You've been in this meeting before. The weekly check-in where everyone reports what they're working on, the monthly all-hands where leadership shares updates you already saw in email, the project sync that could have been a Slack message. You leave wondering why you bothered.

But here's the thing: these meetings aren't failing at their purpose. They're succeeding at a purpose you weren't told about. The agenda items are a cover story. What's really happening is something far more interesting—a ritual that maintains the invisible architecture of your organization.

Anthropologists have long understood that rituals serve functions beyond their stated purpose. A rain dance isn't really about making it rain—it's about bringing the community together, affirming shared beliefs, and reinforcing who belongs. Your Monday morning standup works the same way.

When everyone gathers at the same time, in the same place (physical or virtual), responding to the same prompts, something powerful happens beneath the surface. The hierarchy becomes visible. The manager speaks first and last. Certain voices carry more weight. The seating arrangement or video grid silently communicates who matters. These meetings perform the organizational structure into existence, over and over again.

This is why organizations cling to meetings that seem objectively pointless. Cancel them, and something starts to fray. People feel less connected. The chain of command becomes fuzzy. New employees struggle to understand how things really work. The meeting isn't transferring information—it's transferring structure.

Takeaway

Regular gatherings maintain social structures not through what's discussed, but through the act of gathering itself. The ritual is the message.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described social life as a kind of theater, where we constantly perform roles for various audiences. Meetings are one of the most important stages in organizational life—and everyone is simultaneously actor and audience.

Watch what actually happens in your next team meeting. People aren't just sharing updates; they're demonstrating that they're busy, competent, and aligned with organizational priorities. The junior employee who asks a thoughtful question is showing she's engaged. The manager who praises someone publicly is performing generosity while reinforcing his power to bestow approval. The person who stays quiet is performing too—perhaps modesty, perhaps disengagement, perhaps strategic invisibility.

This explains why video-on versus video-off became such a charged issue in remote work. It's not really about attention or connection. It's about the performance. Without visible faces, the theater collapses. Leaders can't read the room, performers can't gauge their reception, and the entire ritual loses its power to sort people into categories of engaged and checked out, team player and lone wolf.

Takeaway

Meetings are stages where we perform competence and loyalty. What you say matters less than what your presence demonstrates about your place in the group.

Understanding meetings as rituals doesn't mean accepting pointless ones forever. It means approaching them strategically. If you try to eliminate a ritual meeting by arguing it's unproductive, you'll face mysterious resistance. The meeting serves needs that productivity doesn't capture.

The smarter approach is to acknowledge what the ritual provides while reshaping it. Can the hierarchy be performed in fifteen minutes instead of an hour? Can the loyalty displays happen asynchronously, freeing synchronous time for genuine collaboration? The most successful meeting reformers understand they're not just changing a calendar item—they're proposing a new ritual to replace an old one.

You can also use this knowledge to participate more effectively. If meetings are performance stages, consider what you're performing and whether it serves your goals. If gatherings reinforce structure, notice what structure you're reinforcing by attending, speaking, or staying silent. You can't opt out of the ritual entirely—but you can become a more conscious participant in how it shapes your organization and your role within it.

Takeaway

To change ritual meetings, don't attack their productivity—offer alternative rituals that serve the same structural needs more efficiently.

The meeting where nothing happens is actually a meeting where everything happens—just not on the agenda. Hierarchies are reinforced, loyalties are displayed, and the invisible architecture of the organization is rebuilt brick by brick.

Once you see this, you can't unsee it. Every gathering becomes a text you can read. And with that reading comes a choice: participate unconsciously in rituals that serve structures you may not endorse, or bring awareness to how these moments shape the social world you inhabit.