Are your meetings too long or are they actually too shallow?

The petri dish problem

I have always been a bit people-obsessed. Maybe it’s having a charismatic older brother who seems to seamlessly fit in wherever he goes. Maybe it’s because I inexplicably got picked fifth for a friend’s Beyblade squad in Year 5. Who knows. But I have always been a little too fascinated with why people gather and what happens when they do.

It might explain why I find myself unable to look away when observing meetings. Not in a masochistic way, though our lord and saviour Dolly Parton knows there’s been plenty of material for that, but because meetings are one of the few places where you can watch human behavior, power dynamics, and organisational culture collide in real-time. They’re like a petri dish for everything interesting about how people work together. Or don’t.

And yet there’s a thriving cottage industry in meeting optimisation that seems determined to miss all of this. Fifteen-point checklists. Standing desks to keep things brief. The tyranny of the agenda. Apps that gamify punctuality. All very sensible. All very logical, all solving the wrong problem.

We treat meetings like broken machinery that needs fixing with the right combination of tools and techniques. But what if meetings aren’t broken at all? What if we’re simply looking at them through entirely the wrong lens?

The leadership double standard

Consider how we approach leadership development. Nobody sends executives on a two-hour course called “Seven Hacks for Better Leadership.” We understand that leadership requires depth, reflection, discomfort, and the courage to examine power dynamics and human behavior. We expect it to be difficult and worthwhile.

Yet suggest a three-hour workshop on meeting culture and watch the eye-rolling commence. “Just send the agenda in advance” someone mutters. “Keep it to 30 minutes” adds another. Tips. Efficiency. Life hacks. As if the primary problem with meetings is that they take up time.

This is rather like complaining that conversations with your teenage daughter take too long, or that falling in love is inefficient. While technically they are true, they entirely miss the point.

What meetings actually are

Here’s the uncomfortable truth, meetings are not interruptions to your work. Meetings areyour work.

Meetings are where leadership happens in public. They’re where culture gets performed, not discussed. They’re the theatre where power dynamics play out, where commitment is built or destroyed, where trust either compounds or evaporates. Meetings are where you discover what actually matters versus what you claim matters in your strategy documents.

In renewable energy, where you’re trying to deliver projects that will power the country’s future while juggling planning constraints, grid connections, supply chain chaos, and stakeholder expectations, meetings are where the critical trade-offs get made. Or avoided. Or made badly because the room wasn’t set up for honest conversation.

When speed becomes the problem

If you are running meetings where participants feel unable to surface risks, you aren’t having “inefficient meetings.” They’re creating a culture where problems hide until they become crises. The meeting length isn’t the issue. The absence of psychological safety is.

An executive team that spends 90 minutes debating turbine specifications but rushes through “culture and people” in 8 minutes isn’t managing time poorly. They’re making a statement about organisational priorities that every person in that room will remember and repeat.

The efficiency trap

The obsession with meeting efficiency is particularly puzzling in an industry dealing with projects that take years, capital expenditure in millions, and consequences that last decades. We’ll spend three months on due diligence for a wind farm but won’t invest three hours designing how our leadership team makes decisions together.

The renewable energy sector attracts brilliant people who are time-poor, plate-spinning, and driven by genuine urgency. There’s a country to decarbonise. Grids to transform. Technologies to deploy at unprecedented scale. Every hour matters.

Which makes it all the more peculiar that we’re willing to tolerate meetings that destroy trust, obscure rather than clarify decisions, and leave people more confused than when they arrived. Not because they were too long, but because they were too shallow

The theatre of business

Think of your last truly consequential meeting. Perhaps it was a go/no-go decision on a major bid. Or a difficult conversation about project delays. Or a strategy session where you needed to choose between competing priorities.

What made that meeting work or fail? Was it the agenda format? The meeting length? Or was it whether people felt able to speak honestly? Whether the room had been set up to surface disagreement productively? Whether the decision-making process was clear? Whether the senior person spoke last or first?

These are questions about theatre direction, not time management.

A thirty-minute meeting where junior engineers stay silent about risks they’ve spotted because the project director has already stated their preferred option is a catastrophically expensive meeting, regardless of its brevity. An eighty-minute meeting where a difficult trade-off gets thoroughly examined from multiple perspectives, resulting in a decision everyone understands and commits to, is a bargain.

Meetings are not administrative overhead to be minimised. They’re leadership development in real-time. They’re culture-building in action. They’re where your business actually happens.

The better question

Once you see meetings this way, the question changes from “how do we make meetings shorter?” to “how do we make meetings worthy of the decisions they’re meant to produce?”

That’s a much more interesting question. And a much more answerable one.