Everyone complains about meetings. The sweet spot of communicating just the right amount of information to the right people at the right time in a format that they will understand is a chimera and doesn’t exist. Incomplete or asymmetric information is a fact of life and a design feature or flaw (depending on your point of view) of organizations and bureaucracies everywhere. If complete transparency is one solution, then information overload and loss of competitive advantage would be two side-effects. Trial and error normally lead companies and teams to a cadence of meetings that fulfil their requirements in most situations. When this system fails it can usually be supplemented by emergency meetings and dedicated project teams. All this is to say is that meetings are a feature of work life and are usually necessary. This post is about why meetings often fail to meet their objectives and how we can avoid this. In the spirit of honesty, I have attended and hosted meetings that have not met their objectives and I will almost certainly continue to do so. But the more thought we can put into meetings, the better we can make them over time.