
Why Meetings Are a System Design Problem
From Digital HR Leaders with David Green by David Green
May 26, 2026 · 56 min · Season 54 · Episode 275
About this episode
David Green discusses the design and effectiveness of meetings with Rebecca Hinds, exploring concepts like meeting debt and the impact of AI on collaboration.
Are your meetings actually working? Or has your calendar just become a system nobody knows how to switch off? In this episode, David Green is joined by Rebecca Hinds , Stanford-trained organisational researcher, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, and author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done . In this conversation, David and Rebecca discuss: Why organisations should treat meetings as a product, and what that actually means in practice The concept of meeting debt, and why calendars accumulate bloat in the same way codebases accumulate technical debt What a 48-hour calendar cleanse involves, and what typically happens when organisations rebuild their calendars from scratch The patterns that show up most consistently when mapping how work actually moves between teams How AI is being used to improve meetings, and the ways it can make dysfunctional meeting culture worse What the conversation looks like in the room when CHROs start rethinking collaboration for the AI era This episode is sponsored by TechWolf.  …
People in this episode
Host: David Green
Guest: Rebecca Hinds
Topics covered
- meetings
- system design
- organizational research
- AI in work
- collaboration
- meeting culture
Keywords
- meetings
- system design
- meeting debt
- AI collaboration
- organizational research
- calendar management
- work patterns
Sponsors
TechWolf
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Glean, HSBC, AMD, T-Mobile, GSK, ServiceNow, Pfizer
Products: Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done
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