Have you ever noticed that the more people you add to a project, the less likely it is to actually finish, yet we keep adding 12 more ‘stakeholders’ every time the deadline slips? I’m sitting here, stomach growling because I decided to start a keto-adjacent diet at exactly 4:02 PM like a complete masochist, and I’m staring at a calendar invite for a ‘Strategy Alignment’ call that includes 32 people. Thirty-two. That isn’t a meeting; it’s a town hall. It’s a congregational prayer for a miracle that no one is actually willing to work for. My blood sugar is dropping, my patience is non-existent, and the sheer inefficiency of it makes me want to throw my sugar-free seltzer at the wall. We tell ourselves these gatherings are about information exchange, but that’s a lie we tell to keep from looking at the mirror. Most corporate communication could be handled in a three-sentence email, but an email has a sender. An email has a name attached to it. An email is a trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to a single human being who made a choice. And in the modern office, a choice is the most dangerous thing you can possibly make.

We’ve moved into an era where meetings function as a form of legal defense against future blame. If I make a decision and it fails, I’m the one who gets the 52-minute lecture from HR or the redirected career path to the basement. But if I ‘socialize’ the decision in a meeting with 22 other people, then the failure belongs to the ‘group.’ We are building systems of accountability that spread responsibility so thin that it becomes invisible to the naked eye. It’s the bystander effect, digitized and color-coded in Outlook. When 32 people are responsible for a KPI, 0 people are responsible for a KPI. We’ve turned collaboration into a weaponized version of ‘not it.’

The Recovery Coach’s Theory

I was talking to Zoe K., an addiction recovery coach who spent 12 years in the corporate meat grinder before she decided to help people actually face their problems instead of scheduling them away. She has this theory that corporate meeting culture is essentially a collective relapse into childhood. We want a parent to tell us it’s okay, but since there are no parents in the C-suite, we settle for a consensus. Zoe K. pointed out that in recovery, the first thing you lose is the ability to say ‘we’ when you mean ‘I.’ You have to own the mess. But in a conference room, ‘we’ is the ultimate hiding spot. She told me about a client who spent 42 hours a week in meetings just so he never had to be the one to sign off on a budget that might fail. He wasn’t working; he was buying insurance with his company’s time. He was addicted to the safety of the crowd.

I think about that as I look at this invite. The organizer didn’t invite 32 people because they value 32 different perspectives. They invited them for ‘visibility.’ Visibility is the most expensive word in the English language. It costs the company roughly $2,112 per hour in lost productivity for that many mid-level managers to sit in silence while one person reads 42 slides that were already sent out in the pre-read. But that $2,112 is seen as a necessary premium. It’s the cost of ensuring that if the project tanks, the person at the top can say, ‘Well, everyone was in the loop. Everyone saw the plan. Why didn’t anyone speak up?’ It’s a trap designed to capture everyone in the net so no one can jump ship alone.

The Diet of Time

There’s a certain irony in my current state of hunger. When you’re fasting, or dieting, or whatever this 4 PM mistake is, you become hyper-aware of waste. Every calorie matters. Every movement of the fork is calculated. Why don’t we treat our time with the same metabolic rigor? We treat hours like they’re an infinite resource, like we’re at an all-you-can-eat buffet of boredom. We pile our plates with status updates and ‘quick syncs’ until we’re too bloated to actually move. I’m sitting here craving a piece of bread, and I realize that most of us are starving for a single hour of uninterrupted, high-stakes work where the results are ours and ours alone. We are terrified of that autonomy because autonomy is the sibling of consequence.

The Project Growth Paradox

I remember a project I worked on about 12 years ago. We had a team of 2. Just 2. We didn’t have meetings; we had conversations. We didn’t have ‘alignment sessions’; we had arguments that ended in a decision. It was the most productive 62 days of my life. But as soon as the project got ‘visibility,’ the team grew to 12. Then 22. Suddenly, the pace slowed to a crawl. We weren’t doing the work anymore; we were managing the perception of the work. We were building a duschkabine 100×100 around ourselves-clear enough that everyone could see what we were doing, but thick enough to keep anyone from actually touching it or taking the heat when it shattered. We wanted the transparency without the vulnerability.

Zoe K. once told me that the hardest part of coaching executives isn’t teaching them how to lead; it’s teaching them how to be alone. Leadership is a lonely act. Making a call that might be wrong is a lonely act. But the corporate structure is designed to kill loneliness by smothering it with 12-person committees. We’ve traded brilliance for safety. We’ve traded the ‘I’ for a ‘we’ that doesn’t actually exist. It’s a ghost in the machine. And the worst part is, we all know it. We sit in those chairs, or on those Zoom tiles, and we see the 22 other faces looking back at us with the same glazed expression of ‘I’m just here so I don’t get blamed.’ We are all co-conspirators in the death of our own agency.

The Fear of Autonomy

I’m looking at the clock. It’s 4:32 PM. My diet is 30 minutes old and I’m already questioning my life choices, which is exactly what happens 12 minutes into any meeting that has more than 5 attendees. You start to wonder how you got here. You start to calculate how many hours of your life have been swallowed by the void of ‘collaboration.’ If you’re lucky, you have a Zoe K. in your life to tell you that you’re just hiding. If you’re not, you just keep clicking ‘Accept.’

We need to stop pretending that meetings are for communication. If we wanted to communicate, we’d write. If we wanted to decide, we’d empower. We hold meetings because we are afraid. We are afraid of the silence that follows a mistake when you’re the only one in the room. We are afraid of the 102 questions that follow a failure when you can’t point to a consensus. So we build these elaborate rituals of ‘syncing up’ and ‘circling back’ to make sure that if the ship goes down, we’re all holding the same leaky bucket.

The Intermittent Fasting of Invites

Maybe the solution is to treat our calendars like our diets. We need a period of intermittent fasting from the ‘Send Invite’ button. What would happen if we limited every decision to a maximum of 2 people? What if we banned ‘visibility’ as a reason for attendance? I’ll tell you what would happen: people would be terrified. They would have to own their work. They would have to stand behind their choices without the 22-person human shield. And for the first time in 12 years, we might actually get something done.

The Honest Lie

I’m going to go eat a celery stick and pretend it’s a pizza. It’s an honest lie, much like the ‘Action Items’ list that will come out of this 32-person call. We’ll list 12 things that need to be done, assign them to ‘the team,’ and then meet again in 12 days to wonder why none of them happened. It’s a cycle of avoidance that keeps the lights on and the progress stalled. But at least when the boss asks why the project is 52 days late, I can show them the invite. I can show them that everyone was there. I can show them that I followed the process, even if the process was designed to go nowhere. And in the end, isn’t that what we’re all really working for? Not the success of the project, but the survival of the employee. We are all just trying to stay ‘visible’ enough to be seen, but grouped enough to be safe. It’s a miserable way to work, but it’s a very effective way to never be wrong. And in a world that punishes mistakes more than it rewards truth, that’s a trade most people are willing to make 102 times a day. Have you checked your calendar lately? How many shields are you hiding behind today?