This Meeting Could Have Been an Email
How to turn one hour into twelve and call it collaboration
Universities are extraordinarily good at assembling expertise. Walk into the average university meeting and you might find someone who has published extensively on artificial intelligence, someone who understands the intricacies of international trade, someone who can explain why markets behave irrationally, and someone who has spent twenty years studying how organisations can become more efficient.
Naturally, we put all of them in a room for an hour to discuss if Forms B14 and C16 should be merged.
This is one of the quieter miracles of university administration. We employ people whose time is expensive, whose calendars are full and whose expertise is highly specialized, then periodically remove them from whatever they were doing so that they can listen to information that could have been communicated in three paragraphs. The practice is so normal that nobody finds it particularly strange. Put the same twelve people into a room for no stated purpose outside working hours and somebody would eventually call security. Put “Meeting” in their calendars and everyone turns up.
There is one particular variant that deserves recognition: the Friday afternoon meeting. This is rarely convened to avert an institutional crisis, because genuine crises at least provide the consolation of being important. The Friday meeting is more likely to involve “touching base”, “aligning expectations” or having “a quick discussion” about something that has somehow survived the preceding four days without one. Everyone arrives with the accumulated fatigue of the week and the faint hope that somebody will say, “I don’t think we need the full hour.” Instead, somebody opens a PowerPoint. Then, at 4.47pm, just as the weekend has become visible possibility, somebody says, “Since we’re all here, can I just raise one more thing?”
It is difficult to explain the emotional significance of that sentence using conventional economic models.
The economics of the meeting itself, however, is considerably easier.
One Hour is Rarely One Hour
The obvious starting point is opportunity cost. An hour-long meeting attended by twelve people doesn’t cost an organization one hour; it consumes twelve person-hours, before counting preparation, travel, follow-up and the time required afterwards to remember what everyone had been doing before the meeting interrupted them. This is hardly a revolutionary economic insight, but organisations have an impressive capacity to forget multiplication when Outlook is involved.
The arithmetic becomes uncomfortable surprisingly quickly. Ten reasonably senior academics and administrators in a 90-minute meeting represent fifteen hours of professional time. That may be an excellent investment if those fifteen hours resolve a difficult problem, prevent a bad decision or allow competing perspectives to be reconciled. The relevant question is therefore not whether meetings consume time. Everything consumes time. It is whether gathering everyone simultaneously produces something worth more than the alternatives.
This is where Ronald Coase becomes unexpectedly useful to anyone staring at a meeting invitation.
In The Nature of the Firm, Coase (1937) argued that using markets is not costless. Searching for information, negotiating arrangements and coordinating transactions all carry costs, which helps explain why organisations internalize many activities rather than repeatedly coordinating them through the market. The broader intuition transfers rather nicely to meetings: coordination itself has a cost, and organistions need mechanisms for reducing it.
Meetings are one such mechanism. Instead of twelve people exchanging 47 emails over four days, it can be perfectly rational to put them together for an hour, settle the issue and move on. The trouble begins when the mechanism designed to reduce coordination costs develops coordination costs of its own.
When Coordination Requires Coordination
Universities provide fertile territory for this because they are genuinely complicated organisations. Decisions about academic quality, assessment, accreditation, student welfare, research, finance and governance often require collective judgement, and many should not be made by whoever happens to reply first to an email.
The problem is therefore, not that universities have meetings. It is that meetings can gradually become the default response to organizational activity.
A committee identifies an issue and establishes a working group. The working group meets to develop recommendations for the committee, which then meets to discuss those recommendations and requests clarification. The working group reconvenes to provide the clarification, after which somebody prepares a PowerPoint summarizing the matter for the next committee meeting. None of these individual steps is necessarily irrational, yet collectively they produce the curious situation in which an organization can become extremely busy discussing work without noticeably reducing the amount of work still waiting to be done.
Coase’s argument contains a useful warning here too. He didn’t suggest that internal organisation was free. Rather, he explicitly recognized that the costs of organizing additional transactions within a firm could rise as the organisation expanded. In other words, replacing one coordination mechanism with another does not abolish costs. It merely changes where they appear.
Anyone who has attended a meeting about improving the efficiency of meetings may already have reached a similar conclusion empirically.
Parkinson Would Have Enjoyed Outlook
There is also the question of why meetings so reliably consume the amount of time allocated to them. C. Northcote Parkinson’s famous observations that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” first appeared in The Economist in 1955 and was subsequently developed in Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson, 1957). The observation was satirical, but its longevity probably owes something to the uncomfortable frequency with which organisations appear determined to provide supporting evidence.
Its meeting-room equivalent is easy to recognise. A meeting scheduled for an hour has an extraordinary tendency to last approximately an hour, regardless of whether the agenda contains twelve items or three. A relatively straightforward issue develops previously undiscovered philosophical dimensions, somebody provides useful historical context dating back several years, and another person remembers that a different committee once discussed something similar, although nobody can quite remember what it decided.
Then, the chair announces that twenty minutes remain, which should, in theory, accelerate proceedings but instead seems to reassure everyone that there is still plenty of time.
The agenda eventually reaches Any Other Business, perhaps the most optimistic phrase in organizational vocabulary.
The Economics of Being Invited
There is another cost that receives less attention: the number of people attending a meeting and the number genuinely required for it are not always the same.
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Again, there are perfectly reasonable explanations. Universities value collegiality and consultation, and excluding the one person who actually understands the issue can make a supposedly efficient meeting spectacularly inefficient. Invitations therefore, become a form of organizational insurance. We invite people because they might have something important to contribute, because they represent an affected group, or occasionally because nobody wants to explain later why they were not invited.
The premium on that insurance is their time.
This produces the familiar participant who has said nothing for 53 minutes but remains professionally attentive, occasionally nodding while privately calculating whether their disappearance would constitute a governance issue. Online meetings have made this considerably easier because the human face can convey intense engagement while the hands answer emails beneath the camera. It may even represent an informal attempt to recover some of the opportunity cost imposed by the meeting, although institutional policy should probably stop short of recognising this as a productivity strategy.
The more useful question is whether attendance and consultation have quietly become synonymous. They are not. Someone can be consulted before a meeting, represented during it or informed afterwards without necessarily spending an hour witnessing the entire decision-making process.
Three Questions Before “Send Invitation”
Perhaps every meeting invitation should therefore face a very small burden of proof.
Does something need to be discussed?
If everyone simply needs to know something, send it to them. Preferably without attaching a 37-slide presentation containing exactly the same information.
Does something need to be decided?
If a decision requires judgment, competing perspectives or collective accountability, get the relevant people together.
And finally:
Do these particular people need to be there?
This may be the most expensive question organisations fail to ask.
Being affected by a decision does not necessarily mean someone needs to attend the meeting that produces it. Sometimes, people need representation. Sometimes they need consultation beforehand. Sometimes they simply need to know what was decided afterwards.
And sometimes, of course, they really do need to be in the room.
The point is to know which.
None of this will abolish meetings, nor should it. Universities are communities built around deliberation. We argue, question, challenge and occasionally spend fifteen minutes debating terminology because irritatingly, terminology sometimes matters.
But time matters too.
The next time twelve people are about to surrender an hour of their collective lives, it may be worth remembering that the meeting does not cost an hour.
It costs twelve.
And if it is 4pm on a Friday, it may cost considerably more in human suffering.
The meeting probably isn’t going anywhere.
But perhaps the highest form of administrative leadership is occasionally deciding not to.
References (if you’re interested)
Coase, R. H. (1937). The nature of the firm. Economica, 4(16), 386–405. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x
Parkinson, C. N. (1957). Parkinson’s law, or the pursuit of progress. John Murray.
