The Meeting Factory: How Detached Roles Manufacture Burden

by Dave Miller

Real life constraints, time, money, safety, reputation, and consequences, create the gravity that makes work honest. They force clarity: what are we trying to produce, for whom, by when, at what cost, with what risk. When a role insulates itself from that gravity, when it becomes performance, commentary, or “process theater,” it can still look active while steadily losing validity as a contributor to results.

Why constraints and expectations make process theater look worthless

In actual operations, constraints do three things that theater cannot tolerate.

They require tradeoffs.

Real work demands choosing this over that. Theater avoids tradeoffs by multiplying meetings, frameworks, check-ins, and “alignment” rituals that preserve optionality and keep decisions reversible.

They impose consequences.

Constraints connect behavior to outcomes. When you miss, something breaks: a customer leaves, a deadline slips, a budget blows up, a safety issue occurs, trust erodes. Theater avoids consequences by placing responsibility in “the system,” “the team,” or “the next phase.”

They force measurement and definition.

Expectations require specificity: what does “done” mean, what counts as success, what counts as failure. Theater thrives in ambiguity because ambiguity protects status and avoids accountability.

In environments with real constraints, theater does not just annoy people. It triggers suspicion. People sense that if an activity cannot survive deadlines and consequences, no one should fund it, staff it, or elevate it.

Detachment from outcomes degrades perspective, morality, and usefulness

A role’s distance from real outcomes is not morally neutral. Distance changes incentives.

1) Perspective collapses

When you never absorb the cost of delay, you start treating time as infinite and decisions as “discussion topics.” You stop seeing second-order effects: rework, friction, burnout, customer confusion, and opportunity cost. The role becomes locally rational, busy, and globally irrational, harmful.

2) Morality thins out

Morality here is not abstract virtue signaling. It means accountability to real people who pay the price when you miss. Distance makes it easy to justify burdens on others because the role never experiences the pain it creates. This is how well-intended support functions produce misery: more forms, more gates, more approvals, more “stakeholder alignment,” more compliance rituals, because the role’s world runs on paperwork, not consequence.

3) Usefulness becomes self-referential

Detached roles tend to measure value by internal artifacts: decks, documentation, frameworks, maturity models, “best practices,” roadmaps, steering committees. These can help when they directly reduce risk or accelerate throughput. Without outcome accountability, the artifacts become the product, and the role becomes a factory of outputs no one can cash.

4) Utility declines because incentives invert

A detached role gets rewarded for involvement, not accuracy. It feels safer to request more analysis than to make a call. It feels safer to add a checkpoint than to remove one. It feels safer to expand scope than to prune it. Over time, the role’s incentives invert the organization’s intent.

The predictable result: extra weight, burdens, and decision blockades

Once roles exist without outcome accountability, three organizational pathologies show up.

Weight: additional steps that signal diligence, reviews, councils, templates, pre-reads

Burden: decision cost rises; the organization spends energy proving work instead of doing work

Blockades: approvals proliferate because power migrates to the people who can delay; delay becomes control and status

This is why process theater does not merely waste time. It becomes a structural tax that slows execution and corrodes trust.

A practical rule for planning tools and personnel

If you want roles to stay grounded, moral, and useful, design them so they cannot survive without delivering outcomes.

Rule: Every role must own a measurable outcome or share ownership of one.

If a role supports others, define its outcome as a measurable impact on a primary outcome, time-to-delivery, defect rate, customer retention, incident reduction, throughput, cost-to-serve.

Outcome accountability tests

1. Name the deliverable that changes reality.

Not “strategy,” not “alignment,” not “visibility.” What changes for the customer, team, or system?

2. Name the metric that moves.

If the role disappeared for 90 days, what number would get worse?

3. Name the decision rights.

If the role cannot decide or cannot execute, it will default to theater.

4. Name the cost it controls.

If the role can impose work on others with no cost to itself, it will inflate burden.

4. Name the feedback loop.

How quickly does the role feel the pain of being wrong? The longer the loop, the more theater creeps in.

The core thesis

Real constraints reveal reality. Roles detached from outcomes drift into performative activity because they get rewarded for motion rather than results. That drift degrades perspective, thins moral accountability to real people, and produces organizational sludge: extra weight, unnecessary burdens, and decision blockades. Therefore, when planning tools and personnel, design roles to own actual outcomes, or to measurably improve them, or you will manufacture overhead that eventually competes with the mission itself.

Simply put:

Don’t give someone the authority to say no unless they have the authority and responsibility to say yes.

Don’t take a no from someone who does not have the ability to say yes.