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We’ll call Jim’s cross-disciplinary team on Rocket Design’s big project “Team Rocket.” Team Rocket just made it through a difficult design effort and presented their final efforts in the form of a series of screens. The team includes product managers, user interface designers, front-end and back-end developers, some marketing or social media folks, and a part-time business analyst. They may or may not work in a formal agile style—it doesn’t really matter.

The team is in bad shape after that meeting, from lots of disagreements over the final product, long hours, and disappointed stakeholders. The designs are perceived as being behind the curve compared to their competitors’ efforts, despite Team Rocket having strong feelings to the contrary. They decide to institute a new recurring meeting to “prevent things from getting out of hand in the future.”

Recognize where your meeting habits come from, and if they are truly still working.

—DAVID SLEIGHT DESIGN DIRECTOR, PROPUBLICA

When you get busy, your calendar is littered with recurring team meetings, also known as standing meetings or check-ins. They are the mosquitoes of meetings. They seem to be myriad, and each one takes a little bit of your life away, but not enough to kill you; just enough to be a nuisance. For each one of these meetings, you should always have two questions in the back of your mind:

• Why did you establish this meeting?

• Has that job been done?

If you can’t answer the first, or the second answer is “yes,” the meeting should be deleted or declined. It’s that simple. Part of knowing when a standing meeting like Team Rocket’s course correction meeting is working is recognizing when it’s time to stop having it. Continuing to expect a productive outcome out of the same get-together when the goals have already been achieved (or new goals haven’t been clearly articulated) is a special kind of insanity that only exists in meetings. To combat that insanity, apply the design-thinking checklist.

1. Identify the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Understand that problem sufficiently with research or a clear understanding of constraints.

2. Revisit and experiment with format, including length of time and method of facilitation. Consider skipping a few meetings, just to see what happens.

3. Make changes to the meeting semi-permanent after observing successes. Eliminate changes that don’t produce successes.

4. Walk away from meetings that no longer do the job intended.