Meetings are not the problem
I’ve been thinking about meetings for a long time. Not because I enjoy thinking about them, but because they keep getting in the way. And the longer I watch organizations, the clearer one thing becomes: meetings are rarely the problem people think they are. They’re a symptom.
Here’s the core idea, stripped down as far as I can get it:
Meetings are a surrogate for collaboration.
They appear when real collaboration isn’t possible yet.
And no, this is usually not a conscious choice. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Let’s avoid collaboration and replace it with meetings.” It happens subconsciously, almost automatically, as a system response to low trust, weak relationships, and a lack of shared inner state.
When collaboration actually works
I stumbled across it by chance. We had restructured our team: self-organization, smart and trust. All the practical, human, and productive things. Becoming faster. More focus. More collaboration.
And suddenly we look at our calendars and realize: the meetings have disappeared. Almost all of them. (And as the self-organization was killed again by new management, first thing was meetings came back.)
When collaboration actually works, people don’t need to talk about it. They just work together. Decisions are made while doing the work. Code gets written, designs evolve, strategies become clearer, problems get solved. Sometimes two people are involved, sometimes five, sometimes more. But nobody feels the need to put a label on it.
Interestingly, we rarely call that a meeting. We call it work. Because …
The focus is the outcome.
Meetings start to appear when this kind of working together isn’t safe, isn’t trusted, or isn’t possible. When people don’t dare to decide. When responsibility is unclear. When relationships are too thin to carry disagreement. Then collaboration gets enforced. It gets scheduled. It gets framed. And the moment you enforce something that should be voluntary, resistance appears. Quiet resistance, usually. Fatigue. Cynicism. Calendar battles.
The strange disappearance of meetings
There’s a strange dynamic here that many people miss: as collaboration capability grows, meetings disappear. Not because someone banned them, not because of a new policy, but because they’re no longer needed.
For some people, that thought is unsettling. Meetings give structure, visibility, and a sense of being involved. For others, it sounds like a dream come true. Both reactions are worth paying attention to.
Why most meetings don’t feel like work
If you look closely at most meetings, you’ll notice something else. Very few of them are actually about getting work done. They’re about opinions. About alignment. About positioning. Maybe importance. About making sure nothing bad happens. Sometimes about making sure someone important is present.
Importance is something different than meaning.
Again, this isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a structural one.
When people come together and genuinely produce something — a decision, a piece of software, a design, a plan that actually changes behavior — we usually don’t experience that as a meeting. It feels completely different. Lighter. More focused. More alive.
In a collaborative environment, this becomes normal. The focus shifts from “Who needs to be involved?” to a much more uncomfortable question: What is the simplest possible way to get this done well?
That question cuts deep.
Intelligence is mostly about avoidance
At a system level, intelligence is mostly about avoidance. Avoiding unnecessary steps. Avoiding friction. Avoiding waste. “Maximize the work not done” sounds provocative, but it’s really about respect — for energy, attention, and time.
And one of the biggest sources of waste in organizations is ego.
This is uncomfortable to say, but hard to ignore once you see it. Ego loves meetings. Meetings create stages. Stages create hierarchy. Hierarchy creates importance. And importance can feel very good, especially when something else is missing.
Since Henry Ford, we haven’t changed that much in how we organize work. Not because we couldn’t do better, but because the pyramid still works surprisingly well as a compensation. If someone feels empty inside, standing a bit higher up can feel like meaning. It’s not the real thing, but it works — for a while.
As long as we’re busy.
As long as we’re distracted.
As long as we don’t listen too closely.
Importance is not meaning
There’s usually a moment later in life when this compensation stops working. Health changes. Time becomes limited. And a question appears that can’t be postponed anymore: Was this really what all that effort was for?
That’s a hard moment to realize that importance was never meaning. It was a substitute.
Meaning comes from only two places: being part of something larger than yourself, and being in real relationships. No meeting can replace that.
A simple experiment
If you want to play with this idea, try a simple experiment. Just observe your next few workdays with a slightly different lens. Where do you see politics instead of progress? Where do you see bottlenecks created by “importance”? Where do signatures, approvals, or meetings exist mainly to confirm status rather than to move something forward?
And, gently, where do you notice the same patterns in yourself?
This isn’t about guilt. It’s about clarity. Because once you see it, you have a choice. You can keep trading meaning for importance — or you can start letting go.
No more meetings — as a consequence
So no, this isn’t a call to ban meetings. It’s something much simpler, and much harder.
When collaboration grows, meetings fade. When trust deepens, calendars clear. When people start working together for real, enforced togetherness becomes unnecessary.
No more meetings — not as a rule, but as a consequence.
And for many organizations, that wouldn’t just save an absurd amount of money. It would make work feel human again.
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