# Standup Against Standups By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2022-11-22 Standups are typically daily, short meetings (10-15 minutes) where everyone part of the company, team, or project gets to share what they are working on and any roadblocks. The idea is to improve communication and ensure everybody knows what is happening. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. The meeting is short, so it's not wasting everyone's time and promotes communication to improve outcomes. Seems like a win-win. However, Standups are hardly the most efficient way to work. First, they are daily meetings at a scheduled time that break up the natural flow of work. Unless the organization is working on an assembly line where people are more robots than humans, meetings create immediate and deep work stoppages. These stoppages are more costly than anyone can calculate. For example, let's say you only have 30 minutes before your next meeting. Do you dive deep into solving a problem or check and generate additional emails? If that meeting didn't exist, you are more likely to dive into the dedicated time it takes to tackle the problem. Putting a meeting into someone's schedule forces them to do less valuable work overall. Beyond breaking up the day and the ability to do deep work, Standups are also inefficient because of how they treat the individual. As hinted earlier, Standups may work well when everyone must work synchronously as robots in an assembly line. However, most organizations are not engaged in this kind of work. Here people are not machines. Treating them as machines is the best way to get precisely what you asked for. This sounds good until you realize how frustrating your computer is at times. The computer does exactly what you asked it to do and nothing more. No insights, no creativity, no context, and no intention. Computers are inefficient when programmed incorrectly or asked to solve some of the simplest problems that humans do without thinking. I'd venture to say that IBM spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing the Watson computer program to play Jeopardy. While it did beat humans in a meaningless gameshow, it has yet to do anything else of significance regardless of the marketing hype you see on TV. Does this sound like an efficient use of millions of dollars? Standups are equivalently not efficient because they do not trust the person and their ability to do work in creative and engaging ways. Ultimately, Standups in most organizations represent the shortcomings of management and the structure of the organization. If the go-to move of management is to force humans to become machines, good luck doing anything efficiently, let alone interesting. #### Related Items [[Meetings]] [[The Value of Short Meetings]] [[My problem with project management]] [[Organizational Analytics]] [[Creative]] [[Management]]