Boardroom Meeting Suggestion

Origin: a Wii U joke, Christmas Eve 2012¶

The template comes from a single webcomic strip. John Kleckner published “Outlook Oust” — instalment 134 of his gaming comic Hejibits — on December 24, 2012. It depicts a Nintendo boardroom in which an executive asks how to make the Wii U a valuable entertainment platform. The first employee suggests TV compatibility, the second suggests Netflix, and the third suggests DVD playback — a feature the console conspicuously lacked — and is thrown out of the high-rise window. Every later version inherits that exact rhythm.

Spread¶

The comic escaped the gaming-webcomic circuit within days. Joystiq featured it on December 29, 2012. A 4chan /b/ draw thread on January 3, 2013 produced a flood of custom versions, and a compilation of over 300 variations hit Reddit’s /r/4chan on January 5, 2013. The same day an MTV-themed version on /r/funny cleared 7,500 upvotes; a snack-food industry version ran on Memebase on January 11, 2013; and a “Boardroom Suggestion Memes” Facebook page picked up 4,400 likes within 24 hours of launching on January 14, 2013. Blank speech bubbles and a four-panel grid made it trivially easy to fill in, which is exactly what happened.

Why the format works¶

The layout does four jobs in sequence, which is unusually efficient for an exploitable:

• Panel one — the boss asks an open question, establishing the subject.
• Panels two and three — two employees give safe, corporate-approved answers, establishing the norm.
• Panel four — a third gives the honest, obvious answer, and is defenestrated.

The window is the whole argument. It is a visual claim that the punishment is not for being wrong but for being right at an inconvenient moment.

Meaning and usage¶

Boardroom Meeting satirises institutional denial: corporate strategy that refuses to consider the thing customers actually want, political debate that rules out the obvious remedy, or any organisation where the correct answer is socially unsayable. Common shapes include a company brainstorming retention ideas until someone suggests paying people more, or a platform iterating on features until someone suggests fixing the one users complain about. Self-referential versions — where the third employee’s suggestion is that the meme format itself is played out — became a recurring subgenre.

Variants and legacy¶

A February 2013 extended edit reversed the outcome so the boss approves the suggestion, and a reworked version posted to /r/bonehurtingjuice in June 2019 cleared 27,900 upvotes by deliberately mangling the joke. Longer five- and six-panel builds stretch the setup for more escalation. More than a decade on it remains one of the most durable multi-panel exploitables in circulation, sitting alongside Gru’s Plan and Change My Mind as a template built specifically for argument rather than reaction.