My Thoughts

The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible (And It's Not What You Think)

Three months ago, I sat through a ninety-minute "alignment session" where we spent forty-seven minutes discussing the colour scheme for our quarterly newsletter that gets sent to roughly twelve people.

That's when it hit me. We're not having meetings anymore—we're having elaborate avoidance rituals disguised as productivity theatre.

After seventeen years of facilitating workshops, running teams, and watching Australian businesses tie themselves in knots over basic communication, I've identified the real culprit behind our meeting epidemic. It's not technology. It's not generational differences. It's not even poor facilitation skills, though lord knows we've got plenty of that going around.

The problem is simpler and more insidious: we've forgotten that meetings are supposed to solve problems, not create them.

The Comfort Zone Conspiracy

Here's what nobody wants to admit—most meetings exist because making decisions is bloody uncomfortable. It's easier to schedule another "touch base" than to actually touch base with reality. I've watched entire organisations develop elaborate meeting cadences that ensure no one ever has to make a definitive call about anything.

Take project kick-offs. Remember when those used to last two hours and you'd walk out knowing exactly who was doing what by when? Now they're sprawling three-day affairs with breakout sessions, vision boarding, and something called "stakeholder journey mapping." By day three, everyone's exhausted, the scope has doubled, and nobody can remember what problem we were originally trying to solve.

The irony? All this collaborative process is making us less collaborative, not more.

The Meeting Industrial Complex

I blame the productivity gurus partially. You know the ones—they've convinced us that every conversation needs a formal framework, every discussion requires a documented process, and every decision must involve everyone who might possibly be affected by it.

Wrong.

Some of the best business decisions I've witnessed happened in five-minute corridor conversations between two people who actually understood the problem. But try suggesting that in today's "inclusive" workplace and watch how quickly you get labelled as someone who "doesn't value diverse perspectives."

Here's a radical thought: not everyone needs to be involved in every decision. In fact, involving too many people in routine decisions is one of the fastest ways to guarantee you'll make terrible ones.

The sweet spot for most operational decisions? Three people maximum. One person who understands the problem, one person who'll implement the solution, and one person who'll live with the consequences.

That's it.

The Australian Factor

We've got a particular problem here in Australia that I don't see discussed enough. Our cultural tendency towards consensus-building, whilst generally admirable, becomes a liability in meeting environments. We're so concerned with making sure everyone feels heard that we've lost the ability to distinguish between input and noise.

I consulted with a Melbourne-based tech startup last year where they were holding weekly "culture alignment meetings" that regularly ran for three hours. Three hours! To discuss whether their Friday afternoon drinks should start at 4:30 or 5:00 PM. When I pointed out they could probably just pick a time and see how it goes, the CEO looked at me like I'd suggested they sacrifice a goat in the boardroom.

This isn't collaboration—it's paralysis with better catering.

The Remote Work Red Herring

Don't even get me started on how remote work has supposedly "changed everything" about meetings. It hasn't changed the fundamentals at all. A bad meeting is a bad meeting whether you're wearing pants or not.

What remote work has done is expose just how many of our in-person meetings were completely pointless. When you remove the social pressure of physical presence, the hollow nature of most "strategic discussions" becomes painfully obvious.

The companies that adapted quickly to remote work weren't the ones that invested in fancy video conferencing setups—they were the ones that already had clear decision-making processes. Time management training becomes crucial when you can't rely on casual hallway conversations to sort out the mess your meetings created.

The Permission Paradox

Here's something that'll make you uncomfortable: the best meeting facilitators I know are borderline dictatorial. They cut people off. They redirect tangents. They make unilateral decisions about what deserves discussion time and what doesn't.

This flies in the face of everything we've been taught about inclusive leadership, but it's absolutely essential. Someone needs to have the authority to say "that's interesting, but it's not why we're here" without spending fifteen minutes explaining their reasoning or checking for consensus.

The most effective leaders I've worked with treat meetings like surgical procedures—highly focused, carefully planned, and over as quickly as possible. They understand that respect for people's time trumps respect for people's need to be heard on every single topic.

The Cost Nobody Calculates

Let's talk numbers for a moment. A typical middle manager in Sydney earns about $95,000 annually. That's roughly $45 per hour when you factor in overheads. Your weekly team meeting with eight people costs your organisation approximately $180 per hour.

Now multiply that by the number of meetings each person attends per week. For most office workers, it's somewhere between twelve and twenty hours. We're talking about thousands of dollars in labour costs for what often amounts to elaborate status updates that could have been handled via email.

But here's the real kicker—the opportunity cost. Every hour spent in a pointless meeting is an hour not spent solving actual problems, serving customers, or developing skills that matter. Managing difficult conversations training exists because we've created so many unnecessary meetings that people have forgotten how to have direct, purposeful discussions.

The Solution Hidden in Plain Sight

The fix isn't complicated, but it requires courage. Start cancelling meetings that don't have clear, measurable outcomes. Not objectives—outcomes. If you can't articulate exactly what will be different in the world after your meeting ends, you probably don't need the meeting.

Replace status updates with asynchronous reporting. Use shared documents. Send voice messages. Do literally anything except gathering eight people in a room to listen to Dave from accounts explain why his quarterly numbers are slightly behind target.

Reserve face-to-face time for genuine collaboration—when you need to solve complex problems, navigate conflict, or make decisions that require real-time discussion. Everything else is just social media for the office.

Here's my personal rule: if the meeting could be a phone call, make it a phone call. If the phone call could be an email, send an email. If the email could be a text message, text it. And if it doesn't need to be communicated at all? Don't.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most meetings happen because someone feels they should happen, not because they need to happen. We've created a culture where calling a meeting is seen as leadership, when often the most leadership thing you can do is recognise that a meeting would be counterproductive.

The businesses that thrive in the next decade won't be the ones with the best meeting software or the most sophisticated collaboration platforms. They'll be the ones that figured out how to make decisions quickly with minimal fuss.

That means accepting that not every voice needs to be heard on every topic. It means trusting people to do their jobs without constantly checking in. And it means having the discipline to resist the urge to turn every minor coordination issue into a forty-five-minute discussion about "alignment."

The irony of writing 1,400 words about keeping things simple isn't lost on me. But sometimes you need to over-explain simplicity before people will accept it.

Your meetings are terrible because you're having too many of them, with too many people, about things that don't require meetings. The solution isn't better meetings—it's fewer meetings.

Try it for a month and thank me later.