will resurface later. Recurring Coordination Debt is backward-looking: it counts items that already resurfaced in this meeting because they were parked without resolution in a prior one. A zombie topic today becomes Recurring Coordination Debt the moment it comes back. Tracking both shows whether the cycle is being interrupted — by converting zombie topics into managed deferrals with next steps — or compounding.
Treat the act of parking as a decision that needs its own closure. Before moving on, explicitly assign the transmission burden: ask who will own bringing this back, and to which specific forum. Name an owner. Set a date or trigger. This converts the zombie topic into a managed deferral. The intervention takes less than a minute while context is fresh. It takes significantly longer in a future meeting when the background must be reconstructed before the group can address the substance.
Not always. In environments that map to David Snowden's Cynefin Complex domain — where cause and effect are only clear in retrospect — a topic resurfacing may reflect necessary iteration rather than a coordination failure. Repeated discussion of an emergent, complex problem can be a healthy Probe-Sense-Respond cycle. The Zombie Topics metric is calibrated for situations where the lack of a next step creates genuine execution risk, not for every iterative discussion in a genuinely complex environment.
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