Fewer meetings, more production. A manifesto.

The classic types of waste from the Toyota Production System can be transferred to meetings almost without translation. Waiting: everyone sits there until the last person arrives. Overproduction: information is presented that nobody needs. Inventory: topics are postponed and pile up. Transport: the same information travels through three committees. Motion: participants switch between appointments without really arriving at any of them. Rework: decisions are reopened in the corridor after the meeting. Overprocessing: twenty slides for a question that one sentence would have answered.

Once you have seen it this way, there is no going back. The calendar becomes a value stream. And as in every value stream: first make it visible, then improve it.

That is why I like to have leadership teams log their meetings for a week: purpose, participants, duration, outcome. The result is almost always sobering and almost always the beginning of real change.

Here are the principles I agree with operations teams. They are deliberately short so that they can be hung on the wall.

• Every meeting has a purpose that fits in one sentence: decide, align or solve. Informing is not a purpose. Information goes in writing.
• Anyone who does not contribute to the purpose is not invited. Attendance is not a sign of appreciation.
• The agenda comes beforehand, with the question that is to be answered. No agenda, no meeting.
• The duration follows the content, not the calendar grid. Short slots are the standard, long ones the exception.
• Every meeting ends with decisions, owners and deadlines, visible to everyone. What is not recorded was not decided.
• Recurring meetings have an expiry date. They are reviewed regularly and cancelled if necessary.
• The shop floor takes priority. Anyone needed in the plant may leave an office meeting.

The manifesto only works if leadership lives it themselves. If plant management keeps sending invitations without an agenda, nobody follows the rules.

After the logging week comes the cut list. For every recurring meeting I ask the same question: what would happen if it were dropped? For a surprising number, the answer is: nothing.

Typical candidates are status rounds in which people report in turn what is already in the system anyway. Alignment meetings that only exist because two departments do not dare to talk to each other directly. Steering committees for projects that have long since become part of daily business. And the many meetings whose original reason nobody remembers any more.

An administration department head I worked with had a weekly alignment meeting between order processing, production planning and purchasing. It ran long, everyone came, little was decided. On closer inspection it turned out that the meeting was substituting for a missing process. The departments had no defined handover point, so they met. Once the handover point was defined in the system, the meeting became redundant. The meeting was not the problem, but what it was compensating for.

Fewer meetings does not mean no meetings. A plant needs regular communication, but with a cadence and a clear purpose at every level. The shopfloor meeting at the board on the line, short and daily, for deviations from the last shift. The plant round for topics the lines cannot solve themselves. The leadership meeting for decisions that concern resources or priorities.

The principle behind this is escalation upwards, not information downwards. Each level handles what it can solve itself and passes on only what it cannot solve. That makes the leadership meeting shorter, because it only sees the real obstacles.

Anyone who builds this cascade cleanly no longer needs many of the previous meetings. The status report to the management team disappears, because the management team can see on the wall where the plant stands. Alignment between departments disappears, because interfaces are regulated in the process.

Many companies try to fight the flood of meetings with tools: chat instead of meetings, kanban board instead of status round, shared documents instead of presentations. That can work if the rules are clear beforehand. If not, the waste merely relocates. The meeting becomes a channel with hundreds of messages that everyone has to read so as not to miss anything.

My rule: first clarify the purpose and the process, then choose the tool. A chat replaces a status round if it is agreed who writes what there and when, and who has to read it. A digital board replaces an alignment meeting if the handover points are mapped on it and someone maintains them daily.

And some things still need the room. Conflicts, decisions with far-reaching consequences, topics with emotion: those do not belong in the chat. For those, every minute in the room is worth it, provided the minutes before it have been saved.

You do not have to turn the whole company upside down. Start with your own leadership team. Log for one week. Then draw up the cut list and be bold: whatever is cut can be reintroduced at any time if it is missed. Usually it is not missed.

Then agree the manifesto rather than decreeing it. Let the leadership team adapt the principles so that they become its own. Put them up where they can be seen. And after a month, review together what has changed: how many meetings are gone, how many decisions were recorded, how often invitations were sent without an agenda.

The real gain is not the time saved. It is the attention that flows back into the plant. Leaders who sit in fewer meetings are more often at the gemba. And that is where improvement happens, not in the conference room.