In this interview, Simon Pritchard of the Portfolio Strategy and Development Academy talks with meetings expert David Julian Price, author of five books and holder of roughly 40 years of experience in improving meetings. Price identifies three core reasons meetings fail: they are too numerous, run too long, and lack productivity, leading to a cultural blasé attitude because participants do not bear direct financial responsibility for meeting time. He highlights research showing that most organizational decisions are not made in formal meetings but in informal settings like corridors or water coolers, resulting in a lack of documented decision records and accountability. To illustrate the problem, Price recounts a consultancy project with a government department responsible for public building construction, where contract‑variation decisions were made on‑site without any capture or analysis. The solution introduced was a structured, on‑site stand‑up meeting process to ensure decisions are recorded, evaluated for budget impact, and assigned ownership. The conversation underscores the need for better meeting design, cost awareness, and formal decision‑capture mechanisms to improve organizational effectiveness.
Chapters
One skill that really sets people apart within an organization like ours is their ability to run meetings. And today I'm here to talk to the meetings guy himself, the author of 5 books on running meetings, with 40 years of experience observing and helping people to run better meetings. My name is Simon Pritchard from the Portfolio Strategy and Development Academy, and today I'm delighted to be here with David Price.
Hi, Simon.
Welcome, David.
Thank you.
So why do meetings go so wrong?
Well, look, there's 3 things that make meetings go wrong in, in, in our experience, and that is there's too many, they go for too long, Or they're just not productive. And people become a bit blasé about meetings, I think. And one of the reasons they become blasé is no one actually has to pay for them. They still cost in terms of time and lost opportunity, but no one actually has to sign a piece of paper that says, yes, we'll transfer this amount of money for the cost of this meeting.
Well, I did, I did read a story about an organisation in Asia where they ran it where everybody had to pay to use all the facilities, including meeting rooms.
Oh right, yes.
And the behaviours changed completely.
Yeah, I mean what a great idea, you know, just start charging for the rooms. People would soon stop that. But that leads to an interesting point, Simon. What the research shows us, the area I work in is meetings and decision making, and the research shows that Almost all the meetings in organisations don't get— all the decisions, should I say, in organisations don't get made in the meetings. They get made in the corridor, or the Americans would say at the water cooler. So, but not in the meetings. But if you ask people, where do we make decisions? They say, oh, we make them in meetings. But they don't. Most of them are made in the corridor. Now, here's the downside for that. If they're made in the corridor, they're There's no record of it. And so when you go to the meeting, people say things like, well, who decided that? Or when did that get decided? And no one can remember because it wasn't made in a meeting. So it's, it's a bit of a peripheral issue, the decision-making, but it's nevertheless one that people think everything happens in a meeting, and it doesn't. And it doesn't happen necessarily effectively in a meeting either.
Well, do you need to ban the corridor discussions? Because I'm sort of thinking, how can you guarantee that people follow a healthy thinking process if it's actually— the decision is not made in the meeting?
Well, that's right. Look, let me tell you how that research that I did started. A government department called me, and it was a department that was responsible for the building of public buildings like schools and hospitals. And they said, we're finding that so many decisions are being made about contract variations when something happens out on site, but no one captures it. And so I was brought in as a consultant to help them find a process where they could actually, A, ensure that the decision they're making was a good one, and B, that it was captured. And so, for instance, they said they may be building a school and someone decides that the windows that have been specified need to be changed. And so what would normally happen is they'd just have a discussion on site. Oh well, no, let's just get these windows instead of those windows, which sounds fine, but no one records that, A, that that decision was made. No one actually looks into, well, what is the budgetary Or the financial impact of that decision. And no one records, well, who's going to carry it out. And so we found that we needed actually to create a structure for stand-up on-site meetings for contract variation, because there was no mechanism for that to occur. And yet it was the most frequent thing that occurred on a daily basis almost.
