Pointless meetings. Every. Week.

Work visualization boards and tracking tools that are staples of popular methodologies, but are barely touched by teams after the first few weeks.

HR platforms that do everything, cost a small fortune, and yet employees only use one or two aspects of it.

What do these things have in common? Often it’s a simple matter of unclear purposes.

At one point in time, an individual or group of people recognized a problem, and implemented what they thought was an appropriate solution. But quite often, those who are subjected to the solution or perhaps inheriting the solution later on (after personnel changes, company growth, etc.) are not aligned on the original context. What remains is usually the solution but not the explanation of the problem. And very few companies or teams tend to revisit solutions that appear to be working. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?

At best, people simply don’t engage with the solution, or the solution drifts over time (meandering meetings, anyone?) and the problem goes unaddressed. At worst, it becomes a significant time or money sink, a point of frustration, and a sarcastic reference point in employee conversations. All of these things remove time and focus from more important activities and goals for the group or company.

Fixing it is almost as simple as the original oversight:

• Clearly define the original “problem” (or opportunity, if you tend towards appreciative inquiry).
• From that, define the purpose (or desired outcome) of a solution.
• Reflect on whether the current solution is fitting that purpose.
• Do all of this with a wider, diverse group of people in the problem/opportunity space – those who experience it.

All of the examples at the start of this post are essentially creating a new product or service, like a startup – you need to understand the customers’ problem (in this case, your peers), regularly check if it’s helping to solve those problems, and regularly evaluate how to improve it, even if it means a pivot.

Here’s an example of a very lightweight exercise you can do as a group to put this into practice and perhaps generate some insights. Choose a recurring meeting or ceremony that takes several people’s time. It might be as simple as a standup, or as expansive as a stakeholder review of a product in development. You can opt to do this exercise at the start of the meeting, or at the end; my preference is to have it independent of the meeting, to help people detach it from the activity itself.

1. Ask the participants to silently write down the purpose of the meeting. I’ve found that a good way to create clarity around purpose is to ask “What would go wrong if we stopped having this meeting? What dysfunction might happen?”.
2. Have each person share their understanding of the purpose.
3. If there is significant misalignment, you’ll need to spend some time clarifying the intent of the meeting. Start by having individuals provide a deeper explanation of the different understandings (many of you will notice similarities to “planning poker”). If the group agrees on multiple purposes, note them separately for now.
4. With the purpose(s) clarified, ask for an indication of how well the meeting is serving them. The Fist of Five is a quick and simple method for this.
   As in step 4, listen to deeper explanations of any widely-varying thoughts.
5. If the overall “rating” of the meeting vs purpose is low, do another round of silent writing to source ideas for a better solution. It doesn’t have to be a meeting; it may be an occasional email, an information radiator, or just a more lightweight chat between a subset of the group. A useful lens for this is simply asking “What would serve the same purpose, but take less time, or have a better result?”

As mentioned at the start of this post, you can also do this quite easily for a work artifact like a team board, information radiator, or other work management tool. Beyond this exercise, periodically re-checking the purpose and solution helps keep it valuable, and I often see groups find that the original problem or opportunity is no longer there; the environment or domain has shifted without them realizing it.

A classic example of “abandoning an old solution” is removing daily standups if the team is communicating and committing organically throughout the day. Other common examples I’ve seen during my coaching are teams pivoting the structure of their sprint ceremonies, the merging of several large meetings into fewer (saving dozens of people-hours per week), completely changing the cadence of meetings to be more congruent (allowing people to leverage input or data in a more timely manner, and reducing disruption or distractions), and changing which product data is tracked (reducing “noise” in looking for insights).

Some less-common examples: replacing work management tools with Slack updates (a virtual standup), creating a shared process rather than hiring for a new role (or vice versa), and pivoting development frameworks.

Let me know if you give it a go – I’d love to hear the results!