The $50 Billion Meeting Problem Nobody Wants to Fix
Another day, another pointless meeting that could have been an email.
The average knowledge worker now spends 38% of their week in meetings.
I worked out recently that my clients are collectively spending over $2 million per year on meetings that produce no tangible outcomes.
That’s not including the opportunity cost of what doesn’t get done while everyone’s sitting around a table discussing things that could be resolved in a five-minute conversation. The meeting culture has become so entrenched that people feel guilty when they’re not in meetings. I’ve had managers tell me they don’t feel productive unless their calendar is completely booked with back-to-back sessions.
We’ve created a culture where being busy is more important than being useful.
What most leaders refuse to acknowledge: most of them are just poor planning disguised as collaboration.
Remember that last “touch base” you sat through. How much actual useful communication happened? How many concrete decisions emerged?
The dirty secret of meeting culture is that most meetings exist to make executives feel like they’re in control, not to actually solve problems or make progress.
This isn’t collaboration – it’s social performance for leaders who can’t communicate clearly outside of a formal setting. It’s management theatre, performed for an audience of captive colleagues.
The meeting that nearly broke my faith in corporate sanity.
I watched a marketing department spend nearly two hours in a meeting discussing why their previous meeting had run overtime.
The first meeting ran for ninety minutes. The agenda covered twelve different projects, most of which only involved two or three people in the room. By the end, everyone knew a little bit about everything, but nobody had the time to actually work on anything.
Within a month, they were having meetings to plan meetings, and follow-up meetings to discuss what was covered in the previous meetings. The project delays got worse, not better. The irony was completely lost on them. They genuinely couldn’t see that the meeting about meetings was the exact problem they were trying to solve.
Digital meetings have removed the natural barriers that used to limit how often we got together.
In the old days, you had to book a room, coordinate schedules, and physically gather people. That friction meant you only called meetings when they were genuinely necessary.
I’ve seen teams where it’s literally impossible to find a three-hour block of uninterrupted time in anyone’s calendar.
The result? Meeting explosion. What used to be a phone call is now a scheduled session with presentations. Every day is fragmented into thirty-minute chunks between various meetings.
The thing that makes my blood boil: the belief that more communication automatically leads to better decisions.
Sometimes the best thing you can do for a project is leave people alone to actually work on it.
There’s a reason why the most groundbreaking companies – think Apple in their early days – were famous for rapid decision-making.
Every concept needed to be presented in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was mediocre work that had been committee-approved into blandness. The innovative solutions died in the endless feedback loops.
Innovation doesn’t happen in conference rooms full of stakeholders.
Meeting culture has developed its own language that disguises waste as wisdom.
“I think we need a deeper dive” – translation: “I haven’t thought this through, but I don’t want to look unprepared.”
{{“{Let’s get everyone in a room|We need all the stakeholders aligned|This requires a cross-functional approach}” – translation: “I’m afraid to make a decision, so let’s spread the responsibility around.”|The phrase “let’s unpack this” makes me want to {scream|lose my mind|run for the hills}.}}
“I’ll send out a calendar invite” – translation: “Nothing will actually change, but we’ll create the illusion of progress through scheduling.” It’s become corporate speak for “let’s turn a simple issue into an hour-long discussion that resolves nothing.”
But here’s where I’ll probably lose some people: most “collaborative” meetings are actually counterproductive to real teamwork.
Real problem-solving happens in uninterrupted spaces where experts can think deeply without the pressure of contributing for an audience.
Collaboration isn’t sitting in a room brainstorming from scratch – it’s capable professionals bringing their best thinking to a time-limited discussion. The meetings that actually work are the ones where people come with solutions, not the ones where they come to figure things out together.
What are the alternatives to meeting madness?
Introduce friction back into the meeting process.
I love the organisations that have instituted “meeting-free days” where scheduling are simply not allowed.
Some organisations assign a dollar cost to meetings based on the time value of attendees. When you see that your “quick sync” is costing $800 per hour, you start to think differently about whether it’s necessary. The productivity improvements are usually obvious.
Separate communication from collaboration.
Most meeting content should be documented communication.
The engineering teams that do this well have real-time visibility that eliminates the need for progress reviews entirely.
I worked with a consulting firm that replaced their weekly progress reviews with a simple online dashboard. Meeting time dropped by half, and project visibility actually improved. Everyone can see what’s happening without sitting through verbal updates.
Third, embrace the fact that not everyone needs to be included in every decision.
The best managers I know are strategic about who they consult in different types of decisions.
Inclusion is important for strategic changes, but not every choice requires group consensus. Most day-to-day issues should be made by the individuals closest to the work. They understand that broader input isn’t always valuable voices.
Here’s the metric that changed everything for me:
Track the ratio of meeting time to implementation time on your key initiatives.
I’ve consulted with teams where people were working evenings to complete tasks because their normal working hours were consumed by discussions.
Sometimes the ratio is even worse. Effective teams flip this ratio. They spend limited time in meetings and maximum time on execution. The talking serves the doing, not the other way around.
That’s not productivity – it’s dysfunction.
The emotional investment in meeting culture is worth examining.
There’s also a security in meetings. If you’re in meetings all day, you can’t be blamed for not producing work.
Actually doing work is often solitary, uncertain, and doesn’t provide the same social feedback as facilitating a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your productivity, even if they don’t generate outcomes.
Look, I’m not suggesting we eliminate all meetings.
The meetings that work are purposeful, thoroughly organised, and action-oriented. They bring together the necessary participants to solve problems that require immediate input.
Everything else is just social ritual that wastes the time and energy that could be directed on actual work. They’re strategic about when to use them, disciplined about how to run them, and realistic about whether they’re working.
What I wish every leader understood about meetings:
Good meetings solve problems permanently rather than creating ongoing debate cycles.
Poor meetings generate more meetings.
Choose accordingly.
The future of workplace success depends on it.
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