# The meeting is usually the system asking for help.
Nobody loves meetings. This is not a controversial statement. You could walk into any company in the country, say "we have too many meetings," and everyone from the intern to the CEO would nod in agreement. Then they'd all go to their next meeting.
We treat meetings like a weather problem — something we complain about but accept as an inevitable force of nature. They aren't. Most meetings exist for a specific, diagnosable reason: information isn't flowing where it needs to go, so humans assemble in a room to manually do what the system should be doing automatically.
Every recurring meeting is a workaround for a missing information flow. Find the flow, fix the flow, cancel the meeting.
The status meeting diagnosis
The most obvious case is the status meeting. Monday morning. Everyone gathers. Each person reports what they're working on, what's blocked, what they need. The manager synthesizes this into a picture of where things stand. It takes an hour. Sometimes ninety minutes.
What's actually happening is this: nobody can see what anyone else is doing. The system of record — whatever it is — doesn't reflect reality. Or it does reflect reality, but nobody trusts it. Or it's accurate and trusted but it's too hard to check. So instead, humans interrupt their actual work to verbally reconstruct the state of the operation for each other.
This is a systems failure. Not a culture failure. Not a discipline failure. The meeting exists because looking at a screen doesn't give someone what they need to make a decision. Fix the screen and you fix the meeting.
I worked with a construction company that had a daily all-hands. Every morning. Thirty-five people. Forty-five minutes. The project manager would go person by person: what's your crew doing today? Any issues? Any equipment needs? It was a ritual. Sacred. The PM believed — sincerely — that this meeting was the heartbeat of the operation.
We built a board. Not a sophisticated one. A shared screen at the dispatch desk with five columns: crew, today's assignment, status, blockers, notes. Updated by crew leads throughout the day. Took about ten weeks to get the habit established.
The daily meeting dropped to fifteen minutes. Then ten. Then three times a week. Then "as needed." The PM initially resisted — felt like losing control. Six months later he told me it was the best change they'd ever made. The meeting had been doing a job that a visible board could do better.
The decision meeting diagnosis
Decision meetings are harder. Someone needs to make a call and they've assembled the relevant people to discuss it. This feels reasonable. Often it is.
But look closer at why the decision requires a meeting. Usually it's because the decision-maker doesn't have the information they need. They have some of it. They know the general shape. But the specifics — the constraints, the dependencies, the downstream impacts — live in different people's heads. The meeting is an extraction operation.
The underlying problem isn't that the decision is hard. It's that the context needed to make it is scattered. If the cost data, the customer impact, the schedule implications, and the risk factors were all visible in one place, most of these decisions wouldn't need a room.
I'm not saying all decisions should be made alone. Complex, high-stakes, actually ambiguous situations benefit from human discussion. But those represent maybe 20% of the decisions that currently get meetings. The other 80% are decisions that *feel* hard because the information is hard to assemble, not because the question is hard to answer.
The alignment meeting diagnosis
Then there's the alignment meeting. This one's sneaky. It shows up as a "sync" or a "check-in" or a "touch base." The stated purpose is making sure everyone's on the same page. The actual purpose is compensating for the fact that the page doesn't exist.
When there's no shared document, no visible plan, no common source of truth, people drift. Not out of negligence — out of reasonable interpretation. They heard the same words in the kickoff meeting and came away with subtly different understandings. Without a reference point, those differences grow until someone notices a contradiction, panics, and calls a meeting to "get aligned."
An alignment meeting is the organization admitting it doesn't have a shared source of truth. Fix the source, fix the drift.
The fix isn't better meetings. The fix is an artifact — a written plan, a visible board, a shared model — that everyone can check independently. Alignment should be something you verify, not something you perform.
Meetings that should survive
I'm not anti-meeting. I want to be clear about that. Some meetings are valuable.
A meeting where people with different expertise examine a novel problem together — that's valuable. You can't replace that with a dashboard.
A meeting where someone is presenting difficult news and wants to read the room, answer questions in real time, and demonstrate respect for the people affected — that should be a meeting.
A meeting where the team builds shared understanding of something ambiguous — a new market, a strange customer pattern, a technical decision with no clear winner — that benefits from human presence and dialogue.
But these meetings are rare. Maybe one or two a week in a well-run operation. If your calendar shows six meetings a day, five of them are probably system failures wearing a calendar invite.
The test
Here's a simple test for any recurring meeting. Ask: if the information this meeting produces were already visible to everyone who needs it, would we still meet?
If yes, keep the meeting. It's doing something that information alone can't do.
If no — and you'll find this is most of them — don't try to make the meeting shorter or more efficient. Fix the information flow. Build the board. Write the document. Make the status visible. When you do, the meeting will cancel itself. Nobody decided meetings are bad. The meeting just stopped being necessary.
That's not a meeting problem solved. That's a system finally doing its job.