Laziness situates the problem in individuals and as a deep characteristic, and I think neither is true.
Normally when I see ineffective meetings and missing communications, it's an organizational culture issue. The number one cause I see is what the Lean people call "overburden". I know somebody who was a big fan of circulating notes and tried to bring that practice to a new job. But they ended up giving up because a) bosses put too much on their plate to have the time for that, and b) everybody else was overloaded enough that they wouldn't read the notes anyhow.
That of course means everybody has even more work now, the work called "failure demand". Extra meetings. Doing the wrong work because of confusion. Dealing with delays trying to get information not communicated to them. Etc, etc. So good meeting notes become more needed and more difficult to adopt.
In my view, all of this is driven by not getting another Lean concept: push systems vs pull systems. [1] Work is not driven by actual demand and capacity limits, which is how pull systems work. Instead managers jam requests into the hopper with little regard for capacity, causing all sorts of downstream pathologies.
So if we want to actually fix this, we need systemic change, not individual blame.
Normally when I see ineffective meetings and missing communications, it's an organizational culture issue. The number one cause I see is what the Lean people call "overburden". I know somebody who was a big fan of circulating notes and tried to bring that practice to a new job. But they ended up giving up because a) bosses put too much on their plate to have the time for that, and b) everybody else was overloaded enough that they wouldn't read the notes anyhow.
That of course means everybody has even more work now, the work called "failure demand". Extra meetings. Doing the wrong work because of confusion. Dealing with delays trying to get information not communicated to them. Etc, etc. So good meeting notes become more needed and more difficult to adopt.
In my view, all of this is driven by not getting another Lean concept: push systems vs pull systems. [1] Work is not driven by actual demand and capacity limits, which is how pull systems work. Instead managers jam requests into the hopper with little regard for capacity, causing all sorts of downstream pathologies.
So if we want to actually fix this, we need systemic change, not individual blame.
[1] https://www.allaboutlean.com/push-pull/