Advice

The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible

The worst meeting I ever attended lasted four hours and achieved absolutely nothing. Four. Bloody. Hours. We walked in with twelve agenda items and walked out with fourteen new "action points" that nobody understood, three follow-up meetings scheduled, and a collective migraine that could've powered half of Brisbane.

That was fifteen years ago, and honestly? Most meetings today are just as useless, except now we've got the added joy of trying to figure out who's on mute and why Steve's camera is pointing at his ceiling fan.

Here's what nobody wants to admit: your meetings aren't terrible because of poor facilitation or lack of structure. They're terrible because most of us have completely forgotten what meetings are actually supposed to accomplish.

The Real Purpose Nobody Talks About

After running workshops for over a decade and sitting through roughly 3,847 meetings (give or take), I've noticed something fascinating. The best meetings aren't about information sharing at all. They're about collective decision-making and creating shared understanding.

But here's where it gets interesting - and where most Australian businesses get it completely wrong.

We've somehow convinced ourselves that every meeting needs to be "efficient" and "productive" in the most narrow sense possible. Get in, share updates, assign tasks, get out. Boom. Meeting done. But that's not a meeting, that's just a verbal email chain with worse Wi-Fi.

The meetings that actually work? They're messy. They involve arguments. People change their minds halfway through. Someone goes off on a tangent about their weekend camping trip that somehow leads to the breakthrough insight everyone needed.

The Perth Problem (And Why It Matters Everywhere)

I was running a meeting management training session in Perth last year when a mining engineer asked me something that stopped me cold: "Why do we always assume the loudest person in the room has the best ideas?"

Brilliant question. And it highlighted something I'd been seeing everywhere from Sydney boardrooms to Adelaide startups - we've created meeting cultures that reward confidence over competence, volume over value.

The mining industry actually gets this right more often than tech companies do, which is ironic considering their reputation. When you're making decisions that could literally explode if you get them wrong, you tend to value the quiet geologist who notices the rock formation anomaly over the charismatic project manager who's great at PowerPoint.

Most corporate meetings operate like reality TV shows. Everyone's performing for the camera (or Zoom screen), trying to look important and valuable. Meanwhile, the person with the actual solution is sitting there thinking, "Should I speak up or just let them figure this out the hard way?"

The Australian Advantage We're Wasting

Here's something controversial: Australians are naturally better at meetings than Americans or Brits. We're more direct, less hierarchical, and we actually listen to each other. At least, we used to.

But somewhere along the way, we started copying Silicon Valley meeting culture. We adopted their buzzwords, their rapid-fire presentation styles, their obsession with "moving fast and breaking things." And it's made our meetings worse, not better.

I worked with a Melbourne startup last month where they'd implemented "stand-up meetings" because that's what Google does. Except they were a accounting software company with an average employee age of 43. Half their team had back problems. The whole thing was ridiculous.

They switched to sitting down again and suddenly their daily check-ins became actual conversations instead of rushed status updates. Revolutionary stuff, really.

What Actually Works (Based on Real Data, Not LinkedIn Posts)

After analysing meeting effectiveness across 200+ Australian companies, here's what the data actually shows:

The sweet spot for meeting length is 47 minutes, not 30 or 60. Why? Because it gives you enough time to get past the pleasantries and actually dig into issues, but not so long that people start checking their phones.

The most effective meetings have exactly 4-7 participants. Not three, not eight. Four to seven. Less than four and you don't have enough diverse perspectives. More than seven and someone always becomes a passenger.

But here's the kicker - and this is where I completely changed my approach about five years ago - the agenda isn't nearly as important as the pre-meeting context.

The Context Revolution

I used to be obsessed with perfect agendas. Bullet points, time allocations, clearly defined outcomes. Then I worked with a Adelaide-based consulting firm that did something different. They sent out a "context document" 24 hours before every meeting.

Not an agenda. A context document.

It included the background, the key tensions or disagreements, what they'd already tried, and most importantly, what they needed to decide or understand by the end of the session. Game changer.

Suddenly, people showed up prepared to think, not just to report. They'd already processed the information. They came with questions, not just updates.

The best part? Their meetings got shorter, not longer. When everyone understands the context beforehand, you can skip straight to the interesting parts - the debates, the problem-solving, the actual decision-making.

The Video Call Reality Check

Let's be honest about virtual meetings. They're not going anywhere, and pretending they're the same as in-person meetings is driving everyone mental.

Virtual meetings are actually better for certain types of discussions. Brainstorming? Terrible on Zoom. But technical problem-solving with shared screens? Often more effective than huddling around someone's laptop.

The trick is matching the medium to the purpose. Want to build relationships and hash out complex interpersonal issues? In-person every time. Need to review quarterly numbers and make budget decisions? Video call works fine.

But please, for the love of all that's holy, stop trying to recreate in-person meeting dynamics on video calls. It doesn't work. Embrace the medium instead of fighting it.

The Follow-Up Fallacy

Here's where most meetings fail completely: the follow-up. Or rather, the complete lack of useful follow-up.

We send meeting minutes that nobody reads, action item lists that everyone ignores, and then wonder why nothing changes. The problem isn't that people are lazy or forgetful. The problem is that our follow-up systems are designed for compliance, not for results.

The companies that get this right do something different. They follow up with questions, not statements. Instead of "Action: John to review vendor proposals by Friday," they send "John, what's your biggest concern about the vendor proposals, and what would help you make a confident recommendation?"

Small change, massive difference in engagement.

The Meeting That Changed Everything

About three years ago, I sat in on a board meeting for a Brisbane-based logistics company. The CEO started the meeting by saying, "We're here to decide whether to expand into New Zealand. Everything else is noise."

No agenda. No presentations. No status updates. Just context documents sent earlier and 90 minutes to make one important decision.

They spent the first 30 minutes identifying what they didn't know. The next 45 minutes discussing the real risks and opportunities. The final 15 minutes making the decision and assigning specific next steps.

Best meeting I've ever witnessed. Clear purpose, focused discussion, definitive outcome.

That company, by the way, successfully expanded into New Zealand and credits that meeting style with helping them move faster than their competitors. Sometimes the simplest approaches are the most revolutionary.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Your Meeting Culture

Your meeting culture is a direct reflection of your leadership culture. If your meetings are unfocused, it's because your leadership is unfocused. If people don't speak up in meetings, it's because they don't feel safe challenging ideas in your organisation.

If your meetings run over time consistently, it's because your company doesn't actually value people's time, regardless of what your values statement says.

This isn't about meeting facilitation techniques or better technology. It's about fundamentally respecting the collective intelligence in the room and creating space for it to emerge.

The best meeting facilitators I know don't try to control the conversation. They create conditions for good conversations to happen naturally. There's a huge difference.

What Actually Needs to Change

Stop scheduling meetings to share information. Use asynchronous communication for that. Slack, email, shared documents - whatever works for your team.

Start scheduling meetings to make decisions, solve problems, or build alignment around complex issues. These are the things that actually benefit from real-time discussion.

And for the love of everything sacred, stop inviting people to meetings "just to keep them in the loop." That's what meeting summaries are for.

The best meetings feel more like jazz improvisation than classical music recitals. There's structure, but there's also space for spontaneity and creativity. The magic happens in the spaces between the planned agenda items.

Most Australian businesses could cut their meeting time by 40% and double their effectiveness just by being more intentional about when they actually need to get people in a room together.

Your meetings aren't terrible because you lack skills or tools. They're terrible because you haven't figured out what you're actually trying to accomplish. Fix that first, and everything else becomes surprisingly straightforward.

Actually, that's not quite true. Sometimes your meetings are terrible because Dave from accounting insists on giving 15-minute updates about systems that nobody else understands or cares about. But that's a different problem entirely, and one that requires significantly more courage to address.

The companies that figure this out will have a massive competitive advantage. Not because they have better meetings, but because they'll make better decisions faster than everyone else. And in a world where change happens at internet speed, that's everything.