Everything Needs a Meeting: Too Much Work to Make Organizations Work
Why does so much work go into making work possible?
The meeting before the meeting. The decision that has already been made but somehow remains open. The manager who is responsible for an outcome but cannot control the conditions required to achieve it. The experienced colleague everyone calls because they know how things really work.
None of this necessarily means that an organization is failing.
Often, the opposite is true.
Customers are served. Projects are completed. Targets are met. Decisions are made. The organization works.
But an extraordinary amount of human effort may be going into making it work.
Everything Needs a Meeting examines the structural conditions behind this hidden organizational work. It follows the path through which organizational action moves:
Boundary → Authority → Decision → Responsibility → Consequence
When these elements remain sufficiently connected, the organization itself carries much of the recurring work required to act. When the connections weaken, people begin to compensate. They coordinate more. Escalate more. Align before meetings. Maintain informal decision routes. Build workarounds. Rely on personal relationships. Carry knowledge about how to make formal structures function in practice.
These adaptations are often intelligent and necessary. They can also become so successful that the organization no longer sees the structural gaps they are compensating for.
What looks like functionality may gradually become dependency.
Everything Needs a Meeting develops the concept of Structural Coherence as a way to understand this difference. Rather than arguing for more hierarchy, more formalization, or fewer meetings, it asks a more useful question:
Does the structure carry enough of the work-or are people continually carrying the structure?
For leaders, managers, organizational designers, consultants, and anyone who has wondered why apparently simple work requires so much coordination, this book offers a different way to see how organizations actually function-and why capable people can keep structurally incoherent systems working for far longer than anyone realizes.
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