“We often think meetings are the problem. Usually, they’re a symptom of a bigger problem: a broken communication system.”
Poorly run meetings cost trillions of dollars every year yet there are multifaceted drivers for why we keep them as a comfort zone for ‘moving forward’. This powerful insight challenges us to look beyond the surface of meeting overload, beyond the binary concept of how much time we’re spending and look at exactly how much it is costing us and why.
Consider the “visibility bias” : we often equate presence with productivity. Meetings are highly visible, making them status symbols rather than efficient tools. This bias fuels unnecessary meetings and hinders true progress.
Imagine an organization where 30-50% of meetings could be eliminated without negative consequences. While canceling meetings provides relief, the real change comes from employees redesigning what deserves to be a meeting
Applying a “product design” lens means intentionally crafting meetings. Just as you wouldn’t ship a product without user feedback and refinement, why do we tolerate poorly designed meetings that are our most expensive form of collaboration? This approach empowers teams to reclaim their time and focus on valuable synchronous interaction.
This strategy requires leadership buy-in and a psychologically safe environment for employees to decline meetings without guilt. It shifts the mindset from “busyness as a badge of honour” to “impact as a measure of success.”
What’s one “meeting legacy system” in your organization that needs a redesign?
The main insights you’ll get from this episode are :
“We often think meetings are the problem. Usually, they’re a symptom of a bigger problem: a broken communication system.”
This powerful insight challenges us to look beyond the surface of meeting overload, beyond the binary concept of how much time we’re spending and look at exactly how much it is costing us and why.
Consider the “visibility bias” : we often equate presence with productivity. Meetings are highly visible, making them status symbols rather than efficient tools. This bias fuels unnecessary meetings and hinders true progress.
Imagine an organization where 30-50% of meetings could be eliminated without negative consequences. While canceling meetings provides relief, the real change comes from employees redesigning what deserves to be a meeting
Applying a “product design” lens means intentionally crafting meetings. Just as you wouldn’t ship a product without user feedback and refinement, why do we tolerate poorly designed meetings that are our most expensive form of collaboration? This approach empowers teams to reclaim their time and focus on valuable synchronous interaction. AI reinforces ‘busyness’ and its role will depend how we enact it; AI often makes collaboration worse here as it offers an opportunity to cognitively offload hard work.
Applying these meeting strategies requires leadership buy-in and a psychologically safe environment for employees to question the impact and decline meetings without guilt. It shifts the mindset from “busyness as a badge of honour” to “impact as a measure of success.”
What’s one “meeting legacy system” in your organization that needs a redesign?
The main insights you’ll get from this episode are :
- Visibility bias: presence = productivity, but most of the real work takes place behind the scenes, and visibility = value, so meetings become a status symbol.
- The users of the meeting ‘product’ are attendees, but meetings are not generally designed with the user in mind – it tends to be a very poorly optimised product.
- A tangible metric is simply to ask users if the meeting was worth the time they invested, i.e. impact v effort, and what the organiser could do to improve it.
- Calendar cleanses offer temporary relief but no ownership for the users; ‘meeting doomsday’ involves employees proactively deleting meetings.
- Time savings come mostly from small changes that add up, e.g. five minutes shorter, or fewer attendees – this gives employees social permission.
- Meetings are a symptom of a broken communication system in which employees do not understand how they contribute to the bigger picture.
- AI reinforces ‘busyness’ and its role will depend how we enact it; AI makes collaboration worse as it offers an opportunity to cognitively offload hard work.
- There is a trend to over-index on tech, but we must be intentional and clarify how the AI is in service to the humans in the room.
- Collaboration overload and intensification of work with AI means that strategic collaboration will be required for specific types of output.
- Meeting design demonstrates leadership in an organisation, and the ability to rescue a meeting that is going badly.
- Leaders need to create a psychologically safe environment in which employees can tell leaders when the tech is not working.
- In the face of cognitive debt, we must use tech to become more strategic, and leverage AI to become more human, e.g. in terms of meeting schedules.
- Apply the rule of halves to one dimension of a dysfunctional meeting to trigger positive questioning and healthy conversation (with a potential domino effect).
Find our more about Rebecca and her work here :
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-hinds
https://www.glean.com/work-ai-institute
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-Best-Meeting-Ever-Principles/dp/1399640305
