Who Gets to End the Argument

Meetings that start after 8 p.m. rose 16 percent in a single year. The figure comes from Microsoft, which studied anonymized activity across Microsoft 365 and surveyed 31,000 knowledge workers in 31 markets. Sixty percent of meetings, it found, are called on the spot. One in ten is scheduled at the last minute.

No one voted for this. It simply accrued, the way precedent accrues in an institution that has stopped asking why it does things.

Somewhere along the way, the calendar became the default answer to every organizational question. A decision needs making, so someone sends an invitation. News needs sharing, so someone sends another. The workday lost its edges, and a generation of professionals began measuring the week by the number of screens they survived.

Where decision rights were never assigned

But a crowded calendar is less a record of work than a record of power, specifically power that was never handed out. Read one closely and a pattern emerges. The meetings gather around questions no one has the authority to settle. A weekly sync that has run for two years usually means two departments were never told which of them owns the outcome. A status update with fourteen attendees usually means no one trusts the written record. Meetings breed in the gaps where decision rights were never assigned, and they keep breeding because convening feels like progress while naming a decision-maker feels like exposure.

Anyone who has watched a legislature will recognize the move. When a choice is costly, institutions reach for process. They form a committee, schedule hearings, commission a review. The machinery hums, and the choice stays exactly where it was. The corporate reorganization works the same way. The org chart changes. The uncomfortable decision does not.

Evan Unger has spent nearly four decades inside the rooms where that avoidance plays out. When a company calls him in, the complaint is almost always the schedule. He says he rarely finds the problem there. What he finds instead is a team of executives who have never been told which of them is allowed to end an argument. Mr. Unger began in 1988, first inside Merck, later running leadership development at what was then Colorado’s largest hospital system. Today he works with corporations, health systems and school districts as managing partner of Schwartz + Associates.

“A meeting is the most expensive room a company can create,” he says. “When people leave that room unclear, the company pays for it twice, once in the meeting and again in the work that follows.”

Before anyone receives an invitation, he requires the organizer to answer five questions drawn from a framework his firm calls POPRA®, for purpose, objectives, process, roles and agreements. Any of the five can start a fight. Roles start the worst kind. People can agree on a purpose or an objective while privately keeping their own reading of it. A role allows no such looseness. Naming one gives a person the standing to close the debate and tells everyone else they no longer have it. That is where the exercise usually stalls. Groups will spend an hour polishing an agenda to avoid five minutes on the sentence that says who decides.

This is why, in Mr. Unger’s view, the first minutes of a meeting carry most of its weight. He compares them to the opening of a chess match. “If you squander the opening,” he says, “you spend the rest trying to claw back control.”

The opening is rarely lost to a bad agenda. It is lost to the silence that follows the most senior person’s first opinion. Mr. Unger calls this the HIPPO effect, for highest-paid person’s opinion. Once the HIPPO signals a preference, the room stops weighing the idea and starts adjusting to it. Deference replaces deliberation. The meeting runs its full hour, and the objection that might have saved the project surfaces weeks later in hallways and private messages, after the work has already been built on top of the mistake.

It is a small version of a failure familiar from far larger rooms, where advisers read the principal before they read the evidence.

The hours this costs rarely appear in a budget. Steven G. Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, surveyed employees who reported spending 18 hours a week across 17.7 meetings while judging fewer than 12 of those hours worth attending. He put the resulting waste at more than $25,000 per employee per year, roughly $101 million annually at a company of 5,000 people. It may be the largest line in a payroll that no one is ever asked to defend.

The obvious remedy is to cut, and at first the research agrees. Researchers writing in MIT Sloan Management Review studied 76 companies that adopted no-meeting days. Where meetings fell by 40 percent, employees reported productivity 71 percent higher than before. A 60 percent cut was associated with a 55 percent gain in reported cooperation and a 57 percent drop in stress.

Then the curve bends. The gains flatten beyond a 60 percent reduction and reverse after that. At companies that abolished meetings altogether, satisfaction, productivity, engagement and cooperation all fell.

Both halves of the finding point to the same thing. Cutting meetings eases the cost of coordination, which is why the early numbers shine. It does not answer the question that produced the meetings, which is why the gains run out. The companies that emptied their calendars still did not know who decides. What they had eliminated was one of the few places where disagreement had to happen in front of witnesses. Decisions migrated into direct messages. Accountability grew harder to trace. People who had been overscheduled became isolated instead. The packed calendar and the empty one describe the same unresolved question about authority.

What automation strips away

Automation is now dragging that question into the open. Software already transcribes the call, drafts the summary, assigns the follow-ups and retrieves what was said on the same subject last quarter. A meeting whose only job was moving information between heads has little left to justify it.

What remains is harder to explain away. It is the recurring session with no informational purpose, the one that convenes month after month because two executives disagree and neither has been given the authority to settle it. On a crowded calendar that meeting blends in. On a thinned one it stands alone. Automation does not resolve the standoff. It strips away the camouflage.

The damage does not stop at payroll. Decisions that never quite get made return week after week, and the strain of carrying them is what employees eventually call exhaustion.

“People do not burn out from work,” Mr. Unger says. “They burn out from the friction around the work, the ambiguity, the rehashing, the sense that everyone is pushing but nothing is actually moving.”

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Eight people, sixty minutes. That is a full workday of payroll, committed the moment the invitation goes out, before anyone has said a word. Almost no one who sends the invitation ever sees the bill.

Calendars reveal priorities more reliably than mission statements do. They show who is permitted to decide, what requires consensus and how much of an institution’s time is spent avoiding a choice. That holds for a startup, a school board and a cabinet alike.

“It is simple,” Mr. Unger says. “If you want to understand the health of an organization, do not read the annual report. Watch how they run a meeting.”