Six people. One hour. Nothing decided. Everyone leaves saying "well, that could have been an email" — and then attends the same meeting again next week.
Here is the number nobody says out loud: a one-hour meeting with six people is not one hour. It is six working hours, burned in one room. Spent well, a meeting is the most powerful tool a team has — a live conversation can untangle in ten minutes what would take days of messages across time zones, as Module 2 showed. Spent badly, no other habit wastes so much so fast.
The good news: running a meeting people are grateful for takes exactly four ingredients, and none of them is charisma.
Ingredient 1 — an agenda made of questions
Most agendas are lists of topics: "Marketing update. The client report. Website." A topic never tells anyone when it is finished, so each one expands to fill whatever time is available.
The fix is to write each item as a question that can be answered:
- ❌ "The client report" → ✅ "Do we send the report with March numbers, or wait for April?"
- ❌ "Website" → ✅ "Who owns the homepage rewrite, and by when?"