On the cult of meetings

Editor’s note: This is a guest post; views are the author’s. (I’ll publish anything, no matter who wrote it - send me an email!)

This was originally written as a company-internal memo; a few details have been redacted for privacy, etc.

The author was terminated the day after this was shared. They have asked me to stress that the reasons for this were unrelated.

a rant

(this rant represents only the views of the author; no claim of neutrality or even correctness is made)

Borges¹ wrote, in his essay On the Cult of Books² (trans. Weinberger, 1999, I think?)

[For] the ancients[,] the written word was nothing more than a substitute for the spoken word.

It is well known that Pythagoras did not write […]. More forceful than Pythagoras’ mere abstention is Plato’s unequivocal testimony. […] [He] recounted an Egyptian fable against writing (the practice of which causes people to neglect the exercise of memory and to depend on symbols), and said that books are like the painted figures “that seem to be alive, but do not answer a word to the questions they are asked.” […]

[…] [The] end of the fourth century saw the beginning of the mental process that would culminate, after many generations, in the predominance of the written word over the spoken one, of the pen over the voice. A remarkable stroke of fortune determined that a writer would establish the exact instant (and I am not exaggerating) when this vast process began. St. Augustine tells it in Book VI of the Confessions:

“When he [Ambrose]³ was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. […] After sitting for a long time in silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration?) we used to go away. […] We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text being read if it contained difficulties, or who might wish to debate some difficult questions. If his time were used up in that way, he would get through fewer books than he wished. Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did.”

St. Augustine was a disciple of St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, around the year 384; thirteen years later, in Numidia, he wrote his Confessions and was still troubled by that extraordinary sight: a man in a room, with a book, reading without saying the words.

That man passed directly from the written symbol to intuition, omitting sound; the strange art he initiated, the art of silent reading, would lead to marvelous consequences. It would lead, many years later, to the concept of the book as an end in itself, not as a means to an end.

Despite this transition taking place in the year of our Lord 384, it would seem that our company⁴, 1641 years later, is still mainly an oral culture.

(This pathology from which we suffer doesn’t just affect meetings; it is also the reason why, inter alia, no design documents are ever written.)

An interesting pattern can be said to exist here:

• People rarely openly state a preference in favour of meetings
• People often complain about meetings
• Despite this, we keep holding meetings all the time

In reality, the meetings must either be good or bad; thus either they need no change or they need at least some change.

What is the manner in which they suck?

Anecdata, the plural of anecdote

Here are some gripes that developers have expressed about meetings in various contexts:

• I don’t understand the background context sometimes; it seems that often the meeting is just a discussion between two senior employees⁵ in front of an audience.
• People forget what they discussed in the previous meeting, and so feel the need continuously to bring it up again.
• Meetings are simply abused; the old expression is that “this meeting could’ve been an e-mail”
• Engagement is low: a meeting may just be a one-way broadcast of information, completely devoid of interaction.

A logical analysis

I believe that a rational analysis of the meeting as a concept can be made.

• The purpose of a meeting is to exchange information. A special case of this is the hashing out of differences, requiring the conveyance of the more subtle elements of what compromises one is ready to make that a decision may be reached. (Recall how Schmitt⁶ famously reduced all of politics to the distinction between friend and enemy, and yet the practical mechanism in which politics is performed is through parliamentary procedure, which is a special case of meetings.)
• If a person exchanged no information, there was no reason for them to be in the meeting at all. They would’ve been better served spending their time frolicking in the meadow or doing real work – as many people indeed do, turning off the camera and then heading for a walk.
• In fact, the previous point can be expressed mathematically: If knowledge plus meeting equals knowledge minus meeting, then the variable meeting must have a value of zero.
• If a person only received information but had none of their own to share (that is to say - listened but said nothing), their synchronous participation was also without reason. They would’ve also been exactly as well-off, had they just listened to the recording afterwards, or better yet, read through the minutes prepared for the purpose.
• Less commonly acknowledged, if the situation is the opposite; a person who said something but learned nothing also had no reason to be there. They could’ve just as well sent in a pre-recorded video message or, better yet, sent out an e-mail.

This analysis, then, suggests two logical conclusions:

1. Meetings are only good for synchronous discussion. For all other purposes, they are an inferior means of communication which must be avoided.
2. Only a participant who both has something to say and something to hear has any reason to be in a meeting. If people other than this are added, the meeting has grown too large.

(A remark must needs be made here: if the purpose of a meeting is synchronous discussion, which requires a low latency (else turn-taking becomes quite difficult⁷, although people don’t always realize), then a high-latency conferencing software such as Microsoft Teams is probably not the best way of holding it; physical meetings are always the best, but research ought to be made into what is the lowest-latency teleconference provider.⁸)

Why do we keep holding bad meetings?

I move here from analysis to conjecture. My theories:

• It is more convenient, especially for people with challenges of basic literacy, to hold a one-hour meeting than to spend two hours writing a document that could be read in 10 minutes. Even if the total time spent is higher (21 people x 1 hr vs. 1 person x 2 hrs + 20 people x 10 minutes), it is more convenient for the person in charge of the meeting, who is presumably the same person who decided that a meeting should be held.
• There are aesthetic preferences that favour the holding of meetings.
• Holding a meeting is a good way to ensure that someone took part of the information; recall our school days, when the teacher would need to quiz students to make sure that they had done their homework, but had no such need for what they knew they already had told them in class.

I don’t believe that these are good enough reasons to abuse meetings for purposes to which they are not suited. People should simply learn how to read and write. I personally think this is a matter of preference and shyness, as people do not actually seem to struggle with literacy, and I know people with dyslexia who will write perfectly comprehensible (if atrociously spelled) documentation. Hence, what is needed is here too a cultural change.

What would a good meeting look like?

The Platonic ideal of a meeting looks like this: a group of (say) 5 people get together, having all exactly non-overlapping understandings of 1/5 of the answer to a problem. After the meeting, they all understand the whole picture. Or, a group of five people of five different paths who get together, and come out of these having reached an agreement on one path forward.

What has been said previously – discussion as the goal of a meeting and not conducting asynchronous communication in a synchronous (expensive) format – leads us to re-invent the wheels agenda and minutes:

• Before the meeting, all relevant information must be available in an efficiently readable format. (For an extreme example: Amazon prohibits beamer presentations, and instead mandates^{9 10} that a memo of 6 pages must be written before any meetings) – this is also known as an agenda.
• After the meeting, what information/decisions came of the meeting must be committed in an efficiently readable format, in such a way that no important information is lost – these are also known as minutes.

Note that these desiderata exclude both the use of AI and video recordings as a crutch. There are no shortcuts to the perfect document. As Tegnér^{11 12} put it (trans. Rev. Lewery Blackley, 1871):

What thou not clearly speak’st, that know’st thou not.
Twin-born upon the lips are thought and word:
Obscurely spoken is obscurely thought.

If a meeting has neither agenda nor minutes, it is likely to be total crap. If possible, such meeting should be skipped. Remember: if you voluntarily attend a meeting, and the meeting is total crap, you partake in the responsibility for the subpar meeting through your choice of continued participation; your moral responsibility to yourself and to your colleagues is to CTRL+SHIFT+H¹³ the moment you feel that you will learn nothing and contribute nothing.

(If you note that I have deliberately not written anything about the during, that is by intention; I find that my colleagues are more than capable of this part. It is the prep and clean-up work that is sloppy)

(A good example of a successful meeting are the engineering meetings:¹⁴ because everyone is already on the same page and there are both minutes and agendas, the focus of the meeting can become discussion, and the fact that attendance is 100% voluntary means that only the people who want to attend will do so.)

What ought we to do?

I believe that we should get better at written communications and improve our meetings.

1. The scope of participants of meetings should be reduced. There are too many people being added to meetings. Remember that meetings have $O(N^2)$ scalability in terms of time; remember also that 1 hour x 20 people x $50/hr¹⁵ = $1000. Considering […]¹⁶, we sure do make it so easy to spend a thousand dollars worth of company money. At the very least, people should be added as “optional” rather than “required”.
2. Meeting attendance should not be tracked or enforced. This habit merely serves as a crutch for subpar meetings. If people are not attending your meeting, forcing them to do so is not an appropriate solution.
3. It may be a good idea to hold important meetings physically (in the office) when possible, or research teleconferencing solutions with lower latency.
4. Meeting summonses must contain an agenda for the meeting, that also informs of all the relevant background particulars. Screenshots or links to videos are not an acceptable substitute. If there are none, you should either ask for one or skip it. In fact, you have a moral responsibility to do so.
5. Meeting summonses must specify a person who is responsible that minutes are taken. It is fine to delegate the act of taking of minutes, and we should help our co-workers (if nothing else for the selfish purposes of making sure that what you had to say is represented accurately), but the ultimate responsibility must always lie with a specific, designated person.
6. People ought to take matters into their own hands, and reduce the scope of unnecessary meetings by not attending them.

Other resources

A.B.C of Chairmanship, Lord Citrine, 1953. ¹⁷

The ultimate guide on how to run an effective meeting, Atlassian, 2025-08-06 https://www.atlassian.com/blog/loom/how-to-run-an-effective-meeting [note: this is mainly advertising for their product, but the advices are mostly sensible]