Everyone Wants to Be in the Room. Nobody Wants to Run the Meeting.
There is a specific organizational phenomenon that emerges in IT departments once they reach a certain size and influence, and it goes like this: every significant decision attracts attendees, every attendee has opinions, every opinion generates discussion, and by the end of a ninety-minute meeting that was scheduled for thirty minutes, the group has thoroughly explored every dimension of the problem and made absolutely no decision whatsoever. The meeting ends with an action item to schedule another meeting. The cycle continues. Important things do not get decided. Everyone involved is very busy attending meetings about the important things that are not getting decided.
The meeting culture problem in IT is particularly acute because IT decisions carry real technical consequences that make people cautious, and caution in organizations frequently expresses itself as consensus-seeking behavior that is functionally indistinguishable from paralysis. Nobody wants to be the person who made the call that caused the outage, so every call gets escalated to a group. The group, not wanting collective responsibility for a bad outcome, expands the consultation process. More stakeholders are added. More perspectives are solicited. The decision that needed to be made in a week takes a month, and the environment in the meantime continues operating on whatever inadequate configuration prompted the decision process in the first place. Risk-aversion in the decision-making process creates its own risk in the operational environment.
The antidote is not fewer meetings, exactly, though that would help too. It is clearer decision rights, which is the organizational equivalent of access controls: defining who can make what class of decision, under what circumstances, with what level of consultation required before the decision is final. A RACI matrix that actually gets used, rather than created as a project artifact and filed immediately upon completion, tells everyone in the room who owns the decision before the meeting starts. The person who owns the decision can hear input, weigh it, and make the call. Everyone else can disagree and commit, which is a professional skill that organizations do not develop enough intentionally. The meeting where everyone has a vote and nobody has accountability is a support group, not a decision-making body.
Running a good meeting is a professional skill that is systematically undertaught and undertrained in technology organizations, where the premium on technical capability is so high that the operational skills surrounding the technical work get treated as administrative overhead. But the meeting where the right people are in the room, the decision criteria are clear before the discussion starts, the conversation stays on the decision rather than expanding into adjacent interesting problems, and someone leaves accountable for an action with a date attached to it is a genuinely rare and valuable thing. The IT leader who can consistently run that meeting is worth more to the organization than the meeting attendee who has the most opinions about the topic.
The next time you walk out of a meeting where nothing was decided, resist the impulse to blame the topic or the attendees. Ask instead whether the decision rights were clear before anyone sat down, whether the meeting had an owner rather than a convener, and whether the group was there to make a decision or to ensure that no one person could be held responsible for making one. The answers to those questions will tell you more about your organization's decision-making culture than any number of retrospectives about why things take so long.
