Who doesn’t know the feeling of a manager or colleague asking you to schedule a new meeting, an extra meeting, or even a recurring series?
Before you know it, your agenda is taken hostage by meetings that probably didn’t need to exist in the first place.
It is a typical corporate trap. We somehow believe that adding more meetings will bring us closer to the goal of a project.
Often, the opposite happens.
You end up spending most of your time listening to each other instead of actually doing the work. Decisions get postponed, discussions keep coming back, and accountability becomes less clear because everyone is involved.
It is another example of this instinct we seem to have: when something is not working, we add something.
The same thing happens when creating a vision or a strategy. We add more priorities, more ideas, more features.
But maybe the question should be:
What should we remove instead of what should we add?
Because once you start by asking what else you can add, it is very easy to become a feature maximizer.
Sometimes I wish there was a reset button you could press that would remove all the excessive stuff that is no longer contributing to the core.
Maybe there is one.
Maybe it is simply asking the right question at the beginning.
Nature seems to understand this better than we do.
After spring and summer, a tree is full of leaves. When autumn comes, it doesn’t prepare for the next season by adding even more.
The leaves start to fall, because they have served their purpose.
And maybe that is exactly what creates the space for the tree to grow again in spring.
It removes first.
