Does anyone really know HOW to run a meeting?

MEETINGS - PART 1

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

- Albert Einstein

Companies talk about impact, sustainability, and purpose. They talk about creating value rather than problems. But all of that ambition lives or dies in one place most organizations overlook entirely: meetings.

Yes. Meetings.

If organizations want different outcomes, they have to start where decisions are formed, meaning is interpreted, and direction is set. And that happens, for better or worse, in meetings.

Does anyone really know how to run one?

It is estimated that over 11 million meetings take place every single day. That adds up to well over a billion meetings each year. When employees are asked about meetings, they say the same thing consistently: meetings are essential for alignment, but most of them are bad.

They are too long. Poorly organized. Unclear in purpose. And instead of creating alignment, they often produce disengagement.

 The uncomfortable truth is this: the way most meetings are run is outdated because it ignores how people are actually wired to think, feel, and act.

We talk a great deal about sustainability and value systems—about continuous improvement across an organization’s value chain and its stakeholders. Yet we rarely examine the most frequent human system we operate: the meeting itself, and its impact on the people inside it.

Most of us never graduated from the “University of Meetings.” What was meant to be an efficient way to exchange ideas, overcome obstacles, and drive outcomes often turns into something closer to a Snapchat: people talk, information is exchanged, and then it disappears. No shared meaning. No consistent action. No follow-through.

Nearly everyone has experienced this. You leave a meeting, run into a colleague later that day, and see them doing something that makes no sense to you. You ask why. They explain that this is what they understood was expected of them from the meeting you both attended.

You think: I never heard that. And I was in the same room.

This is not a communication failure. It is a design failure.

In our research, as we examined how energy operates within individuals and groups, we encountered a belief system that has existed for generations: stimulus–response motivation. The idea that if I say the right thing, present the right slide, or issue the right directive, people will respond in the way I intend.

That assumption is deeply flawed.

People do not “receive” messages uniformly. They interpret them through their own internal wiring—their way of thinking, feeling, and acting. When meetings are designed as one-way transmissions rather than alignment processes, fragmentation is inevitable.

Current research on meetings reflects the cost of this misunderstanding:

• An estimated $37 billion is wasted annually on unproductive meetings in the U.S.

• Roughly $25 million is spent on meetings every single day.

• Middle managers spend about 35% of their time in meetings; senior leaders spend closer to 50%.

• During unproductive meetings, 69% of people check email, and 49% work on unrelated tasks.

These are not discipline problems. They are system problems.

A better way requires a different level of thinking.

Perhaps the meeting itself is not the enemy. Perhaps the issue is that most people have never been taught—or coached—how to design meetings that align people rather than simply inform them.

The following ideas resonate most with leaders who value involvement and collaboration as part of their natural style. But collaboration is often misunderstood. It is not group work. It is not a consensus. And it is not simply putting people in a room together.

Collaboration is neurological and emotional before it is behavioral.

Every brain is wired differently. Every person processes information through a unique combination of thinking patterns, emotional responses, and action tendencies. True collaboration occurs when those internal systems are brought into alignment around an outcome, not just a goal.

 Most meetings fail because they aim for compliance rather than coherence.

Traditional management models prioritize speed and efficiency. They assume that sending a clear message is enough. But clarity of message does not equal clarity of meaning. Meaning is constructed internally, not delivered externally.

Effective meetings must account for all three components of human behavior: how people think, how they feel, and how they act. When any one of these is ignored, energy dissipates, and alignment collapses.

This is why meetings often feel busy but unproductive; why people leave with different interpretations; why effort increases but outcomes don’t.

Managers trained primarily to achieve logical, task-based goals often default to didactic communication: sending information and expecting uniform reception. What they overlook is that each participant filters that information through their own Winning Profile—their internal design.

The result is speed without alignment. Activity without cohesion.

 Until meetings are redesigned to align internal systems rather than transmit instructions, organizations will continue to confuse motion with progress.

Part 2 will explore what it actually means to design meetings that produce alignment, how to diagnose misalignment in real time, and how leaders can shift meetings from energy drains into performance accelerators.

Watch this space.