Why do our morning meetings take two hours and still lead nowhere?

How to identify which type of meeting you have

Take your last three meetings and divide the time into three parts: how many minutes were spent establishing the current situation, how many on discussion and how many on decisions.

In the companies where I have measured this, the first part dominates by a wide margin. The meeting effectively becomes a data-gathering exercise that leaves everyone exhausted by the end.

What causes this situation

There is nowhere for the information to originate earlier. If the state of production is established only when someone asks about it, the meeting is the only place where the information is created.

No one knows who should report what. Without a fixed structure, everyone talks about everything, and the person who enjoys talking most speaks for the longest.

Decisions are not made because the supporting information is missing. An item is postponed until next time because ‘we need to find that out’. Next time, something else is investigated instead.

Too many people attend. When twelve people are in a meeting, ten of them spend ninety per cent of the time listening to things that do not concern them.

Four changes that work

1. Separate status updates from decision-making. Send the status in advance, in writing and in the same format every time. The meeting begins with the matters that require a decision.

2. State who makes the decision for each item. Not who will talk about it. Who will decide.

3. Do not open an item without supporting information. If the supporting information is missing, the item is not discussed and someone is assigned to prepare it. This saves half the time.

4. Invite only those who will make the decision or are directly affected by it. Send the minutes to everyone else.

Why this is not enough on its own

These organisational measures work immediately. But if the company has no reliable way to establish the current situation without asking, the problem will return. Someone will compile the pre-meeting update manually, after six months they will no longer have time to do it, and the meeting will turn back into a data-gathering exercise.

The lasting solution is for status information to be created automatically where the work is done and to be available without one person having to ask another.