Alignment meetings

When you work for a huge organisation, you spend a lot of time in meetings. Significant number of them are in alignment meetings. What happens in them? People bargain over what should be priority across their teams so that the organisation is not wasting resources moving in different directions. They want to put it down on paper that these are the priority projects and they jointly agree to work on them.

But through the year, things happens and ad-hoc opportunities appear so the different teams jump upon them and the alignment meetings themselves became the waste of resources.

Why not align our intentions instead and make sure that we all sync-up our criteria on what constitute importance, and the principles for assigning something to be priority throughout the year. Especially when they randomly pop up. Isn’t this a better way to organise ourselves? Sure, people’s judgments may differ slightly but that’s not as bad a point for contention than having to throw the work of hours of meeting out of the window?