The Meeting That Replaced the Work

Twelve people in a room to coordinate a two-day change that takes seven weeks. Nobody owns the notification process end-to-end, so the organisation hires capable people to manage friction it created.

Twelve people sit in a conference room on a Thursday at 10 a.m. Eight are representing someone who could not attend. Three are taking notes for a different meeting. One understands the system under discussion.

The meeting is a “cross-functional alignment session” for a change to the claims notification workflow: when a claim is declined, the customer should receive a notification within two hours instead of twenty-four. An engineer estimated the implementation at two days. Neither the engineer nor the engineer’s team lead is in the room.

The meeting produces three action items: schedule a follow-up, prepare an impact assessment, draft a business case for the change advisory board. Seven weeks later, the two-day change has not been made.

Treating the meeting as the problem is itself busy work. Nobody owns the notification process end to end. One team owns part of the workflow, another owns the service it depends on, a forum governs the data, a platform team controls the infrastructure, a CAB controls the release. Each checkpoint sounds defensible. The cumulative effect is that a two-day change takes seven weeks and almost none of that time is engineering.

Every executive offsite rediscovers the same complaint: too many meetings. The organisation responds with meeting-free afternoons, lighter rituals, fresher language. “Steering committee” becomes “decision forum.” “Dependency sync” becomes “collaboration touchpoint.” The calendar invitation for the Wednesday 3pm cross-functional alignment session is renamed “Weekly Lightweight Check-in (optional).” It remains on the calendar. Attendance remains mandatory. The meetings reconstitute because the structure still needs them.

The coordination tax

Programme managers, delivery leads, and release coordinators are often among the most capable people in the company. The organisation hires them to manage friction that the organisation itself produced. If you split a process across six teams, somebody must hold the six-team process in their head. The work is real. The need for it is optional.

The proof loop

The coordination layer does not stop at the office wall. A retailer hires a consulting firm to produce a digital strategy. The CTO recognises that much of the resulting deck has only a loose relationship to the actual system. She says nothing. The deck becomes official truth. Six months later, an agency is hired to deliver visible proof that the strategy is working. The agency ships something on time through adapters that break within months. The initiative is reported as delivered. The consultancy is invited back.

Fiction validates fiction while the real system sits offstage collecting the bill. No firm in this supply chain can sell a recommendation that removes the need for the rest of the chain. “Improve cross-functional alignment” is sellable. “Collapse the boundaries that make alignment necessary” is not. The organisation keeps paying to manage a structural wound it created rather than closing it.

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