Developing Meetings People Will Be Disappointed To Miss

“How disappointed would you be if we stopped having this standing meeting?” Let’s be honest: how many standing meetings would get a “very disappointed” answer from participants? If you have one, I want to know your secret.

If anything is competing with Agile in how fast it is losing favor, it is meetings. Call them events, ceremonies, rituals, or cadences. They play a significant role in what people dislike about Agile frameworks such as Scrum and SAFe.

EOS has a funny example. Ask people whose company adopted the Entrepreneurial Operating System whether they would be disappointed to lose the “Level 10” weekly meeting. Few will say yes, which is ironic because the whole idea of the Level 10 meeting is that participants consistently experience it as a 10/10 meeting.

So what can we do? Try making all standing meetings optional. Not just optional for individuals, but optional for the team to decide they do not want the meeting anymore. Can the Scrum Team decide to stop Sprint Planning? Yes. Can the ELT decide to stop the EOS Level 10? Yes. Can teams on a SAFe ART skip PI Planning? Yes. Can the portfolio leadership team skip a portfolio review? Yes.

That sounds extreme, but it changes the ownership. People have a say. They choose. They come as players, not as pawns. They stop following the process by the book and start thinking about intent and context.

Whoever wants the meeting to happen needs to make it one people would not want to miss. They need to develop the meeting as a product people choose to use: an experience that creates enough value to earn its place.