The Meeting That Should Have Been a Prototype

Most meetings exist because someone was afraid to build the wrong thing. That fear is reasonable. The response almost never is.

A meeting produces alignment on a description of a thing. A prototype produces disagreement about the thing itself. The second is more useful, because descriptions are forgiving in a way that working software is not. Everyone can nod at "a simple dashboard" and picture a different object.

The cost calculation people make is wrong. They compare an hour of talking to a week of building, when the real comparison is an hour of talking plus three more hours of talking plus a week of building the misunderstanding, against an afternoon of building something ugly and looking at it together.

I have started treating the urge to schedule a meeting as a signal that I do not yet understand the problem well enough to describe it. If I did, I would not need the room. And if I do not, the room will not give it to me — it will give me a consensus, which is a different thing, and often worse, because it feels like progress.

The exceptions are real. Decisions that involve people's careers, disagreements that have gone cold in text, the first conversation with someone you have never met. Those need voices. But the meeting about whether the button should be on the left is not one of them. Put the button on the left. Look at it. You will know in four seconds what forty minutes of discussion would have failed to settle.

The good version of this is not "fewer meetings." It is a habit of converting arguments into artifacts as fast as possible. Whoever puts the artifact on the table first has done the hardest part of the thinking, and everyone else gets to be right or wrong about something real.