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The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible (And Why Your Boss Will Never Admit It)

Three weeks ago, I sat through a two-hour "alignment meeting" where we spent forty-seven minutes discussing the font size on a presentation that nobody would ever see again. The meeting organiser—let's call him Dave because that's actually his name—insisted we needed to "circle back" on everything while simultaneously "keeping things high-level." By the time we finished, I'd aged approximately three years and developed a nervous twitch.

This wasn't unusual. This was Tuesday.

After running my consultancy for eighteen years and sitting through roughly 4,000 meetings (yes, I actually counted during a particularly boring quarterly review), I've cracked the code on why most business meetings are absolute disasters. It's not what you think. It's not poor planning, lack of agendas, or even those people who join five minutes late with their coffee still steaming.

The real problem? Nobody wants to admit they're completely winging it.

The Great Australian Meeting Charade

Here's what really happens in 73% of corporate meetings across Australia: someone books a room because they think they should have a meeting, then spends the actual meeting trying to figure out why they called it in the first place. Meanwhile, everyone else pretends they understand what's happening while secretly checking their phones under the table.

I learned this the hard way back in 2009 when I was running operations for a mid-sized logistics company in Brisbane. We had weekly "strategy sessions" that were actually just public therapy sessions for the CEO's decision paralysis. Three months in, I realised nobody—including the CEO—knew what we were strategising about.

The meeting culture in most Australian businesses operates like a bizarre cargo cult. We've seen successful companies have lots of meetings, so we assume having lots of meetings will make us successful. It's like thinking you'll become a chef by buying expensive knives.

But here's the controversial bit: some of the most productive companies I've worked with have almost no formal meetings at all.

Take Atlassian, for instance. Their "Team Playbook" philosophy focuses on asynchronous work and only meeting when you genuinely need real-time discussion. Meanwhile, traditional corporations schedule meetings to schedule meetings to plan for the actual meeting. It's meetings all the way down.

The Five Meeting Personalities Ruining Your Life

Every terrible meeting contains at least three of these characters:

The Meeting Hijacker: This person treats every gathering as their personal TED talk opportunity. They'll derail a fifteen-minute status update to share their thoughts on blockchain technology, even when you're discussing bathroom renovation schedules.

The Chronic Clarifier: "Just to clarify..." they'll say, before repeating exactly what someone just said but using slightly different words. They think they're being helpful. They're not.

The Silent Judge: Sits there looking mildly disapproving while contributing absolutely nothing constructive. Their superpower is making everyone else feel vaguely inadequate through strategic eyebrow positioning.

The Process Worshipper: Believes every discussion needs a framework, methodology, or acronym. Can't discuss lunch options without creating a SWOT analysis.

The Time Optimist: Genuinely believes they can cover seventeen agenda items in thirty minutes. Often the same person who says "quick question" before launching into a twenty-minute monologue.

I used to be a Process Worshipper myself. Spent six months colour-coding every possible meeting scenario until my assistant politely suggested I might be "overthinking things." She was right, obviously.

Why Everyone's Lying About Meeting Effectiveness

The dirty secret of corporate Australia? Most managers know their meetings are useless but keep scheduling them anyway because it feels like work. There's something deeply satisfying about filling calendars with important-sounding blocks of time. Makes you feel busy. Productive. Essential.

I've consulted for companies spending literally thousands of dollars on meeting management training while simultaneously scheduling meetings to discuss why their previous meeting training wasn't working. The irony is thicker than Brisbane humidity in January.

Here's what nobody tells you: the most effective business leaders I know are ruthlessly selective about meetings. They'd rather make a decision with 80% information than spend three meetings gathering the perfect 100%.

But admitting this means acknowledging that maybe—just maybe—half your calendar is unnecessary theater.

The Technology Trap (Or: How Zoom Made Everything Worse)

Remote work should have fixed meeting culture. Instead, it somehow made it worse. Now we have meetings about meetings about whether we need to be in the office for meetings.

Video conferencing removed the natural awkwardness that kept in-person meetings somewhat efficient. When you're physically in a room together, there's social pressure to wrap things up eventually. On Zoom? People will happily rabbit on for hours while their cameras are off, probably doing laundry.

Plus, screen sharing has created a new meeting subspecies: the Live Presentation Workshop. Someone spends forty minutes walking through slides they could have just emailed, while everyone else pretends to be engaged but is actually online shopping for houseplants.

The mute button was supposed to eliminate background noise. Instead, it created the "unmuted surprise"—that moment when someone's private conversation about their weekend fishing trip suddenly becomes everyone's business.

What Actually Works (Despite What Your MBA Says)

After nearly two decades of trial and error, here's what I've learned about running meetings that don't make people want to fake their own deaths:

Start with the ending. Literally. Begin every meeting by stating exactly what decision needs to be made or what outcome you're seeking. If you can't articulate this in one sentence, you don't need a meeting.

Embrace the fifteen-minute default. Most meeting software defaults to thirty or sixty minutes, so people expand their content to fill the time. Try scheduling everything for fifteen minutes initially. You'll be amazed how focused discussions become when time is genuinely limited.

Kill the weekly recurring meeting. Just murder it. If something truly needs weekly discussion, it's probably either a crisis (fix it) or routine reporting (send an email). I haven't attended a useful weekly recurring meeting since 2018.

Use the "Amazon method": Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint presentations from Amazon meetings, requiring written memos instead. People had to think through their ideas clearly enough to write them down coherently. Revolutionary concept, really.

Implement the "phone test": If the meeting topic isn't important enough for people to put their phones face-down on the table, it's not important enough for a meeting.

These aren't groundbreaking insights. They're obvious solutions that most organisations ignore because changing meeting culture requires admitting the current system is broken.

The Melbourne Experiment

Last year, I worked with a property development firm in Melbourne that was spending roughly thirty hours per week in meetings across their twelve-person team. That's 1,560 hours annually—nearly a full-time employee's worth of meeting time.

We implemented what I called the "Meeting Detox": no meetings for two weeks except genuine emergencies. Everything had to be handled via email, Slack, or brief phone calls.

Initial panic lasted about three days. Then something interesting happened. Decisions started getting made faster. Projects moved forward. Client responses improved because people weren't constantly in meetings.

When we reintroduced meetings after the detox, the team naturally self-selected only the discussions that genuinely required real-time collaboration. Weekly meeting time dropped to roughly eight hours across the entire team.

Their productivity metrics improved by 23% over the following quarter. More importantly, staff satisfaction scores jumped significantly.

The controversial conclusion? Most meetings exist to make managers feel important, not to accomplish work.

Why This Won't Change (And Why It Should)

Meeting culture persists because it serves psychological needs rather than business ones. Managers feel managerial. Attendees feel included. Everyone gets to perform "being professional" for an hour.

But the cost is enormous. A recent study by Harvard Business Review found that executives spend 23 hours per week in meetings, with lower-level managers not far behind. That's 967 hours annually per manager—enough time to complete a substantial project or, frankly, take a proper holiday.

The organisations that figure this out first will have a massive competitive advantage. While their competitors are busy scheduling alignment sessions about synergy optimisation, they'll be actually getting work done.

The solution isn't better meetings. It's fewer meetings.

Start tomorrow. Cancel one recurring meeting. See what happens. I guarantee nothing important will be lost, and you might just discover that work gets done more efficiently when people aren't constantly sitting around tables pretending to collaborate.

The meeting room revolution starts with admitting what we all know but won't say: most of our meetings are completely unnecessary, and we're all just too polite to mention it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting about reducing our number of meetings. The irony isn't lost on me, but the client's paying by the hour.

Time to go pretend this discussion couldn't have been an email.

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