Organisational aimlessness

A few years back I surveyed 300 busy project professionals about the value of meetings, and the results showed they were wasting a whole day a week in meetings that didn’t help them do their jobs.

Respondents spent 37% of their work time in meetings. Of these, 52% were useless to them. 47% were unstructured, having no purpose, agenda or finish-time. 80% of people blanked out sometimes or regularly for significant periods of time.

If you have a serious job to do, you’d be better off refusing to attend such pointless gatherings on principle, or using the time to refresh yourself with exercise or time with family.

Partly, it’s about badly-run meetings, but how can a team or organisation even allow dumb meetings? Only when it is sinking into entropy and aimlessness, when form and ritual have replaced clarity and urgency of purpose, and when individual accountabilities have become divorced from any purpose.

An antidote to this is a culture of deep and deliberate delegation, in which people at all levels conceive good, stretching outcomes, and skilfully enlist others’ help in realising them.