In this episode of The Burleson Box, Dr. Dustin Burleson sits down with Rebecca Hinds, PhD, to explore a topic that affects every practice, every business, and every team: the meeting culture you’ve inherited, and the meeting culture you’re choosing to tolerate.
Rebecca opens with one of the most memorable details from her book: dysfunctional meetings were once documented as an intentional sabotage tactic during World War II. The point is not to make you paranoid about your calendar. The point is that the behaviors that waste time in meetings are remarkably consistent, and most people do not need convincing that meetings are broken. They already feel it.
From there, Rebecca makes the case for a complete shift in how leaders think about meetings. Her premise is that meetings should be treated like products. They are where decisions get made, priorities get set, and culture gets built or broken, yet they are rarely designed with intention. Organizations often obsess over optimizing everything except the mechanism that dictates how work actually moves. When you treat a meeting like a product, you stop scheduling by habit and start designing for the user, the people in the room who are giving you their time, their focus, and their judgment.
One of the most practical concepts we cover is “Meeting Doomsday,” a 48-hour calendar reset where recurring meetings get deleted and employees rebuild their calendars from scratch. The power of this approach is psychological. Traditional meeting audits cause people to defend existing meetings because there’s social pressure, guilt, and fear of offending someone. Doomsday creates a clean slate, and what Rebecca finds is that most of the time savings come from redesigning meetings, not only canceling them. Meetings shrink. Attendee lists tighten. Formats become clearer. Small improvements compound fast, and teams stop carrying old meetings forward simply because they’ve always been there.
Rebecca also explains why managers suffer the most from unproductive meeting load. Her research shows unproductive meetings have increased since 2019, and managers have experienced the biggest jump. The reason is structural. Meetings are often a symptom of a broken communication system. When people do not know where work lives, where decisions get documented, or how to move projects forward asynchronously, managers end up funneling information upward and distributing clarity downward. They become the human router for dysfunction, and the calendar becomes the penalty.
To help leaders respond, Rebecca introduces the concept of meeting minimalism. Great products are minimalist by design, clear, purposeful, and free of clutter. Meetings should follow the same discipline. She encourages leaders to apply minimalism across four dimensions: meeting length, agenda items, attendees, and frequency. Even a small shift, such as running a 25-minute meeting instead of a 30-minute meeting, can force a team to design with intention instead of letting work expand to fill time. She also shares why standing meetings tend to run shorter and can change behavior in the room by reducing territorial dynamics.
We also get into a theme that most leaders underestimate: meetings are deeply human. Rebecca talks about the value of injecting delight, moments of joy and surprise, into meetings, especially in a world where so much of work has become mediated by technology. A small unexpected shout-out, a personal story, or a simple ritual can change how people experience collaboration. These touches do not need to be cheesy. They need to be memorable.
A major highlight of the episode is Rebecca’s breakdown of agendas. Many leaders assume agendas automatically improve meetings, but her research points to a more honest truth: agendas only work when they’re designed well. Too often, agenda items are recycled, vague, and structured like a laundry list. Rebecca’s favorite fix is deceptively simple. Convert each agenda item into a verb and a noun. That shift forces clarity. It also makes it obvious when an item is complete, which helps meetings end on time and decisions actually land.
Finally, we talk measurement. Rebecca explains why meeting metrics are tricky, because people are conditioned to assume meetings are inherently bad, which makes traditional feedback systems unreliable. Her recommendation is ROTI, Return on Time Investment, a simple 0–5 score that helps leaders understand whether the meeting was worth the time. When paired with one follow-up question about how to improve by one point, ROTI becomes a lightweight system for continuous improvement rather than a complaint box.
If you lead a practice, run a department, manage a team, or simply want your calendar to stop owning your week, this episode will change the way you think about meetings. You’ll walk away with principles you can apply immediately, without software, without bureaucracy, and without turning your team into meeting accountants.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Your Best Meeting Ever by Rebecca Hinds, PhD
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (OSS / WWII)
Steven Rogelberg’s research on why agendas only help when they’re designed well
Elise Keith and the concept of ROTI (Return on Time Investment)
Ted Lasso as a cultural example of using small moments of delight to shift meeting culture
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