Every two weeks we do a review of progress against our Objectives and Key Results. It takes between 60 and 90 minutes and involves about 20 people. We go over the key results one by one, describe their current status, assess whether we’re on track to achieving them, and identify next steps.

Well, that’s not quite right. Key result owners populate a shared document before the meeting where all of those things are described. Then they’re stated aloud in the meeting. There’s sometimes discussion, but it’s not anything that can’t be done via email the shared document. A naive observer in this meeting would probably recommend this meeting be cancelled. This naive observer would be wrong.

When each person states their update aloud, they experience it in a way they wouldn’t if it was just words on a page. That also means that, before the meeting, they anticipate what they’ll do and how they’ll experience it. They do not want to show up unprepared. There are 20 of their peers who will be listening to them and possibly asking questions. If they haven’t done their work, it’ll be obvious, and it’ll be felt very differently than if they had simply not filled in some text in a document for people to read.

A less naive observer might also recommend that this meeting be cancelled. This less naive observer would recognize that simply cancelling the meeting would be insufficient. The forcing function of the meeting would need to be replaced with some other mechanism. That could work. It could be better. But it’s not free, and it’s not automatic. The value of this meeting is not what happens in the meeting. It’s what happens before the meeting because of the meeting.