White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now – The Meeting-Industrial Complex

In my experience, meetings come in to being when individuals whose job is to make decisions don&#x27;t have the requisite skills, experience or confidence to make those decisions. The weight of deciding what to do is then spread over whole teams who must confer, interpret objectives, gather information and try to align, frequently over the course of a series of meetings. Everything must be litigated as a group before some kind of consensus is reached and we can move forward.<p>It feels like we&#x27;re working and &quot;being productive&quot;, but it&#x27;s more like meetings are a crutch for layers of management who aren&#x27;t able to clearly define what the business or technical objectives are.

I can tell you how this meetings nonsense came into being.<p>It comes from far too many layers of management and empires that constantly need to align themselves, document things, track things etc.<p>In my experience, every layer of manager adds an order more of red tape, meetings, and complexity.<p>And when they couldn&#x27;t do it all, instead of removing managers, they started asking rank and file to do the same meetings and produce enormous status reports so that the layers can read it all.<p>Everyone is wasting time without asking the root question: Is having so many managers and management pyramids worth wasting so much time of the most productive people of the company - the people actually producing whatever you produce.

Well, yeah, productivity has continued to increase without commensurate decrease in working hours.<p>That doesn&#x27;t necessarily imply that all working hours are productive, instead we seem to need to fill them with something, and meetings meet the requirements. Or in other words<p>&gt; The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) - Stafford Beer[1]<p>Meetings serve to <i>look</i> like you&#x27;re doing something and they take up a lot of time. They serve the purpose precisely.<p>Rather than try to decrease meetings and increase productive working hours, we should take the cue, read the room, and match the cure to the diagnosis, and do what Keynes predicted[2]: work 15-hour weeks. It&#x27;s what we&#x27;re doing already, we&#x27;re just afraid to admit it.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...</a><p>2. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econ.yale.edu&#x2F;smith&#x2F;econ116a&#x2F;keynes1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econ.yale.edu&#x2F;smith&#x2F;econ116a&#x2F;keynes1.pdf</a>

People don&#x27;t want to here it, but meetings are where &quot;it&quot; happens. You simply must have it. That is that. That is not this, it is it. Simply, it&#x27;s that.<p>The truthing the matter relize on meetings to do buisiness. No meeting, no work. Simply, it&#x27;s that. If you let engineers spend their time, they playing with their tinker toys. Sometimes trains. Simply, it&#x27;s that.<p>It&#x27;s not Christmas times when a nice train would be welcome into the office. For now we do buisiness work accordingly the schedule (which is posted). In the meaning times we have meetings. We still doing the work. Simply, it&#x27;s that.

I have discovered a trick for meetings. Aside from one or two half hour meetings that I consider useful I mostly just say “maybe” to the rest and then hardly ever go to them. That way I have the requisite “brick wall” calendar, so I appear to be “busy”, but I also get to do actual work. Depending on where you work and your seniority this may or may not work for you, but it’s worth a try. I learned this trick some 15 years ago when the only way I could get anything done was by doing it after hours, from home. That gets old pretty quick.

Bored, tired, lonely, fearful of making a decision? Call a meeting.<p>The meeting type I don&#x27;t get, which is common, is where some manager or leader calls in a dozen people only to then go around the room one by one getting some data that is irrelevant or already known to anyone else there.<p>Why don&#x27;t they go around to those people one by one and not disrupt everyone?

One of the main purposes of meetings is to reinforce the hierarchy. If somebody can drag you away from your desk, and make you listen to them talk interminably, and answer their uncomfortable questions for an hour or two, its pretty in-your-face who is the most powerful one in the room.<p>Come to think of it, that&#x27;s why CEO&#x27;s hate remote work so much.

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