Field Note: an observed pattern, not a claimed engagement outcome.
Symptom
Meeting overload, attacked with meeting hygiene: no-meeting days, agenda requirements, shorter defaults, calendar audits. Relief lasts about a quarter.
What I Notice
Which meetings resist elimination. The status meeting that keeps regenerating under a new name is usually not a cultural failure; it's load-bearing. Somebody is using that hour to synchronize two systems that don't talk to each other, and the hour is the integration layer.
What Is Usually Actually Happening
The meeting is a compensation mechanism. When information doesn't flow structurally, it flows socially — and social flow requires everyone in a room at the same time. Remove the room and the burden redistributes into Slack threads, emails, hallway conversations, and manual follow-up, which are harder to see and harder to measure than a calendar invite.
Why It Matters
Meeting-reduction initiatives that ignore function don't reduce coordination cost; they hide it. Worse, they often make the organization slower while its calendar looks healthier — a genuinely expensive kind of progress.
What I Would Investigate
For each recurring meeting: what information moves here that moves nowhere else? What decision can't be made without this hour, and why? Which two systems (or two teams) is this meeting manually reconciling? Build the mechanism that does that job structurally, and the meeting will die without a policy.