The “meeting system”.

Organizations spend enormous energy trying to improve individual meetings. Better agendas, shorter durations, clearer outcomes. Most of it works locally and changes nothing systemically.

Because the real reason is structural.

A meeting is not an isolated event. It is the output of a system: the governance model that decides who needs to be in the room, the decision architecture that determines what can actually be resolved there, the leadership culture that shapes how people speak and what they leave unsaid.

When a meeting is dysfunctional, the instinct is to fix the meeting. New format, new facilitator, new rules. Sometimes it helps. But if the system that produces the meeting remains unchanged, the dysfunction returns, in the same room or in a different one.

I have run hundreds of sessions in organizations across every continent. The ones that produce lasting change are never the ones where we improved the meeting. They are the ones where we changed what the meeting was for, who owned the decision, and what happened before and after people sat down together.

That is a system intervention, not a meeting intervention. The difference matters enormously.