If the job of management is to generate work product and management spends most of its time in meetings, management is probably not doing a good job. A written corporate strategy document is work product; debate in itself in any discipline, except possibly philosophy, is not. It has been argued both ways.
That is because the generation of most creative work product requires a state of flow. Most thinkers require 15 minutes or so of immersion to get into this state; during this immersion period much productive work does not get done. Therefore, if the only times we have to generate work product are the 5-minute wedges between (or during!) meetings, we can never truly get into flow and can never accomplish our best work. We can know this a priori.
Consider the fragmented products and processes with which we interact every day. A fragmented, arbitrarily partitioned day yields fragmented, arbitrarily partitioned thinking, which yields fragmented, arbitrarily partitioned work products, which yield fragmented, arbitrarily partitioned human and computer systems. It's Conway's Law in action.
Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
Why, then, do we get so little done? Why do we spend so much (unnecessary) time in meetings?
Immediacy. Responding to immediacy is allowing someone else to prioritize your time. And this beast's hunger knows no limits. This thought piece puts forth two new laws for your consideration:
We can expect busy management to generate incomplete work product, which is to say we can expect busy management to be bad management
Responding to immediacy leads to busy management
Consider this pattern:
We can see how this turns into a negative feedback loop of more time spent responding to failed meetings and more meetings going worse for the lack of preparation, leading to more cleanup meetings. These are the Laws in action - a poorly moderated meeting pervades the flow time of the participants with cleanup tasks, reducing the amount of work product they can, in turn, generate, right on down the line. And this was caused by the moderator choosing to spend his time on something other than what was planned, probably the result of someone else's lack of patience. Wasting people's time and then judging them on their throughput is probably only slightly less bad than encouraging your children to grow up to become advertising executives.
Perhaps we get poor throughput precisely because we try to optimize for throughput.
So how can we reduce typographical therapy and eliminate cleanup meeting backpressure from our pipelines? We follow through on the commitments we have already made by creating the necessary structure for our existing meetings. We create the necessary structure by preparing for the discussion. We find the time to prepare for the discussion by choosing to prioritize our own time, rather than letting requests on our time make those prioritization decisions for us. Like any good law, there should be at least two exceptions. Here's one - tactical meetings shouldn't have an agenda. Most tactical meetings I'm in are actually (poorly planned) strategic meetings in disguise. Can you think of another exception?
We can choose not to be busy. People have been choosing to be busy or not to be busy for at least around 2,000 years. Every department head, executive, and director has the choice of how to prioritize her time.
In my work, I have found that most executives have far too many tactical and administrative items on their schedules, which is often the result of an adrenaline addiction, the need to stay occupied with moment-to-moment activities. - Death by Meeting (2010 AD)
From Alexander the Platonic, [I learned] not frequently nor without necessity to say to any one, or to write in a letter, that I have no leisure; nor continually to excuse the neglect of duties required by our relation to those with whom we live, by alleging urgent occupations. - The Meditations (170 AD)
We must not confuse the activity of sending emails or idly debating with the generation of work product. These strategies have at least three problems: they're not transparent, they're not durable, and they remove all the conflict from meetings before they even happen, leaving them washed out, boring, and most of all ineffective. "Not transparent" means those not privileged to be on the original thread can't discover the content without someone "looping them in." "Not durable" means that scattered pieces of information floating around in people's heads and inboxes are not enough to ensure consistent understanding, rollout and reconstruction conversation-to-conversation and team-to-team. For example, engorging ourselves with data points via email is likely not sufficient to ensure a consistent understanding of the state of the business.
If your work product is functioning software, rejecting immediacy could mean adding a feature request to the backlog. If your work product is a strategy document, rejecting immediacy may mean deferring an analysis to the next quarterly planning cycle. And like all good Laws, the Law of Immediacy has at least two exceptions. If your work product is customer satisfaction, picking up the phone in as few rings as possible (and satisfying the customer) should be your aim. Can you think of another exception?
Rejecting immediacy is not the same thing as increasing bureaucracy - rejecting immediacy should involve less overhead overall, not more. Rejecting immediacy may mean rejecting a poorly conceived meeting.