[Aurornis]

We tried variations of some of these concepts at a previous company that was stuck in meeting hell.

The result, sadly, was: More meetings and more process!

The people responsible for all of the meetings kind of understood the problem, but they only had one tool in their toolbox: Meetings! So they started putting together meetings to discuss the issue Meetings to come up with solutions. Meetings to present new frameworks for meetings. Meetings to look at metrics for meeting time. Meetings to discuss the new system we were using to poll engineers about their feelings about meetings so we could quantify the progress we were making on meetings.

The underlying problem was one of incentives. These people were engaged in a battle of visibility, and their way to staying visible was to call more meetings and generate more activity. The more activity they generated, the more visible they were, and the more important executives thought they looked.

I think the suggestions in the article are great for companies with a mild case of meeting excess, but if a company is so deep in meeting hell that managers don't know how to accomplish anything without calling a lot of big meetings then there's a deeper incentives problem that needs to be addressed.