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Ninety Minutes, No Decision
I sat through a ninety-minute strategic review last autumn that ended without a decision. Not deferred-nobody had ever been trying to make one.
We updated each other, discussed some options, and left with a list of things to discuss at some future point. Nobody had paused, before scheduling it, to ask what the meeting was actually for.
The invitation had said ‘strategic alignment.’ I’ve since noticed that phrase tends to appear when the actual question hasn’t been found yet.
Strategic alignment is always available as an answer to the purpose question.
The question it sidesteps is: alignment on what, specifically, and what decision does that alignment make possible for us?
The Meeting Origin Test
Where Pointless Meetings Come From
Most conversations about pointless meetings treat them as a calendar discipline problem. Too many invitations, not enough willingness to decline.
That analysis is reasonable as far as it goes. It just misses where pointless meetings actually originate-they don’t get scheduled because professionals have poor calendar hygiene, but because the underlying decision was never framed clearly enough to make the meeting unnecessary in the first place.
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The meeting is a symptom. The missing question is the cause.
The Question That Gets Skipped
Every meeting that produces nothing was convened without a clear answer to one prior question: what decision does this meeting exist to make?
The ‘what do we need to discuss’ version is answerable with anything from any agenda. ‘What should we align on’ is the same problem in different clothing.
What cannot always be answered-and is rarely asked before a calendar invite goes out-is what specific outcome will be different after this meeting than before it.
When nobody can answer that clearly, the meeting exists to generate the sensation of progress rather than produce it.
That asymmetry is worth naming before anyone adds it to a calendar.
The Substitute That Feels Like Work
The Origin Test in Practice
The reason the Origin Test is rarely applied is structural. Scheduling a meeting when a decision needs to be made is the path of least resistance-it distributes cognitive load, creates the appearance of shared ownership.
Defers the harder work of framing what actually needs to be resolved. The meeting feels like the work. It is often a substitute for it.
The test doesn’t require restructuring how meetings work-it requires asking one question before the first one gets scheduled.
Before your next significant meeting, ask: what decision will be different after this than before? For the ninety-minute review from the introduction, the honest answer was: none, and reaching that answer would have taken thirty seconds.
This applies most directly to meetings that exist to make a specific call-not to status updates or relationship conversations, where the purpose is different and the test needs adjusting accordingly.
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The Meeting That Shouldn’t Have Happened
Most of the meetings that waste time were never going to produce anything, regardless of who attended or how well they were run.
The problem was set before the invite went out. Catching it there-at the framing stage, not the calendar stage-is where the real work actually is.
“A meeting without a named decision is a conversation with a calendar entry.”
References
[1] Rogelberg, S.G. The Surprising Science of Meetings. Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN 9780190689216. The most rigorous empirical study of meeting dysfunction; lack of clear purpose is the primary predictor of meeting dissatisfaction. global.oup.com/academic/product/the-surprising-science-of-meetings-9780190689216
[2] Drucker, P.F. “The Effective Decision.” Harvard Business Review, January 1967. The first step in any sound decision is clarifying what kind of decision is actually being made — the foundational basis for the Meeting Origin Test. hbr.org/1967/01/the-effective-decision
[3] Klein, G. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press, 1998. ISBN 9780262611466. Experts frame problems before deliberating, not during — the empirical basis for asking the framing question before the meeting is scheduled. mitpress.mit.edu/9780262611466/sources-of-power
FOUND THIS USEFUL?
Forward this to someone who sat through a ninety-minute meeting last week and left with nothing decided.
Reply ‘ORIGINTEST’ for a self-assessment: how to audit your recurring meetings.