For a few posts now, I've been circling the same idea from different angles. First, that nobody buys clarity; people hire for what's underneath the ask. What’s usually missing before clarity ever enters the picture is alignment. And most recently, that the tensions we avoid don't disappear. They just become culture instead.
The more I sit with all three, the more I keep landing on one place where it plays out most clearly: meetings.
I've been surprised by how many meetings end without anything actually moving.
Not all meetings, of course. Some are useful. They help people exchange information, clarify priorities, solve a problem, remove a roadblock, or decide what needs to happen next.
But there is another kind of meeting that feels different.
It usually shows up when something is already unclear. A scope shifts. A client asks for something new. A plan changes. Someone feels out of the loop. There is a sense that people need to "align" or "check in" or "talk it through," so a meeting goes on the calendar.
That sounds reasonable, and sometimes it is. But sometimes the meeting becomes a place where confusion is carried around the room rather than resolved.
The Meeting That Isn't Working
People talk. They revisit the same points. Someone says, "Let's pressure test this." Someone else says, "Let's circle back." Another person suggests seeing what someone else thinks. The conversation sounds active, and because everyone is there at the same time, it can feel like something productive must be happening.
Then thirty minutes pass, and no decision has been made. No owner has been named. No next step is clear. The issue that created the meeting is still sitting there, only now it has taken more people's time.
I don't think the problem is usually a lack of communication. In many cases, there is plenty of it. There are meetings, recaps, check-ins, threads, follow-ups, and more meetings after the meetings. The problem is that all that communication is being used to talk around something that has never actually been defined: what we're deciding, who owns the decision, what changed, and what should be different by the time we leave the room.
When those questions go unanswered, a meeting can become a substitute for clarity rather than a path to it.
What's Actually Missing
I've seen this happen in meetings that pop up unexpectedly, but I've also seen it happen in recurring meetings that were supposed to create alignment. A weekly status meeting can turn into a venting session. A strategy conversation can turn into a rabbit hole about one piece of the work. A meeting meant to clarify priorities can become a place where one person dominates the room and everyone else adjusts around that opinion. That part is easy to overlook, because a meeting is not automatically collaborative just because multiple people were invited. If only one or two people have a real voice, the meeting is not creating alignment. It is creating the appearance of alignment. And when internal politics keep real decisions from being made, the meeting can start to protect the very thing it was supposed to solve.
The Cost Nobody Names
The cost of that is not just time, although time matters. People prepared for that meeting. They paused other work for it. They sat through it, listened, recalculated, and tried to understand what was being said, along with what wasn't.
For the organization, that's wasted money, talent, and attention. For the people in the room, it can become more personal than that. When someone shows up prepared but never gets a meaningful voice, it chips away at trust. When decisions keep getting deferred, people begin to wonder whether anything they do will actually move the work forward. When the same person dominates the conversation every time, that person's influence grows more tentacles. When someone schedules a meeting with no real plan for it, they often leave still chasing the same issue they came in with.
The meeting happened, so it feels tangible. There was a calendar invite. There were people in attendance. There may have even been a few notes afterward. But tangible does not always mean valuable. The value of a meeting isn't that it occurred. It's in what changed because it occurred: whether the work moved, whether anyone left with more clarity than they came in with, whether a decision actually got made or just discussed again.
What a Meeting Can't Do
So many organizations reach for meetings because meetings feel like action. They are visible. They are easy to schedule. They give people a place to put the discomfort of not knowing what to do next. But a meeting cannot carry the weight of an undefined decision. It cannot fix a lack of ownership. It cannot make up for the absence of leadership. It cannot create clarity if no one is willing or able to name what needs to be clarified.
Sometimes the most useful thing a meeting can do is force the right question before everyone starts talking: what are we here to move? If no one can answer that, the meeting may already be telling us something. Not about communication, but about the problem we are still avoiding.
