Long rant: DO THEY BLOODY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT??
At this stage, it becomes non-trivial for anyone to walk into a conversation and notice the conversation starter has no idea what they want.
You ask them an extra "why" and they will stutter. You'd start questioning, "Can they think it through before all of this?"
It might be OK if it is just among your friends; after all, everyone has moments of confusion. But what if it is at work, in a meeting you have never anticipated?
Oh crap, challenging the meeting starter who happens to be your supervisor, boss, or even the boss of your boss? Engineers are expensive. We are expensive. Are we courageous enough to challenge our team lead?
I presume we all can silently agree that low-effective meetings bring more harm than benefits, both for organisation or for individuals.
After attending countless meetings, I think the value of meetings for an organisation lies in ensuring mutual agreements were established through real time communication and collaboration.
However...
The damages of low-effective meetings last
The first problem: unnecessary meetings
When no one is bold enough to challenge the topic of a meeting, it brings the first problem -- unnecessary meetings.
We ought to ask ourselves, can we find a better solution without a meeting?
Consider a scenario like "Product specification review." It involves numerous stakeholders and collaborators, making real-time communication seem most effective. But think again. Does a "review" truly require a meeting?
It's more of a "process" type of work; you simply need to share a document across the organization for everyone to sign off. In such cases, "real-time communication" is unnecessary.
The more unnecessary meetings, the less efficient a team becomes. In the long term, your team might become "meeting-dependent" treating every issue as if it requires a meeting to resolve, unable to complete tasks without one.
The second problem is skyrocketing organisational cost
Meetings come at a cost.
A meeting's cost = number of people in a meeting x average salary of participants x meeting time.
If someone is less efficient, it is quite simple = organisation costs increase.
But in a meeting, the more senior the participants are in a meeting, the more costs multiplied. Thus the cost of low-efficient + low-effect meetings are incrementally larger.
Emotional damage
I believe most of people are the same--we want our time invested yield equitable results. But low efficiency meetings demand your time whilst it doesn't give you the result. You will simply be less happy with fewer achievements.
The scarier part: the amount of things you need to do won't become less if you have more meetings.
If you spend time on meetings, you will need to work extra hours to finish your work. You will be less efficient and might end up hating yourself, even harming your mental status.
Everyone wants to be more efficient. Time is everything.
This is just scratching the surface
What other hidden costs and solutions lie beneath the surface?
How can we liberate ourselves from the shackles of inefficient gatherings and unlock the true potential of our teams?
Running a sprint like Hackathon and everyone squashed in one room until EVERYTHING IS DONE. Those are fun. I love it. But are they effective? We can't ask everyone to "be more mindful" because it just doesn't solve the problem and it might also discourage people to bring up real problem in the company.
If embedding one's philosophy within a product is every founder's dream, I have a question:
what product is out there to help us to be better at meetings?
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