The Meeting That Achieved Nothing—and Why That’s Sometimes Okay

Modern corporate life has evolved into a peculiar form of theatre: every actor dressed in Uniqlo smart casual, each line rehearsed via Slack, and every scene scored by a PowerPoint deck that ends with a slide titled Next Steps (which are never taken). And at the heart of this performance lies the sacred cow: the agenda.

To enter a meeting without one is to arrive unarmed at a duel. Or so we are told.

Your humble author recalls a particularly bruising episode in his former life as a corporate underling, where an innocuous meeting invite—a simple 45-minute slot titled “Touch base on Q3 alignment”—exploded into a full-blown accountability inquisition. An hour before the meeting, my boss pings me: “Where are the slides?” I was baffled. Slides? I had assumed, rather naively, that a conversation might suffice. Silly me. This was a working session, which in corporate dialect translates to: bring a 20-page deck and make sure you’ve assigned a RACI.

Ah yes, RACI. That delightful project management acronym standing for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. It is a matrix so beloved by middle managers that it might as well be printed on their LinkedIn banner. In theory, it clarifies roles. In practice, it enables entire departments to deny responsibility using an Excel sheet.

“I’m not accountable, I’m just informed,” says the procurement lead as the project bursts into flames.

And so we go on, scheduling meetings with immaculate structure: slide templates, Gantt charts, Trello boards with colour-coded deadlines, and project briefs written in the passive voice. But for all this procedural foreplay, most meetings produce less heat than a Swiss radiator in August. We organise ourselves into oblivion.

Take the infamous Waterfall model, once the darling of project managers everywhere. It promised order, sequential perfection, and deliverables that flowed gracefully from one phase to the next. In reality, it was like building a house and only discovering you wanted windows after the roof was already installed. Enter Agile—the chaotic good to Waterfall’s lawful evil. Its rituals—stand-ups, sprints, retrospectives—sounded dynamic, but often resulted in more sticky notes than outcomes. Then came SAFE Agile, a Frankenstein’s monster that promised to scale flexibility across the enterprise and ended up turning everyone into a scrum master with a calendar disorder.

You see, it all looks very organised. But at some point, one must ask: is this structure creating clarity or simply ritualised confusion?

Not all meetings benefit from having an objective. Indeed, some of the most generative encounters in business history—Jobs and Ive chatting over coffee, Bezos pacing the floor with a whiteboard pen, a random VC and a biotech founder arguing over lunch—began with no clear “deliverable.” They were not aligned on outputs. They were curious.

And here we arrive at the core of the heresy: not every meeting needs a purpose. Sometimes, the very lack of an agenda invites the kind of open, unscripted conversation that leads to ideas you can’t plot on a timeline or assign a KPI.

Ironically, this kind of meeting is tolerated—encouraged, even—on the Continent. In Switzerland, one may be invited for a coffee or lunch “just to catch up.” No notes. No minutes. Just the warm embrace of a milchkaffee and a vague hope that something useful might occur. To the Germanic and Dutch sensibility (and your humble author has both), this is excruciating. Why are we here? What is the point? Is there no deliverable? No action log?

We Teutons are not built for vague social interaction. Lunch should be for food. Coffee, ideally, should accompany a signed contract.

And yet, there is something beautifully subversive about the purposeless meeting. It cuts through the fetish of over-organisation. It allows for curiosity, for serendipity, and for the rare experience of not knowing exactly where the conversation will lead. In a business world dominated by tools that track every second and rank every outcome, there is something oddly productive in giving yourself the freedom to waste time.

So, the next time you are scolded for not bringing slides, or asked to define an agenda for a casual chat, try this: smile politely and say, “I thought we might just talk.”

In the age of structured inefficiency, that might be the most productive thing you do all week.