Meeting or no meeting? · Old Dawg Builder's Community

Meeting or no meeting?

"If you don't need to provide input, don't attend the meeting."

This is common advice. Although incomplete.

Because in construction, the meeting where you have nothing to say is often the same meeting where decisions are made that directly affect your work next week.

Skip it, and you're the last to know about a design change that just shifted your sequence. Attend it, and you're spending 90 minutes to get 10 minutes of usable information.

Both options are waste. We just don't talk about it because one of them looks productive.

The issue isn't meetings. It's that we use meetings as our primary information delivery system, and we force people to sit through the entire package to get the piece they need rather than make it intentional to get needed information to the necessary people following the meeting.

Three things I've seen actually solve this:

1. Separate "decide" lists from "inform" lists for every meeting. Different people, different channels.

2. Real-time downstream flags — when a decision is made that affects someone not in the room, they get a message within the hour. A clear message, not buried in next week's minutes.

3. A standing 5-minute post-meeting summary that answers one question: "What changed and who does it affect?"

How do you all handle this type of waste?

2 comments