GoKawiilOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Listen to this post
Key Takeaways Recurring meetings often outlive their original purpose because they’ve become the default route for exceptions the standard process can’t handle.
Cancelling the meeting doesn’t remove the work — issues just stall elsewhere and come back, since ownership alone doesn’t create a path through non-standard cases.
The real cost is the delay between meetings: Work waits, other tasks get sequenced around it, and senior time gets consumed by exceptions that shouldn’t need it.
A weekly meeting had been created to solve one unusual problem on a cross-functional initiative. The standard process didn’t give the issue a clean route to resolution, so leadership brought the right people together and handled it there.
It worked. A second exception appeared a few weeks later, and because the same people were already meeting, the issue was added to the agenda. Then another issue came in from a different part of the initiative.
Months later, the original problem was gone. The meeting wasn’t.
Its agenda now carried a rotating collection of exceptions that didn’t fit neatly into the normal process. Everyone agreed the meeting was taking too much senior time, so someone suggested removing it.
The team tried to send the next unusual issue back through the normal route. It stalled because the process had no clear path for handling something that fell outside its standard assumptions.
... continue reading