Why Your Meetings Don't Make Sense
Why Your Meetings Don't Make Sense
At some point in your career, you will sit in a meeting about a meeting that is being held to prepare for a meeting.
You will nod. You will take notes, or pretend to. Someone will say "let's make sure we go into the room aligned." The phrase will make complete sense to everyone present, including you, and yet if you wrote it down and read it back out loud, you would not be able to explain what "the room" is, what "aligned" means specifically in this context, or what the difference is between going in aligned versus not aligned.
This is the central mystery of Australian office life. The meetings happen. The language happens. Nothing appears to happen as a result, and yet the organisation continues to function — at least structurally — and more meetings are scheduled.
Here is why.
The Meeting Is Not Doing What You Think It Is Doing
The common assumption about meetings is that they exist to make decisions. This is wrong most of the time.
Meetings perform several other functions, most of which are legitimate and none of which require a decision to be made:
They distribute accountability. If twenty people are in the room when a direction is chosen, it is harder to point at any one of them when it goes wrong. This is not cynical — it is rational risk management for the people running the meeting.
They create the feeling of progress. Work can go several weeks without visible output. A well-run meeting can make a week feel productive when the actual output was a calendar invite for next week's meeting. This is not nothing. It is how people stay motivated on long projects.
They check political temperature. Before a decision is announced, it needs to survive contact with the people it affects. The "pre-read" and "sense-check" and "socialise this thinking" meeting exists to find the objections before the formal decision is made, so the decision-maker can either defuse them or decide to ignore them with full knowledge.
They manage relationships. Being in the room matters to people. Not because of what is decided, but because being included signals rank, trust, and relevance. Meetings are a map of an organisation's social structure. The people who are not invited to the meeting often know that information before anything official is announced.
None of these functions require a decision to be made. Which is why most meetings end without one.
The Language Is Designed for This
Corporate meeting language is not an accident. It evolved precisely to serve meetings that are doing something other than deciding things.
"Let's make sure all voices are heard on this" sounds like an invitation to contribute. It is often a signal that the decision has already been made — but it needs to be made with enough process visible around it that the outcome looks consulted rather than imposed.
"There was broad consensus across the team" sounds like agreement was reached democratically. It often means two senior people nodded at the same time.
"We want to bring people on the journey" sounds like inclusion. It often means: people will be told what was decided, once it is decided, in a tone that implies they were part of the process.
The language is not dishonest in a simple sense. The person using it probably does want voices heard. There probably was something that felt like consensus. People will be brought somewhere. It is just that the words and the reality are adjacent to each other, not the same thing.
The Pre-Meeting Is Where the Meeting Happens
The most experienced people in any organisation know this and adjust accordingly.
The actual decision-making happens in smaller, less formal settings. A conversation in the corridor. A quick call before the big one. A message exchange the night before. By the time the formal meeting happens, the outcome is often known by everyone who matters, and the meeting exists to make it official.
This is not corruption. It is efficiency. Getting twelve people to reach a genuine decision in real time, with competing information and competing interests, is genuinely hard. The pre-meeting reduces the surface area of uncertainty. The meeting ratifies what has already been worked out.
The problem arrives when the pre-meeting is inaccessible — when only some people get the corridor conversation, and others walk into the formal meeting thinking it is still open. That is when the meeting stops making sense to the people who were not in the corridor.
Why the Meetings Keep Getting Longer
A meeting that was supposed to be 30 minutes and ran to 90 has a specific pathology. There are several causes, and they all have names.
The "just quickly" problem. "Just quickly" before raising a point signals that the speaker knows the point is not quick. The phrase is a social buffer that allows a long tangent to begin without direct objection. "Can I just quickly ask about..." takes four minutes.
The unresolved prior. Most meetings that run long contain a topic that was not actually resolved in a previous meeting, even though the minutes said it was. The topic resurfaces. The same conversation happens again, often with the same people holding the same positions.
The wrong people in the room. When the decision-maker is not present, the meeting cannot end with a decision. It ends with a recommendation to be taken to the decision-maker — which schedules another meeting. If the decision-maker is present but has not read the pre-read, the meeting begins twenty minutes in once they are up to speed.
The person who asks the question that everyone had but no one asked. This person is invaluable. They also add fifteen minutes.
The Taxonomy of Decisions That Don't Get Made in Meetings
Not all un-made decisions are the same. There are at least four distinct types.
The deferred decision. "Let's circle back on this once we have more data." Sometimes this is correct. More often, the data that is needed could be collected in an afternoon but is being used as cover for the fact that the decision is politically difficult.
The decision that was already made. The meeting is discussing a question that has already been answered elsewhere. The discussion is theatre. Everyone in the room who knows this is deciding whether to play along or surface it. Almost everyone plays along.
The decision that belongs to someone not in the room. Common in organisations where authority is not clearly mapped. The group reaches agreement and then discovers that agreement is not sufficient — there is another person, or committee, or process, that has to weigh in. Back to zero.
The decision no one wants to own. The question is real, the decision is real, but the consequences of being the person who decided are uncomfortable enough that the conversation keeps circling. This one is the most honest of the four. It deserves credit for being the only type that is genuinely stuck.
What Meetings That Work Have in Common
This guide is not advocating for fewer meetings. Meetings are genuinely useful when they are set up correctly.
The ones that work tend to share a few things:
There is one person whose job it is to decide, and everyone in the room knows who that is. There is a question that can be answered with a yes or a no, or a choice between clearly defined options. The pre-reading has been done — not because the outcome is predetermined, but because the baseline facts are not being established in real time. And there is something written down at the end that says what was decided, by whom, and what happens next.
When those conditions are not met, you are not in a decision-making meeting. You are in a different kind of meeting — one of the five described above — and it is worth knowing which one you are in.
The Best Decode
The single most useful piece of corporate translation is this:
When a meeting ends and the action item is "schedule a follow-up meeting," the original meeting did not make a decision.
That is the whole thing. That is the key. If you leave knowing only that one rule, you will save yourself an enormous amount of confusion about what is happening and why.
The follow-up meeting will probably not make a decision either. But at least you will know why.
Circle Back is a daily puzzle game. Four pieces of corporate jargon, decoded into plain English. New puzzle at 9am Melbourne time. Play today's puzzle.