Somewhere along the evolution of the modern organisation, meetings became a proxy for progress. Where once they were brief pit stops for information exchange, they’ve since mutated into a sprawling ritual—bloated, calendar-crushing, ego-pushing, and worryingly unproductive.

In too many places, people are not employed to deliver outcomes. They are employed to attend meetings about outcomes.

From a systems engineering standpoint, meetings are points of friction. They often introduce delay, diffusion, and energy loss. Every time a team stops doing to start meeting formally, the flow of productive output stalls.

Healthy systems optimise for throughput. Unhealthy ones cycle endlessly between input and no output.

In one South African Hi-Tech Engineering company I was involved in, the leadership team was adamant about agility. Yet each mid-level manager averaged 15 hours of meetings per week. Projects stalled, decisions limped through consensus, and no one quite remembered who was responsible for what. Minutes were identical from month to month. You can call the Meetings Organisational Quicksand. Such an organisation had disabled critical work to be done.

Meetings often masquerade as democratic. “Let’s bring everyone in.” “Let’s align all stakeholders.” But most meetings are overpopulated and under-decided.

In a healthcare infrastructure project in Europe, one weekly team meeting featured 14 attendees, 3 of whom spoke, and none of whom were decision-makers. The meeting existed to make sure no one felt excluded. The result? Everyone felt exhausted and frustrated instead.

You don’t need to ban meetings. You need to redesign their role in the system.

•  Decisions, not discussions. Every meeting should end with a who, what, and by when.
•  Shorter by design. 15 minutes is plenty when clarity is present.
•  No spectators. Attendance must be based on function, not formality.
•  Kill recurrence by default. Regular meetings should prove their value, not assume it.

I’ve embedded these principles in many product teams, R&D consortia, and risk management workshops alike. The result? Focus returns. And work becomes... work again.

Smart Questions to think about:

Prompt 1: If your organisation aimed to sustain clarity, energy, and innovation for the next decade, how would you redesign its default communication and decision-making architecture?

Prompt 2: What could replace the meeting as your primary coordination tool?