The $50 Billion Meeting Problem Nobody Wants to Fix
The conference call was supposed to start at 2 PM.
Australian businesses are literally talking themselves out of getting work done.
I worked out recently that my clients are collectively spending over $1.5 million per year on meetings that produce no actual decisions.
That’s not including the opportunity cost of what doesn’t get done while everyone’s sitting around a table discussing things that could be resolved in a five-minute conversation. The meeting culture has become so entrenched that people feel guilty when they’re not in meetings. I’ve had managers tell me they don’t feel productive unless their calendar is completely booked with back-to-back sessions.
We’ve created a culture where being busy is more important than being productive.
The uncomfortable truth about meeting culture? 80% of them are just performance anxiety disguised as collaboration.
Consider your most recent “strategy meeting.” How much actual useful communication happened? How many concrete decisions emerged?
I’ll bet the first twenty minutes were spent on updates, the middle section was dominated by the loudest voices, and the final portion was a rushed attempt to assign actions that were probably unnecessary in the first place.
This isn’t collaboration – it’s social performance for executives who can’t make decisions outside of a formal setting. It’s management theatre, performed for an audience of captive employees.
Let me tell you about the worst meeting I ever experienced.
I was consulting with a technology company in Sydney that was struggling with project delays. The CEO decided the solution was better communication, so he instituted weekly “alignment meetings” for all department heads.
The first meeting ran for nearly three hours. The agenda covered fifteen different projects, most of which only involved some people in the room. By the end, everyone knew a little bit about everything, but nobody had the time to actually work on anything.
Within a month, they were having meetings to plan meetings, and follow-up meetings to discuss what was covered in the previous meetings. The project delays got worse, not better. The irony was completely lost on them. They genuinely couldn’t see that the meeting about meetings was the exact problem they were trying to solve.
Digital meetings have removed the natural barriers that used to limit how often we got together.
In the old days, you had to book a room, coordinate schedules, and physically gather people. That friction meant you only called meetings when they were genuinely necessary.
Now you can set up a video call in thirty seconds, invite dozens people with a few clicks, and create the illusion of progress without any of the logistical constraints that used to make people think twice.
The result? Meeting inflation. What used to be a phone call is now a formal meeting with agendas. Every day is fragmented into thirty-minute chunks between endless conferences.
The thing that makes my blood boil: the belief that more discussion automatically leads to better results.
Over-collaboration is just as destructive as under-collaboration.
There’s a reason why the most creative companies – think Google in their early days – were famous for rapid decision-making.
Every concept needed to be presented in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was predictable work that had been focus-grouped into blandness. The innovative solutions died in the endless review processes.
Genius doesn’t happen in conference rooms full of committee members.
The meeting industrial complex has its own vocabulary designed to make everything sound important.
“I think we need a deeper dive” – translation: “I haven’t thought this through, but I don’t want to look unprepared.”
{{“{Let’s get everyone in a room|We need all the stakeholders aligned|This requires a cross-functional approach}” – translation: “I’m afraid to make a decision, so let’s spread the responsibility around.”|The phrase “let’s unpack this” makes me want to {scream|lose my mind|run for the hills}.}}
“I’ll send out a calendar invite” – translation: “Nothing will actually change, but we’ll create the illusion of progress through scheduling.” It’s become corporate speak for “let’s turn a simple issue into an hour-long discussion that resolves nothing.”
But here’s where I’ll probably lose some people: most “collaborative” meetings are actually counterproductive to real teamwork.
True collaboration happens when colleagues have the space to develop ideas independently, then come together to refine on each other’s work.
Collaboration isn’t sitting in a room talking from scratch – it’s intelligent people bringing their best thinking to a time-limited discussion. The meetings that actually work are the ones where people come ready, not the ones where they come to figure things out together.
So what does effective meeting culture actually look like?
Introduce friction back into the meeting process.
I love the companies that have instituted “meeting-free afternoons” where calendar invites are simply not allowed.
Some companies assign a dollar cost to meetings based on the hourly rates of attendees. When you see that your “quick sync” is costing $500 per hour, you start to think differently about whether it’s necessary. The productivity improvements are usually dramatic.
Stop confusing data transfer with meaningful interaction.
Status updates don’t require live interaction.
The engineering teams that do this well have automated reporting that eliminates the need for progress reviews entirely.
I worked with a advisory business that replaced their weekly team updates with a simple online dashboard. Meeting time dropped by 60%, and project communication actually improved. Everyone can see what’s happening without sitting through meeting discussions.
Third, embrace the fact that not everyone needs to be involved in every decision.
The need with inclusive decision-making has created meeting proliferation where twelve people discuss issues that could be resolved by the right people.
Stakeholder engagement is important for strategic changes, but not every choice requires democratic input. Most operational decisions should be made by the roles closest to the work. They understand that more perspectives isn’t always useful perspectives.
The measurement that transformed my thinking about meetings:
Measure the proportion of time spent in planning sessions compared to tangible results.
For most professionals, the ratio is shocking. They’re spending three hours discussing every one hour of execution.
Sometimes the ratio is even worse. Successful organisations flip this ratio. They spend focused time in meetings and concentrated time on execution. The talking serves the doing, not the other way around.
That’s not effectiveness – it’s dysfunction.
Why are people so addicted to meetings?
For many managers, meetings provide a sense of control that actual work doesn’t offer. In a meeting, you can influence the conversation, prove your value, and feel important to organisational success.
Execution is often solitary, challenging, and doesn’t provide the same visible feedback as leading a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your productivity, even if they don’t produce value.
Don’t get me wrong – some meetings are absolutely necessary.
The organisations that do meetings well treat them like precious resources.
Everything else is just organisational performance that destroys the time and energy that could be directed on meaningful work. They’re selective about when to use them, rigorous about how to run them, and ruthless about whether they’re effective.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned about meetings?
The best meetings are the ones that eliminate the need for future meetings.
Bad meetings create uncertainty that require follow-up clarification.
Design your meeting culture to enable work, not substitute for it.
The future of Australian effectiveness depends on it.
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