Meetings Are for Destroying Ambiguity
Meetings are not for information dissemination. That’s what documents are for. Meetings are not for regurgitating updates. That’s what tracking tools and written reports are for. Meetings exist to create clarity.
August 1, 2025
Let’s start with something we all agree on: people hate meetings. They are too long, too frequent, too vague and too often dominated by people reading from slide decks while everyone else checks email. Yet despite all the eye rolls and memes, we keep scheduling them. There is something essential about meetings, but why do they so often go wrong?
The issue isn’t the number of meetings, it’s that we’ve forgotten what meetings are actually for. Most of the time, they are treated as glorified status updates. We dump information, rattle off timelines, skim through project dashboards and then ask, “Any questions?” before moving on. If no one speaks up, we call it efficient but in truth, we’ve wasted an opportunity.
Meetings are not for information dissemination. That’s what documents are for. Meetings are not for regurgitating updates. That’s what tracking tools and written reports are for.
Meetings - the good ones at least - are all about creating clarity.
Great meetings are full of tension, disagreement and unresolved questions. You don’t get bored when there’s drama. You lean in. You engage. You care.
Ambiguity is the real enemy of high-performing teams. It hides in plain sight, often disguised as polite agreement or surface-level consensus. We pretend we’re aligned, we might even believe we are, but usually we are not. We think we understand the tradeoffs, but we haven’t discussed them. We talk around issues, not through them. How many times has an important issue come up in a meeting only to be "tabled" for a later time that never comes?
This is where meetings should shine! This is the opportunity! When there’s something everyone is worried about but no one is saying out loud, that’s what the meeting is for!
Patrick Lencioni, in Death by Meeting, argued that the reason most meetings are boring is that they lack drama. Boredom is not a flaw inherit in meetings, it’s a symptom of avoidance. Great meetings are full of tension, disagreement and unresolved questions. You don’t get bored when there’s drama. You lean in. You engage. You care. Drama in this case isn’t dysfunction, it’s the honest, necessary constructive conflict you find when people care enough to tackle ambiguity.
That’s why preparation is non-negotiable. When a meeting is treated like a live reading session, it wastes everyone’s time. There is no excuse for walking into a meeting cold. People need to do the pre-work, understand the context and arrive ready to dig into the core questions. If they haven’t read the background material, the meeting shouldn’t happen. If the meeting is just a parade of passive presentations, it shouldn’t exist in the first place.
A good meeting doesn’t revolve around slide decks. It revolves around tension. It starts with a real question - something that’s unclear, something at stake, something unresolved. That question becomes the focal point. The discussion that follows should be active, messy, even uncomfortable. Everyone in the room should be speaking, challenging, clarifying. If only one or two voices dominate, it’s a missed opportunity. If there’s a moment of silence after someone raises a difficult point, that’s usually a sign you’ve hit something worth digging into.
The purpose of a meeting is not for everyone to get along and frankly efficiency is a secondary concern. The purpose of a meeting is to tackle ambiguity. That doesn’t mean every question gets answered, but it does mean that ambiguity is acknowledged. Conflict and disagreement are acknowledged. Clarity isn’t always comfortable, but it is powerful. The best meetings end with sharper understanding, firmer decisions and fewer unspoken assumptions. They leave people aligned, not just updated.
Leave the friction in. That’s where the clarity comes from.
So here’s a simple rule of thumb: if no ambiguity was surfaced and resolved, the meeting probably wasn’t necessary. If the hard part of the conversation got tabled, the meeting failed at its most important task.
Meetings are not the enemy, bad meetings are. Meetings that dodge the hard stuff. Meetings that prioritise performance over truth. Meetings that confuse airtime with alignment. But when we use them to destroy ambiguity - to surface disagreement, wrestle with it and come out the other side - they become something else entirely. They become the forge where clarity is made.
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