A recurring leadership meeting was actually a symptom of an unowned decision. One diagnostic session named the pattern, the meeting got cut, and decision speed doubled within a month.
Every case study in this series is anonymized, but the pattern is real and it repeats across almost every leadership team I’ve audited: a meeting that everyone privately dreads, nobody can quite explain the purpose of, and yet nobody has the standing to cancel.
This one belonged to a mid-size services company. Same 90 minutes, every other Tuesday, for over a year. Officially it was a “strategy alignment” meeting. Unofficially, it was where one specific decision got relitigated, again, by the same five people, with no new information and no new outcome.
What does a culture audit actually surface?
The leadership team came to me describing a “meeting culture problem” — too many recurring syncs, too little getting decided, a general sense that the calendar had become the org chart. That’s the symptom leadership always names first, because it’s the thing they can see. It’s rarely the actual finding.
Instead of auditing the number of meetings, I sat in on the one they complained about most and watched what actually happened in the room, the same behavioral approach I use in every diagnostic. Within twenty minutes, the pattern was obvious: the same pricing-tier decision came up, the same two executives restated their positions, the same non-decision got logged as “more discussion needed,” and the meeting adjourned exactly where it started. That had happened, by their own admission, at least eight times.
The meeting wasn’t the problem. It was the evidence of a problem nobody had named.
How do unclear decision rights show up as wasted meeting time?
Nobody in that room had actually been assigned the pricing-tier decision. It had originally belonged to the VP of Sales, but a reorg six months earlier had quietly split revenue and product ownership between two executives without anyone explicitly re-assigning who got the final call. Both were smart, reasonable people. Neither was wrong. But because no one had the standing to simply say “this is decided,” every conversation defaulted back to a vote nobody was authorized to hold.
That’s the mechanism behind almost every recurring “alignment” meeting that goes nowhere: a decision that reads as shared ownership on paper functions as no ownership at all in the room. The meeting exists to manage the discomfort of that gap, not to resolve anything.
| Metric | Before the audit | After the fix |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring meeting | 90 minutes, biweekly, indefinitely | Cancelled within 4 weeks |
| Pricing-tier decision cycle | 8+ discussions, no resolution over 12 months | Closed in one follow-up conversation |
| Decision speed (leadership-reported) | Baseline | Roughly 2x within 30 days |
| Decision owner | Split, unassigned since reorg | Named to one executive, in writing |
How fast can this kind of pattern actually be fixed?
Faster than most leadership teams expect, because the fix wasn’t a new process, a new tool, or more meetings about meetings. It was a single sentence in a Slack channel: naming which of the two executives now held final say on pricing tiers, with the other explicitly looped in for input but not veto. That decision took one follow-up conversation to make.
The biweekly meeting quietly stopped having a reason to exist. It was cancelled within a month, not because anyone decided to “fix the meeting culture,” but because the thing the meeting had been covering for was finally resolved. This is the difference between the Culture & Brand Audit and a generic operations review — the audit doesn’t recommend fewer meetings. It finds the specific unowned decision hiding behind the meeting and fixes that instead.
Is this specific to one type of company or team?
No. I’ve seen a version of this exact pattern in a legal practice arguing over intake criteria, a founder-led startup relitigating a hiring bar every sprint review, and a family-owned retail brand stuck on the same vendor decision for two quarters. The industry changes. The specific unowned decision changes. The mechanism — a recurring meeting standing in for an assignment nobody actually made — is close to universal, which is exactly why it’s one of the fastest, highest-leverage findings in a VIP Strategy Day or a full audit.
Lia Sarduy is the founder of The PR Plug, a Miami-based AI-native communications consultancy where behavioral science is the lens and every Culture & Brand Audit starts by watching what actually happens in the room, not what the org chart says should happen. Get the next essay by joining the list, or book a call if a meeting on your own calendar just came to mind.
Frequently asked questions
What does a culture audit actually surface?
A culture audit surfaces the gap between the problem a team thinks it has and the pattern that’s actually causing it. Leadership usually names a symptom — too many meetings, slow decisions, inconsistent messaging — but the audit observes the actual behavior underneath: who really has authority to close a decision, what happens when nobody claims it, and where the resulting confusion resurfaces as wasted time.
How do unclear decision rights show up as wasted meeting time?
When no single person is named as the owner of a decision, groups default to relitigating it every time it resurfaces — because nobody has the standing to simply confirm it’s already been made. That looks like a recurring meeting on the calendar, but the meeting isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom of a decision that was never actually assigned to anyone, so it keeps coming back for another vote.
How fast can this kind of pattern actually be fixed?
Faster than most leadership teams expect, because the fix isn’t a new process — it’s naming an owner for the one decision that’s been unowned. In this case, the pattern was identified in a single diagnostic session, the decision right was assigned to one person that same week, and the recurring meeting was cancelled within the month once there was nothing left to relitigate.
Is this specific to one type of company or team?
No. Unowned decisions show up in companies of every size and industry — anywhere a decision is technically “everyone’s” responsibility, it functions as no one’s. The specific meeting and decision in this case study are anonymized, but the underlying pattern (a recurring meeting standing in for an assignment nobody made) is one of the most common findings across Culture & Brand Audit engagements.