Bill Dutton with Dr. Ruth Shillair
After reading one more litany of complaints about ‘meetings’, I must come to their defense. Harry Wallop’s article ‘Are meetings pointless?’ in The Sunday Times (12 August 2026) stirred me to answer his question. While balanced, his article basically calls into question the value of meetings.
So let me begin with my basic premise. Good meetings, at the right time, with the right people, on key issues, are not pointless. They can be an essential aspect of any group collaboration in business, government, or not-for-profit organization or academic collaboration.
For instance, as I am involved in a globally distributed research project, it has become increasingly clear that meetings are essential. When your colleagues are not co-located, the need for meeting as a group becomes far more apparent. Otherwise, I feel like I am tossing my emails or shared documents literally over a wall with no idea of whether anyone has paid attention to them, trashed them, or found aspects of them to be useful. In such ways, individual members of a team can become or feel isolated and lose their motivation if they don’t connect with their larger team.
Are there pointless meetings? Sure.
However, if a meeting is scheduled with nothing of significance to talk about, then it is the fault of the chair or the participants, not the medium of communication. Never schedule a meeting if it is not functional, albeit a function could well be keeping the team together and motivated.
A common complaint is that you can see some participants in a meeting are not paying attention (to you). They may be reading their emails, cleaning their fingernails, or falling asleep. Well, that is feedback, whether you like it or not. In fact, one of the best aspects of meeting in person or online is the ability to see the reactions of individuals during any discussion – not just in carefully crafted comments after the meeting. In that spirit, a difficult colleague can be a good collaborator.
One of my favorite colleagues was famous for making a face that reflected his reactions to my or anyone else’s ideas (https://billdutton.me/2018/05/26/the-bad-collaborator/). Without any interruption of the conversation, I could see what my colleague thought of my presentation or proposal, for example. He converted me to relying a lot on expressions, facial and otherwise, to give real time feedback during a meeting. If you don’t take it personally, it is immensely helpful.
Of course, it is entirely possible that many people believe they spend too much time in meetings as opposed to doing more productive work. But that is an issue over creating the right number and duration of meetings, not the value of meetings per se. Any organization would be wise to be flexible on the timing and duration of meetings and open to responding to feedback so that meetings can be adjusted to be productive. You can spend too much time on almost any task or process, and meetings are no exception.
Zoom ‘fatigue’ can be a problem caused for example by too many meetings packed together. Online video conferencing enables us to attend meetings that we cannot or prefer not to attend in person. And as my colleague Jack Nilles in his 1974 book has argued, meeting online can enable you to make valuable telecommunication-transportation tradeoffs. But by lowering the cost of creating a meeting, there is a real risk of people agreeing to too many meetings. They are almost too easy to schedule and conduct online. However, many people begin to realize they are being over-scheduled or over-booked into meetings. They need to learn how and when to say ‘no’ to meetings that are optional, not valuable, or unnecessary.
Will AI help or hurt? I have read some suggestions of using AI to record and summarize meetings along with providing action points. This could be helpful as it allows for participants to fully focus on the conversation and think creatively rather than worry about notetaking on every comment. However, it also can also end up with even less engagement as participants have an expectation they will get notes, so they can answer emails or work on something else. Personally, I find the AI presence worrisome. I have found AI summaries of meetings worse than worthless, and the arrival of an AI agent into my meetings to be intrusive and potentially a risk. Did everyone agree to having the meeting recorded, for example? Objecting to the AI presence can feel like violating the workflow of others.
But what about the new AI breakthrough? We – not only Mark Zuckerberg – will be able to create a virtual-self based on your past talks, speeches, written work, etc. You can now be in more than one meeting at the same time – solving the age-old problem that you can’t be two places at once. What could go wrong? Will your virtual-self be bored? If you are scheduled in too many meetings now, your multiple personas will enable you to be in every meeting you are invited to join. We will need to double check if participants, even speakers, are virtual or real people. My personal recommendation is to create a higher bar for scheduling or participating in any meeting to make each meeting more meaningful and your work-life more balanced.
Work alone for a while and you might find yourself converting to the value of collaboration and the meetings required to make collaboration work well. Meetings that are well planned can provide a source of human contact and encouragement, if you really participate in person, not virtually.
