Meetings feel pointless because they’re scheduled when someone doesn’t know how to get what they need without gathering everyone in a room.
That’s it. The entire dysfunction of meeting culture compresses into that single structural problem. Organizations treat meetings as the default coordination mechanism because they don’t have better systems for decision-making, information transfer, or alignment. The meeting becomes a catch-all solution for every coordination need, which means it’s optimized for none of them.
The pointlessness isn’t incidental. It’s the predictable outcome of using synchronous group discussion to solve problems that don’t require synchronous group discussion.
What Meetings Replace
Before meetings, someone needed something: information, a decision, alignment across teams, or resolution of a conflict. Rather than building systems that provide these things efficiently, organizations schedule meetings.
The meeting substitutes for several things that should exist independently:
A meeting scheduled to share information replaces documentation. If the information were written clearly and distributed, no meeting would be needed. The meeting exists because no one wrote it down or because the documentation is so poor that verbal explanation is necessary.
A meeting scheduled to make a decision replaces clear decision authority. If everyone knew who had authority to decide and what information that person needed, the decision could happen asynchronously. The meeting exists because decision rights are unclear or because the actual decision-maker doesn’t want sole accountability.
A meeting scheduled to get alignment replaces shared context and goals. If teams understood priorities and had visibility into each other’s work, alignment would emerge naturally. The meeting exists because organizational context is fragmented and teams work from different assumptions about what matters.
A meeting scheduled to resolve conflict replaces functional incentive structures. If people had aligned incentives and clear boundaries, most conflicts wouldn’t exist. The meeting exists because the organization created competing goals and now needs humans to negotiate the contradictions.
In each case, the meeting is treating a symptom. The underlying problem is that the organization lacks the infrastructure to coordinate without synchronous discussion.
The Meeting As Accountability Displacement
Meetings persist partly because they displace accountability in useful ways. When something goes wrong after a meeting, everyone was consulted. No individual bears sole responsibility for the outcome.
This makes meetings attractive to managers who want to make decisions without taking full ownership of them. Gathering stakeholders and reaching consensus means the decision is collective. If it fails, the failure is also collective. The manager can point to the meeting: everyone agreed, all voices were heard, the decision followed proper process.
The alternative would be clearer. A manager with decision authority makes the call, documents the reasoning, and owns the outcome. This creates accountability but also risk. The meeting dilutes both.
Organizations that rely heavily on meetings usually have cultures where individual accountability is dangerous. Making a decision alone and being wrong is career-limiting. Making a decision in a meeting and being wrong is just bad luck. The meeting protects people from the consequences of their judgment.
This is why pointless meetings multiply in risk-averse organizations. The meeting isn’t there to improve decisions. It’s there to spread blame if decisions fail.
The Synchronous Tax
Every meeting imposes two costs: the duration of the meeting multiplied by the number of participants, plus the context-switching overhead for each person attending.
A one-hour meeting with eight people costs eight person-hours. If those eight people were doing focused work before the meeting, each loses additional time recovering context after. Research on context switching suggests this overhead ranges from 15 to 30 minutes per interruption depending on task complexity. A one-hour meeting might actually cost ten to twelve person-hours when switching costs are included.
Organizations schedule thousands of these. The aggregate cost is millions of hours annually. Most meetings produce no decisions, no new information that couldn’t have been shared asynchronously, and no alignment that couldn’t have been achieved through better documentation.
The synchronous tax compounds when meetings require preparation. If eight people each spend 30 minutes preparing for a one-hour meeting, the actual cost is twelve hours of meeting time plus ten to twelve hours of context-switching overhead. Twenty-four person-hours for a single one-hour meeting.
Organizations that track meeting costs in terms of duration only are undercounting by a factor of two or three. The real cost includes preparation, context switching, and the opportunity cost of what else could have been done with that focused time.
Why No One Ends Meetings Early
Meetings are scheduled for specific durations: 30 minutes, one hour, 90 minutes. They almost always consume the full allocated time regardless of whether the agenda requires it.
This happens because the meeting duration isn’t based on the work to be done. It’s based on calendar defaults. Scheduling software offers 30-minute and 60-minute blocks. People pick one. The meeting expands to fill the available time.
Ending a meeting early requires someone to explicitly declare that the purpose has been fulfilled and no more discussion is needed. This is socially awkward in most organizational cultures. It suggests that someone misjudged how long the discussion would take or that the meeting was unnecessary to begin with.
Both implications create mild discomfort. Rather than end early, participants fill time with tangential discussion, revisiting points already covered, or expanding the scope to topics that weren’t on the agenda. This creates the experience of wasting time while sitting in a meeting that could have ended 20 minutes ago.
Organizations that don’t end meetings early are signaling that calendar time is more valuable than participant time. The schedule must be respected even if the work is done.
The Status Signaling Function
Meetings also serve status functions unrelated to coordination. Being invited to a meeting signals inclusion. Attending important meetings signals seniority. Having a crowded calendar full of meetings signals demand for your input.
This creates perverse incentives. People want to be invited to meetings even if their presence adds no value because being excluded suggests they’re not important. Managers schedule meetings with large attendee lists to signal that the topic is important or that they have authority over many people.
Meetings become visibility performance. Participants attend not because they need to be there but because being there proves they’re relevant. The meeting serves an organizational theater function: demonstrating who is included in decisions even if their inclusion doesn’t affect the decision.
This is why meeting attendee lists grow over time. Each person invited can argue that someone else at their level or in their function should also be included. Excluding anyone creates the perception of disrespect or lack of voice. The meeting balloons to include everyone who might feel slighted by exclusion.
The coordination work that supposedly requires the meeting could often be done by three people in 15 minutes. The actual meeting involves twelve people for an hour because the status signaling function requires broader attendance than the coordination function.
The False Consensus Trap
Meetings often end with apparent consensus that doesn’t actually exist. Someone proposes a path forward. A few people voice agreement. No one objects strongly enough to block the decision. The meeting concludes with everyone aligned.
Then people leave and do different things. The consensus was false. What looked like agreement was actually people deciding that the cost of arguing in the meeting wasn’t worth it, that the decision wouldn’t affect them directly, or that pushing back would be politically damaging.
False consensus happens because meetings create social pressure toward agreement. Disagreeing publicly requires explaining your reasoning, potentially contradicting people with more authority, and extending the meeting. In many organizational cultures, this carries social cost. It’s easier to let the group move forward and then quietly do something different.
This means meetings can create the appearance of coordination while actually creating divergence. Everyone leaves thinking there’s alignment because no one objected. Then implementation reveals that people had fundamentally different understandings of what was decided.
Organizations that rely on meetings for alignment get coordination theater instead. The meeting produces consensus in the room that evaporates immediately after.
When Meetings Actually Work
Meetings do serve useful functions in specific circumstances. The failure is using them for everything instead of matching coordination mechanism to coordination need.
Meetings work for real-time negotiation where multiple parties need to adjust positions based on each other’s responses. Contract negotiations, conflict resolution between teams, or architectural decisions requiring immediate trade-off evaluation benefit from synchronous discussion.
Meetings work for building shared understanding of complex topics where people need to ask questions and get immediate clarification. Explaining a new system architecture or walking through a production incident benefits from real-time interaction.
Meetings work for maintaining social connection in remote or distributed teams. Purely social meetings serve a legitimate function even if they don’t produce decisions or transfer information.
The problem is that most meetings serve none of these functions. They’re information transfer that should be documentation. They’re decisions that should have clear ownership. They’re status updates that should be dashboards. They’re alignment that should come from shared goals and visibility.
Organizations use meetings as the default because they don’t want to build the systems that would make most meetings unnecessary.
What Should Replace Most Meetings
The alternative to meeting culture isn’t no coordination. It’s coordination infrastructure that doesn’t require synchronous group time.
Information transfer should happen through documentation. Write clearly, organize information logically, make it searchable. If you can’t explain something in writing, you probably don’t understand it well enough to explain it in a meeting either.
Decisions should have clear ownership. One person or group has authority to decide. They gather input asynchronously through documents or structured feedback. They make the call and document the reasoning. No meeting required.
Status updates should be automated or dashboard-based. If people need to speak status updates in meetings, the systems aren’t instrumented properly. Build visibility into the work itself.
Alignment should come from shared context and goals. If teams understand priorities and can see what others are working on, they align naturally. If they can’t, adding a meeting doesn’t fix the underlying context fragmentation.
Building these systems takes upfront investment. Writing good documentation is harder than talking through something in a meeting. Creating clear decision authority means accepting accountability. Building dashboards requires instrumentation. Establishing shared context takes ongoing communication work.
Organizations prefer meetings because meetings require no infrastructure investment. They’re free in the moment, even though they’re expensive in aggregate.
Why Meeting Culture Persists
Meeting culture persists because meetings benefit the people who schedule them even when they waste time for attendees. The person calling the meeting gets what they need: information, input, visibility, or accountability distribution. The cost falls on everyone else.
This creates a tragedy of the commons. Each individual manager schedules meetings that make sense from their perspective. The aggregate effect is calendars so full of meetings that no one has time for focused work. But no individual meeting is obviously wasteful enough to eliminate.
The solution would require coordination across the organization to establish norms about when meetings are appropriate and to invest in systems that reduce coordination overhead. This is exactly the kind of coordination problem that organizations typically solve by scheduling a meeting.
So they schedule a meeting about improving meeting culture, discuss best practices for 60 minutes, achieve false consensus that everyone will be more thoughtful about scheduling, and then continue scheduling meetings at the same rate because the underlying incentives and infrastructure haven’t changed.
The meetings don’t feel pointless because the wrong people attend or because agendas aren’t clear. They feel pointless because they exist to compensate for organizational systems that should work differently but don’t.
Fixing this requires acknowledging that most coordination problems don’t require meetings. They require better documentation, clearer authority, shared context, and visibility tools. Building these takes work that most organizations won’t do because scheduling a meeting is easier.