Pip: Boghoss’ Blog is asking the question that every overbooked calendar quietly screams: are we working, or are we just meeting about working?

Mara: This episode covers one theme from Laurent Boghossian — the drift from meeting addiction into something organizations have given a much grander name, and what that rebranding actually costs.

Pip: Let’s start with the committee culture trap.

From Meeting Addiction to Committee Culture: A Leadership Trap

Mara: The central tension here is a shift in language that masks a stagnant reality — organizations replaced “meeting addiction” with “committee culture,” and the new label made the same old problem sound almost strategic.

Pip: The post puts it plainly, tracing that evolution: what was once called a professional disease got repackaged into something that sounds like governance.

Mara: Right — and the article names the full cast: “steering committees, executive committees, operational committees and countless other formal gatherings.” The vocabulary expanded while the underlying dysfunction stayed the same.

Pip: So the upshot is that sophistication of language became a smokescreen for the absence of actual work.

Mara: Exactly, and the financial dimension sharpens that point. When senior executives spend substantial time in these gatherings, the cost is real — but the deeper problem is what happens to the decisions inside them.

Pip: Which is that some decisions may already have been made before the meeting starts. Attendance becomes theater.

Mara: The post is direct about the consequence: “Participants are then given the impression that their opinions matter, while the meeting primarily serves to communicate a decision that has effectively already been taken.”

Pip: That is a precise description of how you drain motivation without anyone officially doing anything wrong.

Mara: And the post connects that drain to organizational performance — when employees recognize the pattern, the result is passivity, inertia, and what the piece calls organizational softness. Collective intelligence doesn’t emerge; it evaporates.

Pip: The fix isn’t a better agenda template, either. The argument is structural — management needs to stay connected to operational reality, to actual missions, to the people doing the work.

Mara: The post frames it as a choice between pragmatism and abstraction. Committee culture risks taking organizations, in its words, “off the ground” — disconnected from employees, practical realities, and the missions they exist to accomplish.

Pip: Grounded leadership as a competitive advantage. Turns out proximity to reality is not a soft skill.

Mara: Which raises the harder question underneath all of this — not just how to run fewer meetings, but how leadership culture gets rebuilt once the theater has become the norm.

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Pip: The rebranding of a bad habit into a prestige practice — that’s a pattern worth watching well beyond the conference room.

Mara: Next time, more from Boghoss’ Blog on where leadership thinking is heading.

This episode has been generated using A.I by Laurent Boghossian himself (Source : From Meeting Addiction to Committee Culture: A Leadership Trap)

“Artificial intelligence at the service of humanity. Not the other way around.“