Last updated Oct 15, 2026
Who to read, who to hire, and who we’re watching
People looking for help with meeting problems (e.g., too many meetings, meeting overload, an unhealthy meeting culture, or important meetings that simply aren’t working) will find plenty of people with advice to share.
This guide focuses on the few who have made a substantive contribution through original research, distinctive ideas, or sustained professional practice.
We also distinguish between visibility and relevance. Some influential thinkers are no longer active in the field, while excellent current practitioners remain hard to find. And because meeting expertise takes many forms, the right person depends on the job.
So we look for evidence of substantive work and ask two questions:
What would we call this person to help with?
What do they offer today?
We’ve organized the guide around three questions:
Who should you read?
People who have made a substantive contribution to the field and are still actively publishing or speaking about business meetings today.Who should you hire?
People currently doing substantive work with organizations on meetings, meeting systems, or meeting culture. You can call them and hire them now.Who are we watching?
People developing promising new work that we think deserves more attention.
This is a curated look at a small and evolving field.
We also have biases. We know most of these people personally. Our professional networks are extensive but incomplete. We know more about work published in English and more about North American and European practitioners than we do about many other parts of the world.
That’s one reason we’re publishing this guide. If you’re doing serious work on business meetings, or know someone who is, we’d like to hear about it.
Know someone we’re missing? Please tell us.
Criteria: Focused on Business Meetings, Right Now
Many of the ideas you can bring into a meeting come from broader fields like facilitation, team effectiveness, decision-making, operations, organizational development, and collaboration.
For this guide, we’re drawing a narrower boundary: people who have made a substantive contribution to how we understand or practice business meetings and who have published, presented, or otherwise shared meeting-focused work within the past year.
Who to Read Now
If you’re trying to understand why your meetings aren’t working, reduce meeting overload, or improve meeting culture, start here.
If you’re interested in… | Start with |
The science of workplace meetings | Steven Rogelberg, PhD; Joe Allen, PhD; Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, PhD |
Organizational meeting research and AI | Rebecca Hinds, PhD |
Meeting design and organizational meeting culture | Elise Keith, Dr. Carrie Goucher, Martin Duffy, PhD; Louis Vareille, Lauren Green |
Purposeful gathering and facilitation | Priya Parker |
Operating rituals and team meeting practices | Shishir Mehrotra, Bob Frisch, Patrick Lencioni |
Who Can Help
If you need outside help fixing meetings, redesigning meeting systems, or changing meeting culture, these are people you can hire now. These people currently work with organizations on meeting-related challenges through consulting, research, speaking, training, or advisory work.
If you need… | People to consider |
Keynote or company-wide talk | Rebecca Hinds, PhD, Dr. Carrie Goucher, Steven Rogelberg, PhD, Joe Allen, PhD, Elise Keith |
Large-scale meeting transformation involving analytics or AI | Rebecca Hinds, PhD |
Research and scientific advisory | Joe Allen, PhD; Steven Rogelberg, PhD; Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, PhD; Martin Duffy, PhD |
High-stakes meeting design | Priya Parker, Elise Keith, Lauren Green, Lee Gimpel, Dr. Carrie Goucher, Bob Frisch |
Workshop or conference breakout | Lee Gimpel, Lauren Green, Elise Keith, Louis Vareille, Martin Duffy, PhD |
Team meeting culture reset | Dr. Carrie Goucher |
Practical meeting skills and capability building | Lauren Green, Louis Vareille, Elise Keith, Lee Gimpel |
Organization-wide meeting culture change | Elise Keith, Martin Duffy, PhD; Dr. Carrie Goucher, Lauren Green |
Meeting technology and product advisory | Rebecca Hinds, PhD; Elise Keith, Steven Rogelberg, PhD; Joe Allen, PhD |
Explore Their Work
Joe Allen, PhD: Industrial-organizational psychologist and director of the Center for Meeting Effectiveness, known for research on workplace meetings, virtual and hybrid work, and meeting effectiveness. Explore Running Effective Meetings for Dummies, his books Suddenly Virtual and Suddenly Hybrid, and his research and consulting work.
Martin Duffy, PhD: Researcher and practitioner who studies meetings as organizational systems. His Meeting as a Systemic Process (MaSP) framework treats meetings as a collective organizational resource rather than isolated events. Explore his meeting systems work and consulting, and podcast Talk to Your Meeting Doctors.
Bob Frisch: Strategy consultant, executive educator, and founder of the Strategic Offsites Group, known for designing high-stakes executive meetings, strategy offsites, and decision-making processes. His work focuses on how leaders structure strategic conversations, clarify who is involved in major decisions, and design meetings that lead to meaningful action. Explore the Strategic Offsites Group, and his executive education work at Kellogg.
Lee Gimpel: Facilitator and meeting designer focused on making meetings, retreats, and conferences more participatory and effective. Explore Better Meetings.
Dr. Carrie Goucher: Meeting researcher and practitioner focused on transforming team and organizational meeting culture. Her doctoral research developed an evidence-based framework for meeting success, which informs her work on reducing meeting load and improving collaborative work. Explore FewerFasterBolder and her writing on meeting culture and practice.
Lauren Green: Founder of MeetingMakers and host of the This Meeting Sucks podcast. Her work combines practical meeting design and facilitation skills with team and organization-wide meeting culture improvement. Explore MeetingMakers and the This Meeting Sucks podcast.
Rebecca Hinds, PhD: Organizational behavior researcher and author whose work examines meeting overload, organizational communication systems, and the changing role of AI in how people work together. Explore Your Best Meeting Ever and her research, writing, and advisory work.
Elise Keith: Meeting researcher and practitioner focused on meeting design, organizational meeting systems, and meeting culture. She developed the 16 Types of Business Meetings and Meeting Performance Maturity frameworks. Explore Where the Action Is, Lucid Teams, and the Lucid meeting resources and research library.
Patrick Lencioni: Author and organizational health consultant whose Death by Meeting introduced an influential model for matching different kinds of meetings to different kinds of work, with an emphasis on productive conflict, clarity, and commitment. Explore Death by Meeting and the Four Meetings model and his broader work at The Table Group.
Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, PhD: Organizational psychologist whose research examines what people actually do and say in workplace meetings, using behavioral interaction analysis to understand how meeting dynamics shape team performance. Explore her research on meeting and team interaction.
Shishir Mehrotra: Technology leader and creator of the Rituals of Great Teams project, which catalogs the recurring practices teams use to coordinate work, make decisions, share information, and build culture. Explore Rituals of Great Teams and his writing.
Priya Parker: Facilitator, strategic advisor, and author known for treating gatherings as deliberately designed experiences shaped by purpose, invitation, structure, and host authority. Explore The Art of Gathering and her current writing, courses, and advisory work.
Steven Rogelberg, PhD: Organizational scientist and one of the foundational researchers in modern meeting science. His work examines meeting quality, leadership, inclusion, employee experience, and the organizational consequences of how meetings are designed and run. Explore The Surprising Science of Meetings, his academic research, and his work with organizations.
Louis Vareille: French meeting practitioner and founder of the École Internationale de Réuniologie, known for a practical ten-question method for designing and improving meetings. Explore La réunionite, ça suffit ! Les 10 questions qui changent les réunions and his author profile at Éditions Eyrolles.
Who We’re Watching
These are people developing distinctive new work around business meetings who may not yet have a long publication record or established public profile.
Our bar is evidence of real practice: substantive original thinking, credible client or research experience, and a meaningful focus on workplace meetings.
Liana Kreamer - Meeting researcher and professor who has published with Steven Rogelberg, PhD; co-founder of Kairos. Combines active academic research with meeting consulting and applied work.
Una McAlinden - Researcher and practitioner studying meetings at the systems level, with a particular focus on city council meetings. Brings a facilitation background to her work in meeting design, research, and consulting.
Keeping Up to Date
Most good advice holds up. Many of the fundamentals behind an effective meeting, or even a healthy meeting culture, have changed remarkably little in the past 70 years. You could pick up Doyle & Straus’ 1976 How to Make Meetings Work and use much of that advice with your team tomorrow.
So while this guide focuses on people actively contributing to the field now, “current” doesn’t automatically mean “better,” and newness by itself isn’t especially interesting.
The conditions around meetings, however, are changing quickly enough to create genuinely new problems, evidence, and possibilities. Distributed organizations, AI, increasingly complex cross-functional work, new forms of governance, and changing expectations about participation and authority may all require us to rethink meetings.
That’s what we’ll be watching as we keep this guide current: people extending the field rather than simply repackaging familiar advice, and work that helps us understand problems the existing canon doesn’t yet solve particularly well.
Some questions we’re exploring:
Who is developing new approaches to meeting culture and organizational meeting systems?
Who is doing unusually good meeting work within specific disciplines such as healthcare, government, engineering, product development, nonprofits, or education?
Who is doing this work outside North America and Western Europe?
Who is connecting meetings with AI and emerging collaboration technology (without simply shilling yet another meeting bot 🙄)?
Who has developed a genuinely new method, diagnostic, dataset, or body of evidence?
And perhaps most importantly: who’s doing excellent work that search engines don’t know about yet?
If you’re doing serious work on business meetings, or know someone who is, we’d like to hear about it.