On the origin of bad meetings

One would think that companies would have learned how to have useful meetings by now. The cost of wasteful meetings is so high that you’d expect companies that can’t run effective meetings to die out in Darwinian fashion.

But sadly that hasn’t happened! My career (before my indie game company) was full of wasteful meetings, the number of which increased as I climbed up the ranks.

I’ve seen bad meeting patterns everywhere in my career. They seem ubiquitous throughout the industry. Here’s my take on the most common issues, followed by ideas to make them better.

Interminable meetings

At one point I was in a bi-weekly retrospective where we’d cycle around a room of 75 people, each person giving as many answers to three questions — “what went well”, “what didn’t go well”, and “what can we do better” — as they could think of. The meeting regularly ran to two hours, and sometimes more.

It was a well-intentioned meeting - “democratic” and everyone was “listened” to. But can there possibly be a more inefficient, soul-crushing meeting? Nobody wants to sit in that room for two hours listening to hundreds upon hundreds of ideas, while each person speaks on average for 1% of the meeting.

Here’s a better idea- send an online survey each week to your team, with three text boxes. Take 30 minutes of your own time to summarize the results and email them back to the team. You’ve just saved 300 people-hours a month, indefinitely.

Agendaless meetings

A common phrase in these meetings is: “Does anyone have anything to talk about?”

Agendaless meetings are disrespectful of people’s time. Solve the decision that needs to be solved, then end the meeting. This meeting is probably not the right forum for everything that’s on anyone’s mind.

The person who runs this meeting is not doing their job. It falls on the owner of the meeting to come up with an agenda or cancel the meeting.

Having an agenda requires preparation, which many people are loath to do; but preparation is one of the most important requirements for having good meetings.

Recurring meetings

These are the most dangerous. If a single meeting is a waste of time, it’s annoying. But when a recurring meeting is wasteful, that cost is added every single week, like a tax.

But the kicker is that recurring meetings are actually more likely to waste your time. To call a single meeting, someone had to take the initiative, have a purpose for calling the meeting, and invite the right people. The person who called the meeting needs something (probably a decision) and is acting to get it done.

What typically happens in a recurring meeting is what I call meeting inertia. The meeting has a general agenda, but not a specific agenda. The number of people on the invite list increases inexorably. Nobody is willing to stand up and say the meeting is not effective, they all just go through the motions and let their time be wasted.

The owner of a recurring meeting needs to maintain responsibility for the effectiveness of the meeting over its whole lifespan. Setting the meeting up is not enough; you need to actively monitor its effectiveness and change or cancel the meeting as it evolves.

Why do these patterns persist?

My theory is that it’s a form of decision fatigue, as described in this Economist article.

The academics write that decision fatigue “typically involves a tendency to revert to the ‘default’ option, namely whatever choice involves relatively little mental effort”.

People are mentally exhausted at work! We switch context hundreds of times a day, sit on endless Zoom meetings, make zillions of decisions a day. Who wants to take the energy to fix a meeting that nobody else has bothered fixing? The default option is to do nothing.

Multiply that by the sheer number of recurring meetings, and you’d feel like a regular Sisyphus fighting this battle against the avalanche of stupid meetings.

What’s the common thread here? Laziness causes bad meetings. All of these problems can be fixed by just a little bit of work — preparing for meetings, setting agendas, tweaking the structure, canceling stale meetings. But nobody bothers because we’re all too tired.

What does a good meeting look like?

First and foremost, you have to be proactive! A moderate amount of work in preparing meetings will go a long way towards the happiness and effectiveness of your team. Here are some rules to follow.

• Have an agenda. Whoever calls the meeting should have a specific agenda in mind and communicate it beforehand. Once that agenda is complete, end the meeting.
• Be prepared. Make sure that everybody in the meeting reads the relevant documentation beforehand, and start the meeting by jumping right into discussion. Don’t give people an out by asking “did everybody already read the [proposal, document]”. Set the expectation that they already did. People who came unprepared will fidget uncomfortably, ask stupid questions, and come better prepared next week.
• Don’t invite people that aren’t necessary. And don’t invite people just cause their feelings would hurt. Good people will appreciate that you respected their time.
• Don’t have meetings that can easily be done over email / slack. Remember, meetings are involuntary interrupts that might not work well with any given person’s schedule or work habits.
• Be very careful with recurring meetings. The owner of a recurring meeting has to be very diligent by monitoring the meeting for effectiveness, and making changes as necessary. You have to prune the meeting every so often or else it’ll grow into a monster.

How to implement it

It starts at the top. Ideally, the leaders of the company will set expectations about running efficient meetings. It has to happen this way because they are the ones running meetings and managing the mid-level people that run meetings. There’s little hope for bottom-up meeting revolutions.

Companies that insist on these types of rules will see their meeting culture change over time. As people see the benefits of efficient meetings, they start to demand it from each other, in a virtuous cycle.

It requires diligence to maintain good meeting hygiene. Otherwise the good practices will decay over time and give way to meeting inertia. The leaders of the company ultimately are the ones responsible for reinforcing it, and setting the right example for managers and employees.