Meeting To Decision Ratio
You left every meeting with more questions, fewer answers, and a follow-up on the calendar.
An enterprise that destroys its capital while seeking gain is the death of initiative. Valluvar identifies the paradox: activity that consumes more than it produces. Fourteen meetings. Zero decisions. Last month. Your calendar was full. Your output wasn’t. Each meeting felt productive because it contained discussion. Discussion felt like progress because it consumed energy. Energy consumption felt like work because it was exhausting. But exhaustion isn’t output. And activity isn’t progress. You left every meeting with more questions, fewer answers, and a follow-up on the calendar.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $18.5 billion in WeWork. When WeWork’s valuation collapsed from $47 billion to $9 billion in six weeks, Masayoshi Son doubled down. He committed another $5 billion in rescue financing. I traced the sunk cost logic through earnings call transcripts. ‘We believe in the long-term potential.’ ‘The thesis is unchanged.’ The thesis was always unchanged. By the time WeWork filed for bankruptcy in 2023, SoftBank had written off $14 billion. The loyalty wasn’t to WeWork. It was to the $18.5 billion already spent. Sunk cost doesn’t feel like a fallacy when it’s your money.
A high meeting-to-decision ratio is friction consuming the machine. In engineering, mechanical advantage measures how much useful work a machine produces relative to the effort applied. Friction is the enemy: it converts applied energy into waste heat without producing any useful output. Organisations with high meeting-to-decision ratios are high-friction machines: enormous energy goes in, minimal output comes out. The energy isn’t wasted visibly. It’s converted into discussions, alignments, updates, and check-ins that feel like work but produce no decisions. The machine is running. The gears are turning. Nothing is being built.
For every meeting this week, track one metric: did this meeting produce a decision? Not a discussion. Not an action item. A decision. At the end of the week, divide total meetings by total decisions. If the ratio is above 5:1, your machine is mostly friction.
That spinning wheel has a name. Meeting-to-Decision Ratio. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Meetings multiplied because decisions couldn’t be made informally. Every question was escalated to a meeting. Every meeting that didn’t decide spawned a follow-up. The ratio climbed because the decision-making muscle atrophied.
Navigate
Every meeting has a stated decision to be made. Meetings that exist for updates are replaced by asynchronous communication. The ratio targets 3:1 or lower.
Tool
DMG / Decision Velocity: the metric that measures the ratio of meetings to decisions produced. When velocity is tracked, meetings must justify their existence through outcomes.
Implement
Track one metric this week: did each meeting produce a decision? At the end, divide total meetings by total decisions. If above 5:1, your machine is mostly friction.
Emerge
When meetings serve decisions, calendars open, deep work returns, and the team rediscovers that most issues can be resolved in a conversation, not a conference room.