Recorded live, 18 September 2026

The quest for better meetings was a live conversation about moving organisations from one-off meeting tips to lasting change in meeting culture. The speakers answered four questions submitted by attendees before the event, on getting leaders on board, reducing meetings in fast-changing environments, handling defensiveness, and maintaining change, plus a live question on AI transcription.

It’s for leaders, people responsible for how teams collaborate, and anyone trying to reduce meeting overload or improve meeting culture where they work.

In this live, 60-minute conversation, meeting experts Rebecca Hinds, PhD, Dr. Carrie Goucher and Elise Keith discussed how organisations can make better meetings the norm. They agreed that fixing individual meetings doesn’t change meeting culture, and that lasting change needs designed patterns of meeting, ongoing maintenance, and attention to culture, power and identity. They also argued that AI note-takers raise a bigger question about what meetings are for, and that psychological safety decides whether AI in meetings helps or harms.

Rebecca Hinds, PhD
Organisational behaviour researcher and author whose work examines meeting overload, organisational communication systems, and the changing role of AI in how people work together. She leads the Work AI Institute at Glean, wrote Your Best Meeting Ever, and has spent about 15 years helping organisations fix their meetings. Explore her book, her website and her entry in Today’s business meeting experts.

Dr. Carrie Goucher
Meeting researcher and practitioner focused on transforming team and organisational meeting culture. Her PhD at the University of Cambridge engineering department developed an evidence-based framework for meeting success, and she has worked specifically on meetings for 12 years, looking at them through a systems lens. Founder of FewerFasterBolder and creator of the FrictionFree Team Reset. Explore FewerFasterBolder, her writing on meeting culture and her entry in Today’s business meeting experts.

Elise Keith
Meeting researcher and practitioner focused on meeting design, organisational meeting systems and meeting culture. She has worked on better meetings since 2007, wrote Where the Action Is in 2017, and in 2024 ran experiments in collaboration with the meeting science community. She developed the 16 Types of Business Meetings and Meeting Performance Maturity frameworks. Explore Where the Action Is, Lucid Teams, and her entry in Today’s business meeting experts.

Chapters

1. Improving individual meetings won’t fix meeting culture (09:00)
Dr. Carrie Goucher said most meeting advice looks at one meeting at a time and treats every meeting as the same, assuming that if each meeting gets better, the culture gets fixed. She argued organisations need to design whole patterns of meeting and collaborating that serve their work, deadlines, culture and values, applying design thinking to meetings across the organisation. Rebecca Hinds, PhD, described the same idea as treating meetings like a product: they’re where decisions get made, and culture gets built, yet they’re rarely designed, measured or improved the way products are. Elise Keith compared the quest to the film The Mighty Ducks: teams start by wanting tricks, and succeed when their standards for working together change.

2. To influence leaders, frame meetings around what they already care about (16:15)
Rebecca Hinds, PhD, recommended finding the outcome a leader cares most about (customer satisfaction for sales, engagement for HR, focus time for engineering) and describing both the problem and the fix in those terms. She also suggested co-creating the solution so the leader feels ownership, pointing to the IKEA effect: people value and stick with things they helped build. Elise Keith added that people need relevant stories proving change is possible in their industry, and that you should prove it first in your own meetings.

3. Senior leaders have a skewed view of meetings, and change is caught more than taught (21:50)
Dr. Carrie Goucher disagreed with trying to persuade leaders. She said senior leaders are ready to work on meetings when they’re ready, and that they have a skewed view because they attend better meetings that people prepare for, and research shows people rate meetings they lead more highly than attendees do. Her alternative is to change the meetings you run. Because other people attend them and take ideas back to their own teams, changes to meeting culture spread naturally.

4. High friction and constant change cause meeting overload (24:00)
Elise Keith said constant change is now the normal operating environment, so teams need practices built for it. She suggested learning from teams that have always worked in high uncertainty (special forces, mission-critical and hospital teams), getting much better at asynchronous work, and recognising that a lot of things aren’t actually changing. Dr. Carrie Goucher took a systems view: uncertainty drives people to keep checking in, synchronising and covering themselves, and decision rights can’t keep up. She argued that cutting meetings without dealing with this collaboration anxiety just creates a different kind of friction. Her approach is for leaders to create a safe container (what’s on and off the table, what’s changing, agreed norms) so people feel able to use lower intensity ways of communicating, such as async messages and information radiators.

5. Subtract meetings, and make async communication easier to act on (28:30)
Rebecca Hinds, PhD, said organisations default to solving problems by adding things, including meetings, and need norms and incentives that reward subtraction. She described Bob Sutton’s rule of halves (what if you cut half your meetings, or cut a meeting in half?) and calendar cleanses, where recurring meetings are deleted for 48 hours and only added back deliberately. She cited research by Leidy Klotz showing people often don’t think of subtraction until prompted. Dr. Carrie Goucher added a different angle, focusing on signposting async messages so people can see at a glance what a message is and what’s needed. She described her WTF?! technique (what is this, the task being asked, and follow-up codes for the reader), rich async (video, voice notes and narrative documents that carry meeting-level context), and the aim of anti-fragility, where a team’s way of working grows stronger from change.

6. Meeting changes fade without maintenance (37:00)
Elise Keith challenged the subtraction approach, saying meetings removed in a purge tend to return within about three months unless something prevents them. Rebecca Hinds, PhD, agreed, saying a calendar cleanse can’t be expected to last beyond about six months. She recommended one at least yearly, alongside maintenance mechanisms: rewards and incentives, norms (such as “no lazy asks”), rituals, and leaders repeating the message. She also said tools aren’t inherently synchronous or asynchronous; the norms around them decide how they’re used. Dr. Carrie Goucher said async work needs a new social contract, where people carve out time in their day to read and respond to documents in exchange for fewer hours in meetings.

7. People who resist change can be the best designers of new norms (41:00)
Elise Keith said long-serving people who are passionate about how things are done can help avoid off-the-shelf fixes that don’t fit. Imposed norms feel infantilising; norms people invent themselves stick. She gave examples of organisations creating their own ways of calling out broken norms: a “monkey minder” at a food company, bells at a health organisation, and a rotating “Norm the Enforcer” at a finance company. She said the most successful meeting transformations she’s seen were designed by the people who own the work.

8. Defensiveness about meetings is about identity and status (44:30)
Rebecca Hinds, PhD, said this is hardest when the long-serving people are also the powerful ones. She suggested making bad meetings the enemy (so the person running them doesn’t feel blamed), using objective evidence such as return on time invested ratings, and letting technology deliver feedback, such as AI assessments of meeting health or tools that flag who’s dominating airtime. Dr. Carrie Goucher said this is a culture problem showing up in meetings: for people in high-status positions, change feels like loss, and groups are where identity is built and played back to us. She suggested simple neutral devices like timers and humour as a way out of difficult dynamics. For example, cards people hold up (a terrier, a rabbit hole, a squirrel) when a conversation drifts. She said even serious engineering teams have responded to this because it feels different.

9. Changing meetings changes culture, and some people won’t like it (50:30)
Elise Keith said a barrier people rarely discuss is that better meetings change the culture, which threatens people who like it as it is. Some may decide the new culture isn’t for them, and the new culture will attract people who want to work that way. Dr. Carrie Goucher added that because meetings are so frequent and predictable, changing them can make people feel very exposed. Elise also said how meetings run when senior leaders aren’t present is mostly outside their influence, so people have more power to change meetings than they think.

10. AI forces the question: what is a meeting for? (06:00 and 52:15)
Rebecca Hinds, PhD, said her research finds about 30% of meetings involving knowledge workers now include an AI note-taker, and each bot should have a clear role, like any attendee. Asked why anyone should attend if AI provides a transcript, Dr. Carrie Goucher quoted a Microsoft researcher: if COVID asked what the office is for, AI asks what a meeting is for. Rebecca Hinds, PhD, said that if you can send a bot instead of attending, the meeting probably needs redesigning. She said psychological safety decides the effect of transcription: in safe teams it helps people be more present, and in unsafe ones people hold back and see it as surveillance. Meetings are most valuable for honest, candid conversation, and information exchange can usually move to async channels.

It’s not my call to make. How do I get other people on board?
Frame the problem in terms leaders already care about, co-create the solution with them, bring relevant stories, and start by improving the meetings you run (Hinds, Keith, Goucher).

How do we reduce meetings when there’s constant change?
Accept constant change as normal, learn from teams built for uncertainty, improve async practices, create a safe container so people don’t need to keep checking in, and use subtraction norms such as the rule of halves (Keith, Goucher, Hinds).

How do we stop meeting improvements from fading?
Use maintenance mechanisms (incentives, norms, rituals and leadership repetition), and run a calendar cleanse at least once a year (Hinds).

How do we suggest changes without long-serving people getting defensive?
Have them design the new norms, make bad meetings the enemy, use objective feedback, and use humour (Keith, Hinds, Goucher).

If AI gives me the transcript, why attend the meeting?
If a bot could replace you, the meeting should probably be redesigned. Meetings are most useful for candid conversation, and psychological safety decides whether transcription helps or makes people hold back (Hinds, Goucher).