In my experience, meetings come in to being when individuals whose job is to make decisions don't have the requisite skills, experience or confidence to make those decisions. The weight of deciding what to do is then spread over whole teams who must confer, interpret objectives, gather information and try to align, frequently over the course of a series of meetings. Everything must be litigated as a group before some kind of consensus is reached and we can move forward.

It feels like we're working and "being productive", but it's more like meetings are a crutch for layers of management who aren't able to clearly define what the business or technical objectives are.

A crutch not just for management, but peers/underlings too. As long as we're all trying, we can't be blamed. Ineffectiveness guised as CoLlAbOrAtIoN~

The more bodies thrown at a thing, the closer we get to creating a 'self-fulfilling'/tire-spinning prophecy. As someone who errs towards antisocial but has to mask to be productive, this is entirely unproductive. An 'XY problem', if you will.

I'm a big fan of 'command by negation', aim to do the thing - be prepared to adjust. There's still ongoing communication with this... it's just pointed/with intent. The article opens with this, emphasis mine:

> The meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work.

Dubious, a lot is said... what sticks/is useful? Meetings contain more word salad and posturing than anything. One could argue meetings are more 'creative performance' than 'communication'