Nobody Expects the Meeting
The Spanish Inquisition had a simple management model: ask questions until someone confessed. Modern organisations have improved it. We ask questions until someone agrees to take an action away — then invite them back next week to explain why it hasn't been done.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Everyone expects the meeting.
There is an agenda. There are questions. There are updates. There are actions. And if the meeting is particularly successful, there will be another meeting to discuss what happened at this one.
Meetings are supposed to help organisations make decisions, solve problems, share information and coordinate activity. Some do. Others survive because nobody wants to be responsible for stopping them. Over time, the meeting becomes less about what it achieves and more about the fact that it happens. That is when a meeting becomes a ritual.
Organisations are full of rituals. The weekly management meeting. The monthly performance meeting. The quarterly review. The team briefing. The project board. The steering group. The meeting before the meeting. They all have a stated purpose, but they often serve other purposes as well.
Meetings provide reassurance. Managers hear updates and feel more confident that things are under control. They provide visibility. People can demonstrate that they know what is happening. They provide control. Managers can ask questions, request explanations and check progress. They provide accountability. There is a record showing that an issue was discussed and an action was agreed. In some organisations, the minutes are almost more important than the meeting.
None of this is necessarily bad. The problem is when the meeting itself becomes evidence that management is happening.
A problem is discussed. An action is agreed. The action is recorded. Everyone leaves feeling that progress has been made. But nothing has changed. The action appears on the agenda again next month, perhaps with the reassuring description “ongoing”. The organisation has been busy, but activity is not the same as progress.
This is how organisational ritual works. Talking about something can become a substitute for doing something about it. The meeting gives people the feeling that the issue is being managed, even when the underlying problem remains untouched.
A meeting can also create the illusion of visibility without much understanding. There are reports, dashboards and traffic lights. Green means everything is fine. Amber means there might be a problem. Red means there definitely is a problem, but at least everyone knows about it. Someone provides an update, someone asks what is being done, someone agrees to take an action away, and the meeting moves on.
The organisation has performed the ritual of control.
The danger is not simply that meetings waste time. The bigger danger is that they can reassure managers while allowing organisational problems to remain exactly where they are. A meeting can make an organisation feel as though it is moving because everyone is talking about movement.
The longer a meeting survives, the harder it can become to challenge it. Stopping it feels risky. What if something is missed? What if someone asks why it was cancelled? What if the issue comes back? The meeting continues because the perceived risk of stopping it is greater than the obvious cost of carrying on.
If the same meeting has been happening for two years and nobody can explain what would happen if you stopped it, you haven't got a meeting. You've got a ritual.
The answer is not to abolish meetings. Some meetings are essential. The answer is to make them earn their place in the diary. Before keeping a recurring meeting, ask three questions: What decision or outcome requires this meeting? What has actually changed because of the last three meetings? And what would stop happening if we stopped meeting?
That last question may be the most useful. If the answer is “nothing”, you have learned something. If the answer is “we wouldn't know what was happening”, ask whether the meeting is solving a communication problem or simply hiding one.
The Spanish Inquisition at least knew why it was asking questions. Some organisations have been asking the same questions for years without noticing that the answers no longer change anything.
That is the danger of organisational ritual. You keep doing something not because it works, but because nobody wants to discover what happens if you stop.
So perhaps the next meeting should begin with a question nobody expects:
Why are we still having this meeting?
blairmcpherson.co.uk
