Meetings Aren't the Problem

A bad meeting can turn a manageable day into a Bad Day faster than almost anything else at work. That’s why we spend so much time trying to fix them.

We have all made many attempts over the years. Better agendas. Better facilitation. More participation. Clearer actions. Less PowerPoint. Shorter. Standing up. Fewer meetings altogether.

Then I was talking to someone who has decided to stop trying to change meeting culture, not because meetings don't matter, but because meetings aren't really the problem. Meetings are simply where organisational culture becomes visible. After all, if you sit quietly in a meeting for long enough, you learn a remarkable amount about an organisation.

You learn who speaks first, who gets interrupted, whether people challenge ideas or wait for permission, and whether disagreement is welcomed, tolerated, or quietly punished. You see whether decisions are genuinely made together or whether everyone is waiting to hear what the most senior person thinks.

In many ways, meetings are culture in action. Which raises an uncomfortable possibility.

What if the reason so many attempts to improve meetings fail is that we're treating them as an isolated process problem? What if meetings simply reflect the system around them? A highly hierarchical organisation often has highly hierarchical meetings. A risk-averse organisation often has cautious meetings. A collaborative organisation often has collaborative meetings.

The meeting itself may not be creating those dynamics. It may simply be revealing them. Because the meeting is not the problem; it's the clue. And often what we're seeing in the meeting room is simply the rest of the culture, condensed into one hour on a Tuesday morning.

And perhaps that's why we so often focus on fixing meetings themselves. Meetings are visible. We can redesign an agenda, introduce a new format, shorten the duration or establish new ground rules. Changing culture, power dynamics and decision-making norms is considerably harder.

Interestingly, on the surface, meetings feel like collaboration, as if gathering people in a room makes it more equitable. But attendance is not the same thing as contribution, and discussion is not the same thing as shared ownership.

Plus, there’s also a status dimension to all of this. Meetings can signal importance. They tell us who is involved, who has influence and where decisions are made. In some workplaces, being invited to a meeting can feel almost as important as the meeting itself.

Which means that when we try to reduce meetings or change how they operate, we're not just changing a process. We're potentially challenging long-established ideas about authority, visibility and belonging.

That doesn't mean we should stop trying to run better meetings. Good meetings matter. They save time, improve decisions and make work feel less frustrating. But perhaps when a meeting isn't working, one of the most useful questions isn't, "How do we fix this meeting?" Perhaps it's: "What is this meeting telling us about the organisation?"