A lot of meeting overload is really a documentation failure

In small teams, things work because decisions live in someone’s head. Usually the founder’s. That’s fast, but it doesn’t scale.

Once you add people, assumptions stop being shared. Decisions are scattered across slide decks, chat threads, or half-remembered conversations. When something changes, the safest move becomes another meeting to re-establish what’s still true.

Teams that invest early in durable documentation behave differently. Not “write everything down,” but things like:

• explicit decision logs or ADRs
• clear ownership of processes
• a single place people trust as authoritative

The effect isn’t fewer meetings by policy, but fewer meetings by necessity. Meetings become for making decisions, not reconstructing past ones.

This is something we’re digging into in an upcoming webinar, mostly from a practical angle rather than theory:
https://xwiki.com/en/webinars/XWiki-as-a-documentation-tool

Curious how others here handle decision history and documentation rot as teams grow.