It started with one meeting.

Monday morning standup.

Fifteen minutes. Harmless.

Then someone said “we should probably loop in stakeholders” so it became 30 minutes.

Then someone else said “can we add a weekly retro” so now there were two meetings.

Then a director asked for a “leadership readout” of the standup, which is a meeting about a meeting,which should be illegal but is instead standard operating procedure.

Then the retro started generating action items that needed their own follow-up meeting.

Then someone created a Slack channel for “async updates” that nobody read, which led to a meeting about why nobody was reading the Slack channel.

Then quarterly planning started and suddenly there were eight new recurring meetings on the calendar, three of which overlap, one of which has no owner and has been happening every Thursday for seven months with perfect attendance and nobody can remember why it was originally scheduled.

The calendar is now a solid wall of color from 8am to 6pm. There are no gaps.

There is no time to do the work that the meetings are about. The work doesn’t get done.

So someone schedules a meeting to discuss why the work isn’t getting done. Fourteen people attend. They agree the problem is “bandwidth.”

They schedule a follow-up.

The follow-up is next Tuesday at 3pm.

It will go 45 minutes. Nothing will change.

A new meeting will be born.

The cycle will continue.

The meetings are not a symptom of the dysfunction. The meetings are the company.

The work died a long time ago.

The company has become an orchestra of agents.

Nobody noticed because they were in a meeting.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Companies are becoming tech stacks.

We are all becoming companies.

- j - 🤓🙏🏼

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