Why most steering committees serve no purpose

I am often asked how many steering meetings I hold per week. The real question is not frequency, it is function: a committee that never changes a decision is not a management tool, it is theatre.

The symptom: we report, we do not decide

On many projects, the steering committee has become a disguised reporting ritual. A status is presented, nobody arbitrates, and the real decision is made elsewhere - in a corridor, a private Slack message, or not at all.

Three signs that a committee is no longer steering anything

• The agenda has been identical for three months
• No agreed decision has a review date
• The risks presented are always the same, never resolved or escalated

What changes when you reframe it

A useful steering committee has one function: decide what cannot be decided at a lower level. Everything else - status, progress, indicators - must be available before the meeting, not presented during it.

What I do concretely

1. I separate reporting (asynchronous, before the meeting) from arbitration (the only topic of the meeting)
2. I only put decisions on the agenda, never information points
3. I document every arbitration with a review date - otherwise it does not count

The result is not fewer meetings, it is meetings that produce something.