It’s a familiar scenario for anyone who regularly attends meetings…you scan the agenda and see you’ve got three big agenda items with two hours set aside to get through them. By the time you’re an hour and a half into the meeting you’re still on the first item. By the time the second item comes round, there’s no appetite left to give it proper attention and the third item gets a few rushed minutes at the end or doesn’t get reached at all.
In most cases there’s no agenda to blame, because there often isn’t an agenda at all, just a rough list emailed round that morning, or a series of headings copied from last time with nothing added. Either way, the effect is the same: the discussion has nothing to keep it on track and it can rapidly unravel into something that saps both time and focus.
What the research says
The evidence of the impact of agendas on meeting effectiveness is one area of research where the findings are fairly consistent. A survey of 958 meetings found that whether a written agenda existed and whether the group actually completed what was on it, were both strongly tied to whether a meeting was judged good or bad. Facilities and finishing on time mattered too, but the effect ran largely through how involved attendees felt able to be and an agenda organised the meeting and also gave people a reason to engage with it (Leach, Rogelberg, Warr & Burnfield, 2009).
A separate review of nearly 200 studies by researchers at the University of Nebraska and Clemson University reached a similar conclusion from a different angle: preparing an agenda in advance and circulating it before the meeting was one of the clearest, most repeated predictors of a meeting going well (Mroz, Allen, Verhoeven & Shuffler, 2018).
None of this will surprise anyone who regularly attends or supports meetings. What it does confirm is that a meeting is shaped as much by the preparation and follow-up as by what happens in the room.
How agendas lose their focus
The reasons agendas get out of control is often about how they are built. An agenda requires information from several sources at once: actions from the last meeting, items requested by the chair, papers prepared by the executive team, not to mention statutory items that cannot be missed. Any other business tends to be where the overflow lands and it can often keep landing right up to the moment the meeting starts. Bit by bit, the agenda stops being a structure and becomes a holding pen for whatever didn’t find a proper place elsewhere.
Once that happens, the agenda stops doing its job. It’s no longer a document that tells meeting participants what’s being decided and what’s expected of them on each item. It becomes a list of headings in whatever order they arrived, with no clear sense of priority or of guidance for the discussion. Working that out falls back on memory or on scrolling through the previous set of minutes to check what actually happened last time, time spent formatting and cross-referencing a document that should already be close to finished.
The cost isn’t always visible in the room and often shows up later: in minutes that lack detail because the agenda never signalled what needed discussing and in actions that are quietly dropped because nobody carried them forward from the last meeting. Items get deferred, then deferred again, until they are lost completely over time.
Where Scriba fits
Scriba’s Agenda Builder turns a blank agenda into a working draft, built from what’s already known about the meeting and what’s come before it. Instead of starting from a blank page, Scriba pulls forward outstanding actions from previous meetings and suggests agenda content based on what’s already been covered. In effect, it gives the meeting a map before it starts, so the discussion has somewhere to go rather than finding its own way there. Meeting organisers can then adjust the draft, reorder items and add or remove content before sharing the agenda with meeting participants.
Why a better agenda matters
None of this removes the need for judgement about what should be included or covered in a meeting. Deciding what matters, and what can wait, is still an important step. But the evidence is clear: an agenda that’s properly built, circulated early and followed does more to determine whether a meeting is effective than almost anything that happens once people are in the room.
For the board stuck on its first item after two hours of a meeting, the solution should never be a longer meeting but rather a better starting point.