- Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal
- Posts
- Rethinking Meetings: Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal
Rethinking Meetings: Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal
Rethinking how we meet in the digital age
Jess Price
March 03, 2026
Welcome to the 17th edition of Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal.
Table of Contents
Jess’ Monthly Reflection
Did you know the average person spends 392 hours per year in meetings?
According to Wankernomics, the definition of a meeting is: "A group of people who have no idea what the meeting is about, all trying to give the impression that they do, while simultaneously trying to avoid being lumped with any additional work, while also trying to look smart."
It's a joke. But I've sat through enough versions of that meeting to earn a reputation for hating them.
In 2018, I started calculating what meetings were costing us. If you want to run the numbers yourself, you can do it here. One team I worked with ran the numbers and canceled 80% of their recurring meetings. It's not surprising, considering up to 50% of the 11 million meetings held in the US per day are a waste of time, costing US$37 billion per year.
In 2025, I spent 142 hours in meetings - 250 hours (63.8%) less than average. That gap taught me more about meetings than the meetings themselves did.
It started with blocking time for deep work. People asked why I wasn’t available and asked me to move the blocks. Sometimes I did, but I never deleted them because that’s where my work actually happened. That’s when I realised: the meeting had become the default and deep work the exception.
Over the years, I've become more intentional with my meetings. That doesn't mean I'm inflexible or indifferent to people who want my time. I do this because my work requires hours of uninterrupted focus. This work is the value I provide to others.
So this month, let's talk about meetings: What are they? Why do we default to them? And are they still useful?
Enjoy March’s Worm Moon,
Jess Price
Founder & Chief Vision Officer
EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Research Approach: AI-assisted synthesis to access and distil credible historical and contemporary sources; insights cross-checked; citations included. This is not meant to be a complete summary. Case studies were chosen for their enduring legacy.
A Brief History of the Meeting
Long before Zoom fatigue and back-to-back meetings, gatherings were how communities made decisions, resolved disputes and distributed power. As economic systems industrialised, meetings changed. Each technological leap reshaped how and why we gathered. What began as councils for peace became structured, scheduled and always-on. This accumulation fundamentally reshaped what it means to be in the room.
Pre-Industrial (before 1760): The Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy
Established as early as the 12th century, the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy represents one of history's most sophisticated models of collective decision-making.* Fifty Chiefs representing all clans from six nations would gather to resolve disputes and plan for the welfare of all people. Grand Council, which continues to this day, provides every chief equal responsibility and say in the matters of the Haudenosaunee and must look forward seven generations to the future when making decisions.
*Note: In The Biggest Estate on Earth, Bill Gammage argues Indigenous Australian governance structures were similarly sophisticated, though records are incomplete due to colonisation.
First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840): The Lunar Society
The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1765-1813), and inspiration behind Moonlit Minds' name and release schedule*, was an informal dining club and intellectual society that met monthly in Birmingham, England. They met on the Monday nearest the full moon each month so members could ride home safely. At its core were fourteen regular members from various industries. Meetings rotated between members' homes and were deliberately informal. Power came through the cross-pollination and connection of ideas that more formal institutions couldn't manufacture. This Society is often credited as one of the intellectual engines behind early industrial innovation. Meanwhile, in the factories their ideas helped create, meetings began to be satirised - most notably by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers.
*In recognition, I've released this edition to coincide with Birmingham time.
Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914): Robert’s Rules of Order
In 1863, Henry Martyn Robert was asked to chair a church meeting and found himself embarrassingly underprepared. Determined never to repeat the experience, he spent years studying parliamentary law and, in 1876, self-published Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies. It sold out almost immediately and was reissued as Robert's Rules of Order (Robert's Rules). At its core, Robert's Rules provides a framework for ensuring meetings are orderly, that the minority can be heard and that the majority can act. It introduced and codified concepts like the motion, the second, the amendment, tabling, points of order, quorum and the floor. Robert's Rules continue to be updated, most recently in 2020, reminding us that this inherited logic remains actively embedded today.
Third Industrial Revolution (1970-2006): Quality Control Circles
By the 1960s, Professor Kaoru Ishikawa argued that quality in Japanese manufacturing should not be the domain of specialists alone. Quality Control Circles brought frontline workers together to analyse problems using a defined set of analytical tools with an emphasis on data-driven problem-solving rather than opinion or hierarchy. Crucially, circles required management to listen and act on their recommendations. By the 1970's, Circles became a defining feature of Japanese manufacturing culture. By the 1980's, Western manufacturers adopted circle programs with mixed results. In the West, circles often became superficial, used as a cost-cutting exercise rather than genuine empowerment, leading to cynicism and abandonment. Yet their legacy survives in recurring meetings.
Fourth Industrial Revolution (2011-now)
Videotelephony, the ability to see and hear remote participants in real time, has existed since the 1960s, but broadband, cloud computing and mobile devices created the conditions for mass professional adoption. Zoom (2011) and Microsoft Teams (2017) scaled rapidly, gaining universal adoption during the pandemic. Meetings were no longer limited by geography. We felt the consequences almost immediately with Zoom fatigue, cognitive overload and constant self-awareness. Now AI transcribes, summarises and even attends meetings on our behalf. Presence has become detached from participation.
What this reveals
Across these eras, meetings gained more structure, scale and reach but often lost clarity of purpose. Each leap conditioned us to prioritise presence and procedure over outcome and intent. Consequently, we now face two systemic failures:
Overcrowding: More meetings than we can meaningfully contribute to.
Performative presence: Attendance is proof of work.
This is the default we've inherited: systems that reward being in the room over changing what happens there. Yet the paradox is already visible. The very tools designed to fix meeting overload - AI summaries, async updates, no-meeting Fridays - don’t question the default. Instead, they optimise around it, leaving the deeper question unanswered:
What would make this gathering worth everyone’s time?
To answer this, we need to examine the logic beneath our full calendars.
THE LOGIC WE’VE INHERITED
The meeting defaults we no longer notice
Most of us know the feeling. You finish a day of back-to-back meetings, open your laptop and realise you haven't actually done anything. Meetings were originally designed in service of something: peace between nations, cross-disciplinary invention or frontline problem-solving. Each required collective legitimacy. Over time, Western procedural logic layered in quorums, recurring slots and camera-on expectations. Now the meeting is the default response to almost every organisational need - often detached from the purpose that once justified it.
The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed. Meetings are meant to enable collaboration. Today, they optimise for attendance. To understand why, we need to look at the logic beneath how we meet.
Our meetings were designed for presence because the purpose demanded it
Historically, presence was necessary. The Grand Council required physical gathering for peace. The Lunar Society relied on intellectual collision. QC Circles solved problems that lived on the factory floor. Presence was the condition the purpose demanded. Somewhere between the factory and the calendar invite, that relationship inverted. We kept presence and stopped asking what it was for. AI assistants now expose the flaw. If a bot can attend on your behalf, the meeting may not have required you. If no action follows the summary, it may not have required anyone:
We didn’t notice when the contribution became invisible
Being in the room used to mean doing the work. In knowledge work, the thinking and doing happen elsewhere. The meeting is often where work is reported, not created. Yet we still measure attendance, duration and camera compliance. We still count visibility instead of value:
The fixes protected the default
When presence became the unit of participation, every tool built to manage overload optimised around it. On operational metrics, solutions like no-meeting Fridays, async updates and AI transcription/summaries work. But the volume and assumption remain: meetings are still the default. These ‘solutions’ made meetings more survivable, but they didn’t make them more purposeful:
Redefining the language
The meeting was never the problem. Fifty chiefs continue gathering to secure peace. Fourteen men changed the world over dinner. Workers solved problems that managers couldn't see from the office. These gatherings justified presence. What we inherited was presence without purpose. A system where attendance signals importance, regardless of outcome. Robert's Rules and videotelephony didn’t create dysfunction, but they did scale a mechanism beyond its context. Now we gather first and justify later, all in an attempt to avoid being lumped with additional work.
CREATING A NEW PARADIGM FOR TOMORROW
Designing meetings for humans
If the last three decades taught us to optimise meetings for presence, procedure and attendance, the future must focus on what gatherings are actually for. This shift demands rethinking not just how often we meet, but what we believe a meeting is supposed to produce.
Below are five possible design principles, drawn from Paradigm Makers Essential Elements:
Old Paradigm: Show up, and you've done your part
New Paradigm: Show up with something to change
Showing up can be enough when the work happens in the room. In knowledge work, that assumption no longer holds as the thinking and work happen outside the room. A meeting is justified only if something shifts because you were there. If your absence produced the same outcome, the meeting didn’t require you. This doesn’t mean excluding anyone who disagrees. Instead, it means allowing those who should be present the opportunity to participate.
Question: If you couldn't attend a meeting this week, which ones would still produce the same outcome without you?
Innovation: From Default to Intention
Old Paradigm: When in doubt, schedule a meeting
New Paradigm: When in doubt, name what a meeting needs to produce
A meeting without a clear purpose isn’t a meeting. Successful meetings produce something meaningful. People walk away with a decision, conflict resolved or a shared direction. When everyone in the room knows what they are there to do, the meeting has a reason to exist. When the answer is unclear, no amount of scheduling, summarising or showing up will produce it.
Question: What is the one thing this meeting needs to produce by the time it ends?
For an example of how these types of meetings can operate, look up Pixar's Braintrust.
Technology: From Presence Extraction to Thinking Support
Old Paradigm: Tools that make attendance easier
New Paradigm: Tools that make purpose unavoidable
Every meeting tool made attendance easier, but none made purpose mandatory. Our tools should extend human thinking rather than substitute it. Invites should require defined outcomes and clear agendas. AI should prepare useful insights. Technology should allow us to think generations ahead when making decisions.
Question: Which of your tools rewards visibility over contribution?
Economics: From Open Allocation to Meeting Budget
Old Paradigm: Schedule freely because attention is abundant
New Paradigm: Protect attention fiercely because it is finite
The average employee spends 392 hours per year in meetings. That rarely appears on a balance sheet, yet it is one of the highest hidden costs of knowledge work. Designing for value means treating each person's meeting hours as a finite resource with a ceiling, rather than an open allocation. When the cost of gathering is made visible, the trade-offs become explicit. Adding a meeting means removing one.
Question: If your team had a weekly meeting budget of five hours per person, how would you spend it?
Norms: From Inherited Inertia to Designed Agreement
Old Paradigm: We meet this way because we always have
New Paradigm: We meet this way because we chose to
The most powerful meeting norms are never written down. There's a social cost every time we decline an invite, turn off our camera or block out our calendar for focused deep work. Nobody decided these things; they just accumulated over time until we never thought to question why. Changing them requires naming them first.
Question: If your team redesigned its meeting culture from scratch, what’s the first unwritten rule you’d replace? Why?
How these principles fit together
We can return to more human forms of gathering by redesigning the logic that shapes when and why we meet.
We inherited systems that asked: "Who was in the room, how long were they there, and how visible were they?" Our new systems can ask: "What changed because we gathered, whose thinking was genuinely needed, and what would have been better decided alone?"
When we shift from attendance to collective thinking, gatherings become rarer but more valuable.
DESIGNING 2075: WHAT HAPPENS IF WE START NOW
Scenario Generation Approach: AI-assisted scenario, based on the 5 design principles proposed above and Paradigm Makers’ 2075 vision of a world where our systems are intentionally designed to allow flexibility for humans and structure where it's needed. This is for educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as a prediction of the future.
Beyond Attendance: The Design of Deliberate Gathering
If we begin designing meetings around collective thinking in 2026, what kind of organisations could we inhabit by 2075?
This month, Paradigm Makers’ AI thinking partner proposed a day in the life.
2075 - A day inside a collective thinking organisation
It's 9:10am.
No meetings have started.
Mira, a systems steward at a mid-sized regenerative infrastructure firm, opens their decision dashboard. Three items require their input this week:
A capital allocation trade-off.
A housing design pivot.
A conflict between two cross-functional teams.
Each decision is already structured with:
The decision owner.
The evidence synthesis.
The mapped dissent.
The regenerative impact forecast (human and ecological).
The agency impact score.
The dashboard also shows their cognitive allocation for the week:
6 hours of collective deliberation remaining.
12 hours protected for deep human work.
If they exceed their deliberation ceiling, the system flags the trade-off: what gets displaced?
Today is their only meeting day for the week.
10:00am - Deliberation Gathering
The housing decision affects 20-year energy performance and tenant wellbeing. The invite is explicit:
The precise decision to be made.
The irreversible elements.
The projected future generation impact summary.
The majority and minority opinions.
Attendance is capped at six. If Mira's presence would not change the outcome, they wouldn't have been invited.
The human facilitator, supported by AI, opens by surfacing disagreement patterns and stress-testing assumptions. Forty minutes later, a decision is made, and the motion is finalised.
The regenerative accounting model updates automatically.
No follow-up meeting is scheduled.
12:30pm - Creation Forum
Once a month, the firm hosts a protected creation session.
Attendance is voluntary but selective.
You apply with a hypothesis.
Today's theme: How might housing restore more energy than it consumes?
Preparation is mandatory (and automatically scheduled into your calendar).
No slides.
No reporting.
Only structured experimentation.
Failure logs from previous cycles line the walls as celebrated artefacts.
3:00pm - Norm Audit Review
Every quarter, teams review their collective thinking data:
Speaking distribution.
Decision influence ratios.
Cognitive load patterns.
Power clustering.
Silence and dominance are flagged.
The governance charter requires visible redesign when inequality appears.
Dignity metrics sit alongside financial performance.
Both are treated as structural risk indicators.
What feels different
The office is quiet.
Calendars are sparse.
Gatherings are dense.
No one apologises for declining a meeting.
No one schedules one 'just in case'.
What disappeared
Recurring status meetings.
Camera-on compliance.
Performative updates.
Meeting hours as proof of importance.
What replaced it
Decision integrity reviews.
Cognitive budgeting.
Regenerative impact dashboards.
Explicit power mapping.
Deliberation ceilings.
By 2075, organisations feel calm.
They move slower in the room
but faster across time.
They exhaust fewer people.
They make fewer decisions.
Those decisions last longer.
No one talks about 'meeting culture'.
They talk about governance architecture.
And when a gathering is called, everyone knows exactly why they are there and what will change because they were.
Until next time,
Jess
P.S The concept of meetings and collaboration didn’t evolve in isolation. If you enjoyed this edition, you might also like:
Reply