The Meeting Where Ideas Go to Die

You know the meeting.

It has a name like "Architecture Review Board" or "Technology Governance Committee" or "Digital Steering Group." It meets fortnightly or monthly. There's an agenda template that hasn't changed in years. The same twelve people dial in, cameras mostly off.

Someone presents an idea. Maybe it's a developer who's found a way to automate a painful manual process. Maybe it's a product manager who wants to build a feature customers have been requesting for years. Maybe it's a team lead who's prototyped something over the weekend that actually works.

The presentation ends. There's a pause.

Then the questions begin.

"Have we considered the security implications?"

"What's the integration story with our existing platforms?"

"Has this been socialised with the enterprise architecture team?"

"Who's going to maintain this long-term?"

"What happens if it doesn't work?"

The questions aren't wrong, exactly. They're the questions that responsible governance should ask. But something about how they're asked, and what happens next, tells you everything you need to know.

The idea doesn't get approved. It gets "taken offline for further discussion." It gets "added to the backlog for prioritisation." It gets "referred to another committee for input."

It never comes back.

The Innovation Graveyard

I've sat in hundreds of these meetings. I've chaired some of them. I've watched good ideas enter and never leave.

The pattern is always the same.

The meeting doesn't say no. It never says no. Saying no would require taking responsibility for a decision. Instead, the meeting asks for more information. More analysis. More stakeholder consultation. More alignment with strategy.

Each request is reasonable in isolation. Together, they're a death sentence. The person with the idea can't fight twelve reasonable requests. They don't have the time, the political capital, or the energy. So the idea sits in a queue that never moves, waiting for approvals that never come.

After a few cycles of this, people stop bringing ideas. They learn that the meeting isn't a place where things get decided. It's a place where things get buried.

The meeting becomes an innovation graveyard. Not through malice. Through process.

How We Built These Graveyards

These meetings didn't start as graveyards. They started as genuine attempts to manage risk and coordinate effort.

Someone had a bad experience with a rogue project that caused problems. So they created a review process to prevent that from happening again. Reasonable.

Someone noticed that different teams were building similar things without talking to each other. So they created a coordination committee. Reasonable.

Someone worried about security vulnerabilities in hastily-built solutions. So they added security review as a gate. Reasonable.

Each addition made sense in response to a specific problem. But nobody looked at the cumulative effect. Nobody asked what happens when every project has to pass through five committees, each with the power to delay but not the accountability to decide.

The answer is: nothing happens. Nothing gets built. The organisation becomes structurally incapable of saying yes.

The People in the Room

Here's what makes it worse: the people in these meetings are often good people trying to do good work.

The security representative isn't trying to block progress. They're trying to prevent breaches that could cost millions and damage careers. They've seen what happens when security is an afterthought.

The enterprise architect isn't trying to frustrate builders. They're trying to prevent the integration nightmares that come from uncoordinated development. They've cleaned up those messes before.

The finance representative isn't trying to kill innovation. They're trying to ensure investments create value, not just expense. They've watched money disappear into failed projects.

Everyone in the room has legitimate concerns. Everyone is acting rationally within their role. And the sum of all that rationality is paralysis.

This is the tragedy. The meeting isn't filled with villains. It's filled with professionals doing their jobs. The problem isn't the people. It's the structure.

What the Meeting Actually Produces

Let me tell you what these meetings actually accomplish.

They produce delay. Every layer of approval adds weeks. By the time something gets through the full governance chain, the opportunity has often passed. The competitor has already shipped. The customer has already left.

They produce learnt helplessness. People who have their ideas killed enough times stop having ideas. Or they stop sharing them. The organisation loses access to the creativity of its own people.

They produce shadow IT. When the official channels are too slow, people go around them. They build things on personal laptops. They use unsanctioned tools. They create the very risks that governance was supposed to prevent.

They produce vendor dependency. When building is impossible, buying becomes the default. Every capability gets outsourced because that's the only path that can navigate governance. The vendors understand the committee structure. They know how to package things as "low risk."

They produce exodus. Your best builders leave. Not because the salary is wrong, but because they can't build. They go somewhere that lets them do meaningful work. And when exit interviews ask why, they say "better opportunity." What they mean is "I couldn't build here anymore."

The Questions Nobody Asks

In the governance meeting, every question focuses on risk. What could go wrong? What might fail? What haven't we considered?

Nobody asks the other questions:

What's the cost of not doing this? Every day this problem remains unsolved has a cost. Every week without this capability is a week of inefficiency, missed opportunity, lost customers. The meeting never quantifies this.

What are our competitors doing? While we're debating whether to attempt something, someone else is shipping it. The meeting rarely considers competitive urgency.

What happens to the people who brought this idea? They just watched their work get shelved. They invested time, energy, and hope. How do they feel right now? What will they do next time they have an idea?

What message does this send? When the meeting kills an idea, it's not just killing that idea. It's telling the whole organisation what happens to ideas here. It's teaching people that proposing things is a waste of time.

Is this how we want to work? Somewhere along the way, we decided that governance meant preventing action rather than enabling it. We decided that the answer to risk was paralysis. Is that actually what we want?

The Alternative Nobody Proposes

Here's the thing about these meetings: nobody ever proposes changing them.

The meeting has become institutional furniture. It exists because it exists. It's on the calendar. It has a chair and a secretary and a SharePoint site full of minutes nobody reads. It's just there.

Proposing to change the meeting would itself require a meeting. Probably several. With stakeholder consultation and risk assessment and change impact analysis.

So the meeting continues. Quarter after quarter. Year after year. Ideas continue to die. And everyone agrees that governance is important.

What Governance Should Actually Do

Let me be clear: governance isn't the problem. Bad governance is the problem.

Good governance enables action. It provides guardrails, not gates. It sets boundaries within which teams can move freely, rather than checkpoints that must be passed before any movement is allowed.

Good governance asks: "How do we do this safely?" not "Should we do this at all?" The first question assumes action and focuses on method. The second question assumes inaction and forces justification.

Good governance is accountable for outcomes, not just decisions. If the governance process prevents valuable work from happening, that's a governance failure. The people who run governance should own that failure, not just the failures they prevented.

Good governance is fast. If your governance process takes longer than building the thing would take, your governance is broken. Speed isn't the enemy of safety. Slow governance doesn't produce better decisions. It just produces slower failure.

Good governance trusts people. It assumes that the person proposing an idea has thought about it, cares about the outcome, and can be trusted to act responsibly. It doesn't treat every proposal as a threat to be neutralised.

The Meeting You Should Have Instead

Imagine a different meeting.

Someone presents an idea. There's a pause. Then:

"That sounds promising. What do you need to try it?"

"Here are the boundaries you'll need to work within. As long as you stay inside them, you have permission to proceed."

"Let's check in again in two weeks. Show us what you've learnt."

"If it works, we'll figure out how to scale it. If it doesn't, we'll have learnt something valuable."

The meeting becomes a place where things happen. Where ideas get tested. Where learning occurs. Where building is possible.

This meeting is faster. It's cheaper. It produces better outcomes. And it doesn't require any new technology or consultants or transformation programmes. It just requires deciding to run meetings differently.

The First Step

If you recognise the meeting I'm describing, you have a choice.

You can continue attending. Continue watching ideas die. Continue participating in a process that everyone knows is broken but nobody will change.

Or you can name it.

Say, in the meeting: "I've noticed we rarely approve things. We ask for more information, but then what happens? Where do these ideas go?"

Ask: "What would have to be true for us to say yes to something in this meeting?"

Propose: "What if we ran a time-limited experiment? For the next quarter, ideas under a certain threshold get automatic approval to proceed, with a check-in after two weeks."

The meeting exists because nobody challenges it. The moment someone does, the conversation changes.

What You're Really Building

This isn't just about meetings. It's about what kind of organisation you want to work in.

Organisations that can build things have meetings where ideas get traction. Organisations that can only buy things have meetings where ideas get buried.

The meeting is a symptom. The underlying disease is a loss of belief that building is possible. That internal capability matters. That your own people can create value.

Fixing the meeting won't fix everything. But it's a start. It's a signal that things can change. It's proof that the organisation hasn't completely forgotten how to say yes.

Every organisation has the meeting where ideas go to die.

Not every organisation has to keep it.