Meeting Toxicity

Never speak useless words. To speak them is to speak nothing at all. Valluvar’s test for speech is ruthless: did it serve a purpose? If not, it was silence dressed up as sound. Now apply that test to your last meeting. Twelve people. Sixty minutes. One decision: none. Someone shared a screen. Someone asked a clarifying question that wasn’t clarifying. Someone said “let’s take this offline,” which is corporate for “this requires actual thought, and we don’t do that here.” You left with fewer answers than you entered with.

Google’s diversity programs are among the most documented in tech. The annual diversity report. The employee resource groups. The unconscious bias training. Then in December 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru, co-lead of its Ethical AI team, after she co-authored a paper questioning the environmental and social costs of large language models. The paper was peer-reviewed. The research was sound. Google’s inclusion infrastructure, the one it showcased at conferences and in annual reports, could not tolerate inclusion of a perspective that challenged its core business model.

Meetings don’t multiply because people love them. They multiply because they fill a void. In ecology, invasive species don’t overrun habitats because they’re superior organisms. They succeed because the native ecosystem has been weakened. They fill the gap. Meetings are organizational invasive species. They colonize calendars because the native decision-making habitat has broken down. When people can’t decide informally, they schedule a meeting. When the meeting doesn’t decide, they schedule a follow-up. When the follow-up doesn’t decide, they create a recurring series. Each meeting breeds two more. The calendar becomes an ecosystem where meetings are the only surviving species.

Cancel one recurring meeting this week. Just one. Don’t announce it. Don’t explain it. Just cancel it. If nobody notices, it was already dead. If someone complains, ask them: “What decision did that meeting make in the last month?” The answer is your evidence.

That calendar colonization has a name. Meeting Toxicity. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Untie The Knot

Uproot

Meetings multiplied because the decision-making habitat collapsed. People couldn’t resolve issues informally, so they formalized, then met about the formalization. Each meeting that fails to decide spawns another. The species has no natural predator.

Navigate

Every meeting ends with a single documented decision or is canceled. Recurring meetings are reviewed monthly and killed when they stop producing outcomes.

Tool

DMG / Decision Moment: the protocol that assigns every decision a single owner, a deadline, and a record. When decisions have structure, meetings become the exception, not the habitat.

Implement

Cancel one recurring meeting this week. Don’t announce it. If nobody notices, it was already dead. If someone complains, ask: “What decision did that meeting make in the last month?”

Emerge

When meetings serve decisions instead of replacing them, calendars open, deep work returns, and the team starts resolving issues in conversations instead of conference rooms.