Why most meetings fail
Meetings don't fail because they're meetings. They fail because they're held without the preconditions that make them useful.
The meeting backlash has gone too far. Not all meetings are waste. Most are. But the solution isn't "fewer meetings." The solution is: meet when the preconditions are met, and don't when they aren't.
The preconditions for a useful meeting
- A specific decision to be made
- Clear decision-maker
- Pre-read that participants have actually read
- Everyone needed is present
- A time box
Without all five, the meeting will extend to fill its time, produce no actual decisions, and leave everyone feeling vaguely productive because something happened.
The pre-read gap
The biggest single failure mode is the pre-read. People say they read the doc and then, in the meeting, demonstrate they didn't. The meeting becomes 40 minutes of catching up on the doc, and 5 minutes of the actual decision.
The fix I've seen work: silent reading at the start of the meeting. 10 minutes. Everyone reads. Then discuss. Ugly, but it works.
The "we need to align" meeting
Most alignment meetings exist because nobody wrote down the decision. The meeting is compensating for a documentation failure upstream. The solution isn't another meeting; it's a memo.
Every time someone says "we need to get everyone aligned," the question should be: aligned on what? If you can write it down in a paragraph, start with the paragraph.