Is it time to fix your company's meetings?

Here at Lucid Teams (formerly Lucid Meetings), we often get calls from people like you.

We've been helping organizations improve their meetings since 2010. I'm Elise Keith, the founder, author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization, and principal behind the Meeting Performance Maturity Model and frameworks referenced by meeting researchers and specialists worldwide. (See our library of templates, guides, and more here.) Over the years, we've worked with hundreds of teams and thousands of leaders across industries. Later in this piece, I've listed other experts we collaborate with and admire. This is a small field, and we make each other better.

If you're like many who call us, you might not control the budget or hold the authority needed to approve a meeting redesign project. Instead, you're acting as the project champion and hoping we can provide the guidance you need to get your project rolling. We're happy to help.

Before we begin, I want to share three signs that tell us these projects are dead on arrival.

In this article, we'll look at each of these failure points and outline what you can do to set your project up for success.

The media repeatedly tells us that meetings are a waste of time and money, so no surprise: that's the mindset people bring to their projects. But it's a nonsensical starting place. If meetings are so terrible, why run them at all? If they're just a waste of time, why is it newsworthy when world leaders meet?

Obviously, something's going on here that we value.
But instead of trying to increase that value, misguided project champions focus on eliminating as much meeting time as possible.
The bad assumption: you fix meeting problems by preventing meetings.

Those assumptions sound like this:

Our answer doesn't matter because the budget owner won't approve this project. "Yes," they say, "meetings are a bit out of hand, but that's just what happens when things get busy. We’re fighting much hotter fires right now."

Which makes sense to us, because this plan doesn't work.

People advocating for this approach see meetings as a drain of time, energy, and money. Like a productivity parasite. This makes eliminating as many meeting minutes as possible the only sensible remedy.

Successful projects start with a different assumption.
They recognize that meetings are a necessary and valuable part of their collaborative ecosystem, but they're out of shape. The organization let itself go a bit, and now everything feels sluggish. They know that unless they tone up their flabby calendars, they're never going to reach their top-priority finish lines on time.

Starting with that mindset:

Groups that run the typical project will experience a flurry of activity (the audit, the calculators, the calendar purge, and that 2-hour training) and get temporary relief, but it fades fast.

Say it with me: eliminating bad meetings does nothing to build the skills required for running good ones.

Groups that adopt the successful approach see results that last for years. But, these projects are more complicated to run and more challenging to explain to the busy execs who need to approve them.

So, before you spend a lot of time putting together an executive project pitch, you should check for the second most common failure point.

Great meetings move work forward and help people get along.
How, exactly? That depends on the work they're moving and how they're getting along now.

In a fantasy world, you'd lovingly customize every meeting for the moment. Teams would leave high on productive bliss.

Practically, organizations adopt reusable meeting patterns that ensure every meeting is good enough and easy to tweak. A well-designed meeting system includes top-down guidelines setting the boundaries for all meetings, templates for meetings that cross functional lines, and lots of meeting playbooks tailored for each group.

This means that, if this is your organization's first meeting improvement project, you might need to make changes at many different levels.

Organizational needs shape business processes and meeting flows. These flows & types dictate meeting formats, and formats drive the moment-to-moment dynamics inside the meeting.

In well-designed systems, the surrounding layers set the goals and constraints for everything within them. Champions, however, experience problems most directly at the innermost layer. You notice that standups are boring, decisions aren't clear, and nobody prepares. Those are end-point symptoms. The question is how far you have to zoom out to find a fix.

Each design layer involves structural choices. Different structures require different skills. For example, in cultures focused on aggressively dominating a fast-paced market, meetings are expected to all business, well-documented, brutally direct, and short. In organizations focused on nurturing souls and healing communities, the team may meditate together on their larger purpose before discussing anything on the agenda. Since meetings are where we enact our cultural values, demonstrate our leadership style, and co-create our shared identity, the structures and skills required depend greatly on the values, leadership, and identity you're building together.

And, each layer is supported by different kinds of experts, because while these professionals share some overlap, no one has mastery of it all.

Meetings touch every part of an organization, which means that most significant changes will involve people across roles and hierarchal levels. Some changes require executive approval and leadership, like an organization-wide rule declaring meeting-free Fridays. But there are other changes those same executives can't and shouldn't make. No one wants the CEO dictating how often each project team checks in!

Some implications:

Starting with meeting dynamics and formats makes for cheap experiments you may be able to run without approval.
Frustrating meetings are easiest to see and change at this level. A quick search will give you more tips than you could ever need, and AI offers great suggestions when given enough context. Small experiments build the experience needed to confidently propose bigger changes. And, if you lack the authority to experiment, you can borrow credibility from one of the thousands of outside experts who offer books, talks, and short training sessions at this level.

If these fixes keep failing or fading, however, the problem likely lives higher up.

Skills training alone doesn't work, but it's a lot easier to get approved.
You need to know this going in. Most organizations default to training individuals in generic meeting and conversational skills, because sending people to a workshop doesn't require anyone with authority to think about how work flows between groups. This training is valuable and can produce some quick wins, but any gains will fade just as quickly.

Frankly, training alone is always insufficient: you can teach someone what a well-designed meeting system looks like, but if nobody has the authority or mandate to redesign the current system, the knowledge sits unused. If the only project you can get approved is a quick training, use it to spark follow-up conversations and small experiments.

Every layer within a poorly designed layer suffers.
If your meeting flows are poorly designed, your formats and interactions will feel off, regardless of how skilled your meeting leaders are. Fix the broadest broken layer you can, or if those decisions are outside your zone of influence, at least acknowledge that in your project scope.

Good design choices in the outer layers depend on clarity that may not exist yet.
If your organization can't articulate what it needs to accomplish, the top level has no easy answers. That doesn't mean the rest of the layers are frozen. Most operational needs are known even during disruption, and those are designable now. Think of it this way: you can't design for the unknown, but you can design how your team will meet to figure things out when the unknown arrives. Save yourself time and wasted effort by recognizing which layers you can act on and which ones require upstream decisions that haven't been made.

Full system redesign works at all levels simultaneously.
A comprehensive meeting improvement project doesn't march neatly from top to bottom. Teams adjust meeting dynamics while redesigning formats while rethinking which meetings should exist at all. The layers reveal the design logic, not a project sequence. The choices are intertwined and always shifting. Expect to revisit earlier decisions as the bigger picture clarifies, and to revise the details often.

The expert landscape thins dramatically as you span layers.
Plenty of excellent trainers and facilitators focus on those inner layers. Moving out to Flows and Types, you'll find specialists focused on the meetings specific to a business function, like sales or product development. Specialists looking at meetings across organizational layers and business functions are rare enough to count on one hand.

This isn't because the work is impossibly complex: it's because meeting design as a discipline falls between established professional categories. It's too operational for most organizational designers, too mundane for facilitators, and too design-oriented for most operations consultants.

To deepen your understanding of meeting design and organizational effectiveness, here are a few of the people doing important work in this space (besides us):

Summing up: organizations achieve lasting meeting improvements by making a set of coherent design choices at each of four levels, from organization-wide meeting guidelines down through to who talks first in this week's call. To keep that many decisions lined up, you need the involvement of people with authority at each layer.

This brings us to the final project-killer that meeting champions need to watch out for.

Do people's eyes glaze over when you suggest a meeting project? Have they nodded along, then said you should gather more data to justify the project?

That's an avoidance tactic. They asked you to "build the business case" because they don't want to say no to your face. Publicly acknowledging that meetings suck, but you don't care, isn't a great look.

They're just not into it.

Save yourself the trouble. No bad meeting audit, employee satisfaction survey, or calculator showing how much money meetings cost ever excited an uninterested exec. Several have backfired, as execs challenge the math, the assumptions, and the character of employees who would complain about something they deem trivial.

Instead, recognize that organizations fall into one of three readiness zones. Each one calls for a different approach and a different level of preparation from the champion.

Red-light organizations are focused on other problems. The executives aren't thinking about meetings. They're thinking about strategy execution, decision speed, coordination breakdowns, leadership transitions, or market pressure. A "meeting improvement project" sounds discretionary.

The irony: their meetings are often one of the primary mechanisms keeping those bigger problems stuck.

How do you untangle your biggest knots when you can't reliably find time on the calendar? How do you navigate sudden market shifts when you have no efficient meeting structures for solving problems or making decisions? You know how: dozens of private conversations, leading to a series of frustrating executive debates until finally, one person declares a path that the rest give in to just so they can move on.

Red light doesn't mean the organization won't benefit from meeting redesign. It means seeking approval for a meeting project will get you nowhere.

Instead, you need to incorporate meeting redesign into your high-priority projects.
Problems that rarely get framed as meeting problems, but respond powerfully to meeting redesign:

The champion's move in a Red-light environment: "I know we're focused on [the problem leadership cares about]. Redesigning how we meet on that issue is one of the fastest ways to start making progress." Don't pitch a meeting project. Pursue the business outcome, target the meetings that directly contribute to that outcome, and position meeting redesign as a necessary step in the project.

When leadership is new, strategy needs revamping, and structures are shifting, the very top of the organizational design stack feels unanswerable.

It's worth remembering that even in wild times, most operational needs are known. You still hire, you still ship, you still sell, and support. Those rhythms are designable now, and designing them well gives people something stable to stand on while the bigger questions get sorted. The champion who can point to specific, designable meeting rhythms in the midst of chaos gives their team some blissful predictability.

This is the readiness condition that catches well-intentioned champions off guard. The meeting problems are genuine. You need new structures and skills. Better agendas, clearer roles, stronger facilitation: all of it would make a measurable difference.

For a while.

In Yellow-light organizations, however, the meeting dysfunction is entangled with deeper structural issues. If you fix the meetings without addressing those, the improvements erode quickly because nothing in the surrounding system sustains them.

The most common entanglements to watch for:

The champion's message in a Yellow-light environment isn't "let's fix our meetings." It's "let's start with redesigning our meetings, and here's what we should expect to encounter along the way."

Go in with eyes open. Frame the project as system-level work with meetings as the entry point, and make sure your sponsor understands that some of the most valuable outcomes will be the non-meeting changes the project forces into the open.

This is the most straightforward situation. The leadership team recognizes that meetings need work, and the conditions for a successful project are in place.

If the project could easily be delayed without consequences, it likely will be: you need to understand why it's urgent to design meetings now.

Organizations that get the best results see these projects as a way to level up, rather than as a chore. Leveling up is fun!

If you're seeing these signals, engage the project directly. The organization is ready.

You know which meeting design layers apply (your scope), and you've identified your group's readiness for those changes.
Here's how to start.

It's still doable, but expect a journey of many small steps.

Your group acknowledges the problem and is willing to consider changes. Make the next steps concrete to push them from considering into doing.

You have momentum. Use it before it dissipates.

If you've worked through this article and want to talk it through, book a short call with us. We'll share our advice on what you can start on your own, when to bring somebody in, and what kinds of professionals to engage. If the work fits what we do at Lucid Teams, we'll say so. If it calls for a different kind of expertise, we'll point you to people who are better suited.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization, please visit our website.