Follow, Followed, Follow Up?

You have been in this meeting. Ten people in a room, or ten faces in a grid, for one hour, every week. Three developers, maybe five. Two project managers. Two or three assistants whose job is to manage the very tickets about to be discussed as though no one has seen them. And it goes like this.

“Are there any open tickets?” “Yes. We’re managing them.” “How is the migration of the reporting module going?” “I sent you an email about it on Friday. I need sign-off on the schema before I can continue.” “Good. Can you remind me to reply to that?”

An hour of this. Ten calendars, every week, so that one person can be told, out loud, in front of an audience, what is already sitting unread in their inbox. You leave with nothing you did not have at 8:59. And next week you will do it again.

Hold the number. Ten people, one hour, every week. We will come back to what it costs.

Could you run on nothing?

Before we sharpen the knife, let me take the meeting’s side, because the easy version of this essay, the one written two hundred times, says all ceremony is theater and real engineers just build. That version is lazy, and it is wrong.

You cannot not organize. A team of forty needs to know who is doing what. A team of four needs it too. Even the solo developer alone with a repo has a system: a list, a place the next thing is written down, or a running argument in their own head about what matters this afternoon. Refusing to organize is not the absence of a system. It is a system, the one where you organize around uncertainty by pretending it will sort itself out. Everyone coordinates. The only question is how, and whether the how still does anything.

So this is not a piece against meetings. Meetings are how a group thinks out loud. Without them people drift, duplicate, and quietly build the wrong thing for a month. The question is narrower, and more uncomfortable, than “do we need process.” It is: this specific meeting, the one at 9am tomorrow, what is it actually doing?

What was it invented to cure?

The daily standup has a birthday and a reason, and almost no one who attends one knows either.

Its grandparent is the factory floor. In 1986 two researchers, studying how Honda and Canon and their peers actually shipped, noticed those teams did not run a relay race, specs handed from department to department down a line. They moved together, the way a rugby team moves the ball, everyone in the play at once. The researchers borrowed the rugby word for the tightest formation on the pitch: the scrum. A decade later two engineers turned that into a way of building software, and went looking for the smallest daily habit that kept a team moving as one. They found it in a single hyperproductive team that met every day without fail, and cut that meeting down to the bone: same time, three questions, fifteen minutes, everyone on their feet.

The standing was not a quirk. Sitting lets a meeting sprawl, and they knew it, so they took the chairs away. The posture is a stopwatch. The whole design encodes one distrust: leave humans in chairs and the meeting will eat the morning.

And it was built for one thing only, to make a blocker impossible to hide. If you were stuck, the room found out that morning, and the team swarmed the thing before it could quietly kill the week. That was the wound. Work that dies in silence because no one admits, until Friday, that they were stuck on Tuesday.

So ask it plainly. In your standup, this month, was a single blocker surfaced that the team did not already know, and swarmed, and cleared? Or did everyone recite yesterday to a manager and sit back down?

When did the wound close?

Scar tissue forms around an injury. It is the body’s real repair of a real wound. Then the wound heals, and the scar stays, stiff and pale, long after the thing it formed around is gone. We keep it. It stops being a repair and becomes just a shape we are now.

Every dead ritual on your calendar is scar tissue. Each was once a real answer to a real injury. The status meeting formed around a project that genuinely went dark. The sign-off gate formed around an incident that genuinely happened, once, in some year nobody remembers. The standup formed around a blocker that genuinely killed a sprint. The pain was real. That is exactly why the ritual is so hard to see for what it now is. Which of the ones on your calendar began around a wound you can no longer even point to?

Because look what happened while you were not watching. The wound closed. This team, this quarter, does not lose sprints to silent blockers, or it never did. But the meeting did not close with the wound. It hardened. And a scar that no longer covers a wound is not doing nothing. It is doing something else. So what is a scar still doing, long after the wound beneath it has healed?

Then what is it feeding?

There is a moment, when someone asks for one of these meetings to end, that tells you everything. Not all meetings. This one, the weekly hour that surfaces nothing. The answer comes back instantly, and it is never a reason. It is a version of this: “We do them so the client is happy and feels followed.”

Sit with that sentence, because it is the whole thing. The meeting’s product is not information. Every fact in it was already sent, on Friday, by email. The meeting’s product is a feeling. The client is drowning in mail they will not read, so instead of reading it, they gather ten people to read it aloud to them, live, on demand, once a week.

Look at what that makes the meeting. The email was the answer, written once and sent. The meeting is that same answer produced again from nothing, out loud, by five engineers reading their own sent-mail back to the person they sent it to. Nothing changed between Friday and Monday except the delivery, from a file the client could have opened, to a performance the client could sit through. Why does an answer that never changed need to be generated fresh every week? And who is it being generated for, if not the one person who would not open the file?

Why can’t you cancel it?

Notice which things in your working life you are allowed to question.

You can question the architecture. Propose a different database and someone argues back, and it is a normal afternoon. You can question the deadline, the roadmap, the estimate, the framework. All of it is on the table, all of it can be put on trial, because all of it can be wrong, and being wrong is allowed.

Now try to question the ritual. Say, in the room, “I don’t think we need this meeting.” Watch what you become in that instant. You can question the architecture, the deadline, the roadmap. Question the ritual and you become the person who doesn’t care if the client feels followed. Not someone raising a scheduling point. Someone with an attitude problem, not a team player, the one who wants to stop being accountable.

Is that reaction not the tell? A thing that punishes anyone who tries to remove it has stopped being a tool. Tools survive by earning their keep, and when they stop, you put them down. What survives instead by making its own removal feel like a betrayal? Not a tool. Something closer to a taboo.

Who is being babysat?

Follow the money the meeting never invoices. Ten people, one hour, every week. Put a real rate on the developers and the managers and the assistants, multiply by fifty-two, and you get a number with a comma in it, a genuine line of the project’s cost, spent so that one person does not have to process their own inbox or make their own decision. You know the migration’s budget to the euro. What is the budget of the meeting about the migration, and who decided that one was worth measuring and the other was invisible?

And what is that money buying? Someone in the room cannot do part of their job, the reading, the deciding, the holding of their own thread. The organization does not fix that. It converts the gap into a standing weekly ritual and staffs it with the most expensive people it has. You called it babysitting the client, and you were right, but look again at who is being raised. Three years of this, and the client never had to learn to read a status email, because every week a room of senior engineers arrived to read it for them. The ritual did not teach the client to cope. It taught a team of professionals to soothe on schedule. Which one of them grew up?

Sure it’s their meeting?

It would be comfortable to end here, furious at them. The manager who cannot read email. The client who needs to be sung to.

Let me turn the lamp around before you go.

The meeting protects the client’s feeling, yes. But run the migration forward to the day it slips, because something always slips. What does the record show? Fifty-two weeks of meetings. Every delay reported, on time, in a room full of witnesses. Not one person who can be told they were not informed. The meeting is an alibi, and it is not only the vendor’s. Your name is on it too. Every week you delivered your update, and every update was a small deposit in an account marked not my fault. When the thing fails, that account pays out to everyone who showed up.

So what is it you actually resent? Picture the client gone tomorrow, and with them any chance that anyone will ever again ask you were you informed, did you report this, is this on you. Would you still keep the weekly record of everything you said and sent? Would you still want the room of witnesses? Or would you let it go in a heartbeat, because it was never protecting the work, only the people in the chairs, and you are one of them?

The client wanted to feel followed. Followed how, exactly? Followed the way a leader is followed, attended, kept in the loop? Or the way prey is followed, watched, tracked, never left alone? There was a third way to follow available the whole time, the one that would have dissolved the meeting and sent everyone back to work. Someone could have followed the thread. Opened Friday’s email, followed it to the end, and replied.

Ten people wanted to be followed. Who was willing to follow up?