I don't know. While I'm not completely against the points the OP is making, something about this statement "you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be," really rubs me wrong.
In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Meetings are not the only collaboration point, probably not even the most effective. OP's advice is good advice for increasing communication and building consensus leading up to a meeting, especially if done with an eye towards transparency, as I assume they intend. Ideally you're able to get everyone aligned beforehand and can cancel the meeting. But if someone walks into a meeting blindsided by a predetermined outcome, that's a red flag that you've created an adversarial environment rather than a collaborative one. If a colleague is important enough to be in the meeting then their opinion is an important enough to affect the meeting.
> the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration
A meeting of the executive team is a point of decision, not of collaboration. Individual contributors make meetings for collaborating, middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery, high management make them for decision communication (not decision making).
Most times I see middle managers meeting (and when I participated when I was one) were about "X is happening, the problem is not (entirely) on my area, let's find where it is so we can fix it".
In my experience, managers have no problem looking busy. They can do that without thinking or conscious effort just by letting the system work the way it wants to. What takes conscious effort is doing anything else.
> In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Yes. At the same time, collaboration is limited when you need a lot of one-on-one discussions that are mostly relevant to one person.
You can have those one-on-ones as a part of a larger meeting. But is it optimal? I'd say no. During a meeting attention is limited. You can tackle one problem at the time and can't do them in parallel. If you have multiple problems to discuss where there's one stakeholder, it's a waste of time for others. A meeting that's a collection of queued one-on-ones is not efficient. An efficient meeting is one where every spoken sentence affects every participant.
Bulk of the project progress is done in the trenches, so to speak. Moving it to meetings makes them longer and more frequent. If someone waits for a meeting to drop an unexpected bomb for the whole team, it likely won't be resolved then and there. After all, others weren't aware so they didn't have time to prepare. Asking people to improvise on the spot is not a good idea. I'd argue that giving others as little time to prepare as possible is a symptom of an adversarial environment.
On the other hand, sharing things in advance gives everyone time to digest them.
Perhaps rewording the statement would work. How about "you should go into meetings only if there will be no surprises".
Well, it's a choice that we get to make by shaping our own work environments. The more senior we get, the more impact we have to shape the culture of our workplaces. In my experience technical contributors underestimate the amount of leverage they have to impact these kinds of cultural matters. We often think about the power we have to leave, but we don't use that power to change, or we assume that the organization wouldn't value our input without any attempt to validate that assumption. I have found it valuable in my own career to be more vocal about the kind of organization I want to be in, the kind of team dynamics and politics we choose to enable, etc. I wish I had done so sooner.
The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.
I think what I'm getting at is this: it's wrong to think that there exists any such thing as "the organization". Like "the government" or "the people", it's a useful shorthand but it doesn't really point to anything specific.
The "trick" (not really a trick, just basic politics as correctly pointed out by other commenters) of cultivating one-to-one relationships stems exactly from that realization. There are all sorts of reasons why people oppose technical solutions, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or the collective well-being of the set of people defined by "the organization".
My ideal of how the world ought to work is a perfect, strict meritocracy. But people play games on me, hence I have to play games on them in self-defense. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, defecting is at its most powerful when the expectation is that you will cooperate.
There is no honor in naivete. Or rather, you'll be told how honorable you are right before you get stabbed in the back.
If you are in higher position, you are the one to decide whether it will be a lot of "closed doors, based on friendship, access and nepotism" or a little of it and transparency.
Going into it with conviction that closed doors are correct default way ensures your company will on high level of it.
>In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time.
Everyone publicly and mutually agreeing to support a decision IS valuable collaboration even if they all had 1-on-1 discussions on that idea before hand. Meetings are pretty horrible venues to actually discuss an idea in depth for many reasons. However if you don't all publicly agree on the same idea then the chance for backstabbing politics increases significantly. In essence it's a trust but verify approach.
In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Meetings are not the only collaboration point, probably not even the most effective. OP's advice is good advice for increasing communication and building consensus leading up to a meeting, especially if done with an eye towards transparency, as I assume they intend. Ideally you're able to get everyone aligned beforehand and can cancel the meeting. But if someone walks into a meeting blindsided by a predetermined outcome, that's a red flag that you've created an adversarial environment rather than a collaborative one. If a colleague is important enough to be in the meeting then their opinion is an important enough to affect the meeting.