https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
"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 CO₂ 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 CO₂. 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 CO₂ 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 CO₂ 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."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
