Meetings Are Where Decisions Go To Die

A company moves at the speed of its decisions, not the speed of its meetings. These are very different things, and confusing them is how a calendar fills up while nothing gets settled.

The same argument, three times

Watch what happens when nobody records a decision. It gets made in a meeting. Two people who were not there hear a different version. Three weeks later the question comes back, is debated again, and is settled slightly differently.

Nobody is being difficult. There is simply no shared record, so the company's memory is whatever the loudest attendee remembers.

A decision log is four columns

• What was decided — in one sentence, in plain language.
• Who decided it — a name, not a meeting.
• When — the date.
• Why — one line on the reasoning, so a future reader can tell whether the reason still holds.

That is the whole thing. It takes ninety seconds at the end of a meeting and it removes an astonishing amount of repeated argument. The why column is the one people skip and the one that pays for the rest — it lets you reopen a decision deliberately when circumstances change, instead of by accident.

Fix the agenda, not the frequency

Most people respond to meeting fatigue by cancelling meetings, which is treating the symptom. The problem is usually that the meeting has no fixed shape, so it becomes a general discussion that expands to fill the hour.

Give each recurring meeting a standing agenda and a stated purpose: this one reviews numbers, this one makes decisions, this one unblocks. A meeting that tries to do all three does none of them.

Separate the two types

Information meetings and decision meetings should not be the same meeting. Information can be read in advance; decisions need the people in the room. Mixing them means the decision gets ten minutes at the end when everybody is tired.

Send the numbers beforehand. Open with the decision. You will finish early, which nobody will complain about.

Then protect the quarter

Once a quarter, pick three things. Not seventeen. Write them down with an owner and a date, and review them at the same meeting every week until they are done. A quarter with three finished priorities beats one with seventeen started.