The meeting as a patch

A meeting is often a workaround for a system that cannot tell people what they need to know. Some meetings are real work. Most are repairs. Telling them apart is worth doing.

Try a small audit. For each recurring meeting on the calendar, ask what would break if it stopped. A surprising number exist to move a piece of information from one person to another — a status, a number, a decision — that a better system would have moved on its own.

Real work and repair work

Some meetings are genuinely generative: you put people in a room because the thinking needs the friction. Keep those. But the status meeting, the sync, the standing check-in — these are usually patches over an information gap, and patches have a way of becoming permanent.

The test is simple. If the meeting is repairing a leak, fix the pipe. If it is making something new, protect it.