I have sat in thousands of meetings. I have run companies from them, lost money in them, hired in them, and fired in them. And after doing this long enough, I have come to a fairly simple conclusion.
Most meetings are where progress goes to die quietly and politely.
That is not a productivity take. It is an observation about incentives. Meetings feel like work. They are scheduled. They have agendas. People show up prepared. By the time it is over, everyone has said something, which creates the sensation of having done something. Then everyone goes back to their desk and nothing changes.
Why meetings fail
The problem is not the meeting. It is what the meeting is for.
Most meetings are called to process information that could have been an email, to create consensus that was never really in question, or to give someone the feeling of being consulted without actually giving them authority. None of those are real reasons to gather people in a room.
Real decisions are almost never made in meetings. They are made before or after. The meeting is where they are announced, debated, or ratified. Which means most of what happens in a meeting is theatre.
The people in the room know this. That is why energy is low. That is why phones come out. That is why the same meeting ends up rescheduled in two weeks because nothing was resolved.
The only kind worth having
There is one meeting worth having. It looks like this.
One decision needs to be made. The person who makes it is in the room. Everyone else who is present has information that decision requires. The meeting ends when the decision is made.
That is it. That is the whole framework.
No update meetings. No alignment meetings. No standing weekly where everyone goes through their list. Those are rituals that serve the organisation chart, not the work.
If you need people aligned, write it down and send it. If you need updates, build a system that gives them to you without a meeting. If something needs to be decided, get the right person in a room with the right information and close it.
What this actually requires
Running meetings this way requires something most organisations do not have: clarity about who decides what. If that is not defined, every meeting becomes a negotiation about authority dressed up as a discussion about the work. That negotiation never ends.
The clearest teams I have ever worked with had almost no meetings. Not because they communicated less. Because they had already done the harder work of figuring out who owns what, which meant decisions could be made fast, without committee.
The fastest I have ever moved on a problem is when I could decide it myself. The slowest I have ever moved is when I needed a room full of people to feel comfortable before anything happened.
The meeting is never the problem. The unclear ownership is. Fix that, and the calendar sorts itself.