The Meeting That Should Have Been a Decision

I once sat in a meeting where eleven people spent an hour debating whether a button should say "Submit" or "Continue."

This is not an exaggeration. I have the calendar invite. I have the Figma comments. I have the follow-up meeting that was scheduled to "align on next steps."

The button still says "Submit." It took three weeks.

The Meeting Industrial Complex

Here's a pattern I see in almost every company I consult for: a decision needs to be made. Instead of making it, someone schedules a meeting. The meeting generates discussion but no conclusion, so a follow-up is scheduled. The follow-up includes two more people "for visibility," which means the conversation resets. After three rounds, someone makes the decision in a DM and the meetings quietly stop.

Total cost: 30+ person-hours of meeting time to reach a decision that one person with context could have made in five minutes.

This isn't collaboration. It's diffusion of responsibility with a Google Calendar skin.

Why It Happens

Nobody wants to be wrong. If you make a decision alone and it's wrong, that's on you. If you make a decision "as a team" and it's wrong, that's on everyone — which really means it's on no one.

Meetings are insurance policies against blame. Every person you invite is another layer of plausible deniability. "We all agreed on this" is the corporate equivalent of "I was just following orders."

The irony is that the fear of being wrong is what leads to the worst outcomes. The three weeks you spent debating the button copy? A customer bounced because the checkout flow was confusing during those three weeks. The wrong decision made quickly would have been better than the right decision made slowly.

The Fix Is Boring

It's not a new meeting format. It's not async-first culture. It's not a decision-making framework with a clever acronym.

It's this: every decision needs exactly one owner, and that owner needs to know they're allowed to be wrong.

Write it down. "Sarah owns the decision on checkout copy. She'll decide by Thursday. If you have input, send it to her by Wednesday." That's it. That's the framework.

If Sarah's wrong, you change the button next week. The cost of a wrong button label is approximately zero dollars. The cost of three weeks of paralysis is real engineer time, real customer friction, and a real signal to your team that decisions are scary things to be avoided.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most things your team is meeting about don't matter enough to meet about. Not because the work doesn't matter — but because the blast radius of a wrong call is tiny compared to the blast radius of a slow one.

The companies that ship fast aren't smarter. They're just more comfortable being wrong at high velocity. They make a call, watch what happens, and adjust. The ones that ship slowly are sitting in a room with eleven people, arguing about a button.

Make the call. Ship the thing. Fix it Tuesday.