The point is not in not having meetings, but in having useless and inconsequential meetings.
It's much like requiring that any computation should either return a value or produce an effect. Without that, it's just waste.
It's much like requiring that any computation should either return a value or produce an effect. Without that, it's just waste.
only know to be useless after having had the meeting, and the decisions or discussion were either moot, already known, or completely expected.
So how do you know whether a meeting is required, before organizing and/or attending one?
* Does it have less than 10 people attending?
* It there an here an agenda?
* Is there more technical people than managers?
* Do you know why you've been asked to attend?
If you can answer "No" to any of those questions, you're going to have a bad time. Now you can have meetings where you answer yes to all of the above, and it's still useless, but the chances are lower.
A meeting with more than 10 people tends to waste more people's time than a meeting with less than 10.
Being a bystander in a big meeting, that is the worst. If it doesn't affect me and my input is not needed, why am I there?
One structural cause of that is the “nobody owns anything, everything is shared and employees are replaceable cogs” paradigm. Because then it’s suddenly a real problem that people do things a bit differently. You have to not only agree on what to do (the interface) but also the how (implementation). It would be the same problem in a band if you decided to rotate the instruments every time you jam.