By Joe Wiggins

Perhaps the defining feature of modern corporate life is the meeting. Meetings have come to dominate how companies (and all types of groups) function. While frustrations are consistently and fruitlessly aired about what a time sink they can be, there is a bigger problem with pervasive meeting culture – it changes the way we think, and therefore the types of decisions that we make.

Let’s imagine a typical set-up for an important meeting in an organisation, one where a decision is to be made. Papers have been produced, but they are long and everybody in the meeting has been too busy in other meetings to read them.

This situation means that the attendees are reacting to what they hear in the moment. There has been no time for slow, deliberative thought, instead everyone is thinking instinctively and that is a very different process.

We can think of this distinction between thinking styles in terms of Daniel Kahneman’s system one and system two framing. System one is automatic, subconscious and immediate, whereas System two is slow, conscious and considered.

System one thinking is incredibly useful and effective in many situations, but typically not fantastic for most of the long-term choices that are made in business, investing or politics.

Without time to think slowly and intentionally about issues, we will shortcut to quick system one reactions which are driven by factors that can often be shallow and even entirely irrelevant. These might be our feelings about the person talking, whatever our primary incentives are, recent discussions we might have had on a similar topic, how we might want to appear to the group and whether we have had lunch yet.

Again, system one is not necessarily bad thinking. I am an advocate of using heuristics to solve complex problems, but it is best to choose a heuristic as a smart option after considered thinking, rather than because we haven’t had the chance to assess something carefully.

Even when the process to reach a decision takes time and spans multiple meetings, it doesn’t mean that there has been space for measured thinking. It is more likely just a chain of meetings where instinctive, system one thinking has been the guiding and dominant influence.

The underlying issue is that deliberate thinking just doesn’t hold that much value in the modern corporate world. Meetings are tangible and measurable. If a decision has been made after eight meetings (all with minutes and actions) – it is considered robust, certainly more robust than someone spending the time to think long and hard about a subject.

There is nothing wrong with meetings. They can be an excellent way to debate and discuss ideas, and to benefit from diversity of experience, expertise and approach. They can also be a perfectly reasonable forum for making decisions provided careful consideration has been given to group dynamics and sufficient space is afforded for thinking deeply outside of them.

Increasingly, however, we exist in a world that assumes that if someone is not in a meeting, then they are not working. That is an extraordinarily strange perspective to take for any job where focused, considered thinking is important.

Meetings are increasingly crowding out the type of thinking that leads to better long-term decisions. Maybe we need a meeting to discuss what to do about it.