As companies get larger, scheduling a decision starts to take longer than making it. Decisions that used to get alignment in an hour now “can only happen three weeks from now, once Michael and Melissa are both back.”
The problem goes deeper than big decisions. Daily operational decisions on things like on-call can become impossible to make at all. Teams that need rapid alignment end up in Slack threads that linger and die before end of day, right before the same incident happens again overnight.
The answer is blindingly simple: book recurring time that exists only for as-needed, cross-functional meetings.
A Simple Example
Every day, everyone in the department holds the same 30-minute block for as-needed operational alignment.
It may not be booked over by anyone, for any reason, except cross-team operational needs.
If the day arrives and the block isn’t needed, cancel it.
If it is needed, the necessary attendees join and discuss.
Triggering criteria vary by team, but simple heuristics work fine: join if you got paged overnight. Join if you got paged yesterday, or your team caused someone else to get paged.
Be reachable during the window even if you don’t join. If the people in the meeting need to pull you in, be ready to chat.
I’ve seen this exact setup take an organization from Slack-thread purgatory to crystal-clear daily alignment on operational next steps.
Getting It Right
While the meeting format is simple, keeping it alive takes skill. The necessary conditions are:
It must be run by someone senior. The minute you hand a big, slightly ambiguous meeting to a junior person to “operationalize,” it will die.
After a few cancellations in a row, someone will ask: “can’t we just do this async?” If you cave, you’ll find yourself right back in the exact scheduling hell that made you create the meeting in the first place.
Eventually, the meeting may genuinely deserve to die. Some teams become so operationally autonomous that the block is never triggered. When that happens, kill it. This is another reason a senior person should run it - to spot that condition early and act, rather than letting a zombie meeting haunt everyone’s calendar.
Addendum: Added Benefits
It’s often the only slot your most senior people all hold at the same time. On canceled days, it becomes prime real estate for ad-hoc 1:1s.
The irony in many cases is that people often have “Do not book” private blocks on their calendars, they’re just at separate times. This allows people to just sync up a portion of those for collaboration.
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I've seen and used this pattern before, but only in a cross-team fashion. In those instances, getting the right senior people to show up consistently, is a challenge. Especially PMs and PM-like types tend to skip it as not an important decision-making forum...
Could you speak more to that?