There is a particular kind of meeting that recurs across teams, months, and sometimes years. The agenda looks different each time. The attendees rotate. But the conversation is always the same.
These meetings are not a calendar problem. They are a decision problem. When a choice keeps coming back to the table, it usually means the choice was never actually made — only deferred with the appearance of conclusion.
The deferral feels rational in the moment. The information is not complete yet. The team is not fully aligned yet. The timing is not right yet. Each of these can be true while also being a rationalisation for avoiding the real discomfort: that the decision will disappoint someone, narrow something, or commit the organisation to a direction that cannot easily be undone.
The cost of recurring non-decisions is invisible until it is not. Leadership attention is finite. Every hour spent re-litigating a question that was "decided" six months ago is an hour not spent on what needs to be decided next. The team notices too. Repeated revisitation signals that decisions do not hold — which makes the next decision harder to make with conviction.
The diagnostic is simple: list the last five recurring conversations in your leadership meetings. If any of them trace back to a choice that was supposedly resolved, the issue is not the meeting. The issue is that the choice needs to be made differently — with explicit ownership, stated trade-offs, and an agreed threshold for revisiting it.
Closure is not the same as resolution. Resolution requires someone to hold the decision and be willing to defend it. Without that, the meeting will return.