It starts innocently: “Hey Fatima. We should have a regular meeting, just you, Esteban, and me. There’s enough stuff that we work on together that it would be more efficient to get through it all at once.”

Then it grows: “I think we should add Divya to the meeting. I’d like to get her perspective, and I think it would help her to be part of the discussions.”

People ask to be part of it: “Divya and I are the same level, so I think I should be in the meeting too.”

The agenda gets filled up with a grab bag of small items, and the meeting loses focus. There are twenty people in the room, but most of the time only three or four of them are paying attention.

The original attendees start skipping the meeting because it is an unproductive use of time. The original meeting, having lost its senior sponsorship, loses its value and eventually gets cancelled.

But those senior people still need to get the same stuff done: “Hey Fatima. We should have a regular meeting, just you, Esteban, and me. There’s enough stuff that we work on together that it would be more efficient to get through it all at once.” And so we begin again.

Why does this happen?

• The original meeting has a loosely or implicitly defined agenda and membership
• Attendees of the meeting make isolated (versus holistic) decisions to add more people
• People who hear about the meeting dislike being out of the loop and ask to join
• Too few people get rejected, and nobody gets uninvited from the meeting because it’s socially awkward to do so, especially since it’s not clear who should be there and who shouldn’t
• People can be uncomfortable with speaking for people not in the meeting

If you can solve each of the problems listed above, then you’ll break the cycle of death and rebirth and achieve meeting nirvana*.

There’s one last thing to add: People don’t understand meeting costs. This seems like an obvious one. Estimate each person’s hourly cost and multiply it by the number of people in the room. That’s absolutely true, and it’s not considered often enough. But it gets worse.

The more people there are in the meeting, the more diverse the agenda. The more diverse the agenda, the smaller the proportion of people who are interested in it. Also, only one person can talk at a time in a meeting. That means the bandwidth for discussion and decisions is fixed no matter how many people are present, but it’s a declining proportion of attendance.

Another way to look at it is this: every person who is added to a meeting makes it more costly and less efficient for everyone else in the meeting. It’s the opposite of a network effect. Usually people only look at the benefits of adding someone to a meeting, but it’s not enough that the person bring benefits. They have to bring benefits sufficiently great to exceed the total cost inflicted on everyone else by their presence. The default expectation is that the average person added to a meeting is net negative. If I’m in your meeting, you’d better be getting something significant from me being there.