Sound familiar?
- The same weekly meeting keeps running long, and you can’t remember the last thing it actually decided.
- People show up unprepared, half-muted, doing other work — and everyone knows it.
- “Let’s take it offline” and “let’s circle back” have quietly become the whole agenda.
- You’d cancel it, but nobody’s sure what would break if you did.
Here’s the thing about meetings
Meetings are where organisations spend their most expensive resource — people’s attention — with almost no one tracking the bill. Managers now lose an average of 5.8 hours a week to meetings they consider unnecessary — up 87% since 2019. And it scales: in one survey of employees across 20 industries, people said they didn’t need to be in roughly a third of their meetings, which works out to more than USD 100 million a year wasted at a 5,000-person company.
Do your own math on one meeting: attendees × duration × frequency × a loaded hourly rate. A single weekly hour-long meeting with eight people runs into six figures a year in salary-time. Most teams have several — and have never once put a number on any of them.
The fix isn’t a productivity hack. It’s design. Most meetings fail because they mix three different jobs — sharing quick updates, thinking out loud, and making decisions — and do all three badly at once. Separate them, and start decisions from a proposal instead of a topic, and the same meeting gets shorter and sharper on the spot.
What we’ll actually do
No lecture, no slideware to sit through. You bring a real recurring meeting — one you own, or one you’re stuck in — and you work on it. In 90 minutes we:
- Cost it. A 60-second back-of-envelope of what your worst recurring meeting actually costs, so the stakes stop being abstract.
- Sort it. Split every recurring agenda item into the three jobs it’s really doing — Actions, Brainstorms, Collective decisions — and handle each one the way it needs handling.
- Decide, live. Run a real consent decision in the room, on a low-stakes proposal, so you feel why “is it safe to try?” beats chasing consensus.
- Redesign it. Rebuild the agenda, roles, timing, and ground rules on a one-page canvas — or, if you don’t own the meeting, build a single safe-to-try proposal to take to whoever does.
- Test-drive it. Run the first five minutes of the new format for real, or rehearse your pitch on a sceptical peer, and commit to one change.
What you’ll leave with
- A diagnosis of your most painful recurring meeting — what it costs and where it leaks.
- A redesigned meeting — a rebuilt agenda template, roles, and ground rules you can use next week (or a safe-to-try proposal ready to pitch).
- A toolkit to keep going — a pocket card with the A/B/C model, consent rounds, and the ground-rules checklist.
- The method itself — so you can keep fixing meetings yourself, with no standing dependency on a facilitator.
Who it’s for
The person whose name is on the recurring invite — team leads, project and product managers, ops and delivery leads — running a standing meeting of four to twelve people that’s become too long, too frequent, and decides too little. Also for the trapped attendee: someone stuck in a painful meeting they don’t own and wants to change it from their seat.
It works best as a mixed cohort — open enrolment, or in-house across teams — where each person brings a different meeting. That’s deliberate: it’s how you learn the method instead of quietly handing us your meeting to fix. (Want that instead — us in the room, redesigning one real meeting with you? That’s a separate engagement; just ask.)
Who’s running it
NIMII builds and runs practical, evidence-led workshops on how people work together — grounded in the kind of operational background you don’t get from a slide deck, including running people-heavy operations at festival scale. The whole premise is removing the barriers that stop people moving good work forward — and a broken recurring meeting is one of the most expensive, most ignored barriers there is.
Format & logistics
- 90 minutes, live and interactive.
- Virtual or on-site in the Copenhagen area.
- Groups of 8–20 (works well for a mixed cohort or an intact team).
- Investment: DKK 9,000–16,000 (ex-VAT), in-house, one team, virtual or on-site. Often run as a first, scoped session for teams who want a quick, concrete win before anything bigger.
- Booking: get in touch below.
A couple of honest answers
“Will you just fix our meeting for us?” No — and that’s the point. You’ll leave able to redesign your own meetings, repeatedly. If you want us in the room fixing one real recurring meeting with you, that’s a separate, paid engagement.
“We’ve tried ‘better meetings’ before.” Fair. This one doesn’t hand you rules to forget by Friday. You leave with a rebuilt meeting and a one-page toolkit, having already run a slice of the new format for real.