The steering committee test: is your meeting actually working?
Ask three questions about your last recurring meeting: what did we decide, who owns what happens next, and what's still unresolved from last time? If nobody in the room can answer all three without checking their memory, the meeting is probably running on discussion rather than on a record.
Why this test, and why three questions
Most meeting-effectiveness advice focuses on process: shorter agendas, fewer attendees, better facilitation. All useful, but none of it tells you whether a specific recurring meeting — the Tuesday steering committee, the weekly delivery sync, the monthly account review — is actually producing anything durable. The steering-committee test is a shortcut: three questions, asked cold, right after the meeting ends.
- What did we decide? Not "what did we discuss" — a specific, stated decision, or an honest "nothing was decided, and that's fine because this was a discovery session."
- Who owns what happens next? A named person, not "the team" or "someone will look into it," for each action that came out of the meeting.
- What's still unresolved from last time? Whether last meeting's open items were carried forward, resolved, or quietly dropped.
If the group answers all three cleanly, the meeting is working as a record-producing mechanism, whatever else might be wrong with it. If the room goes quiet, or answers are inconsistent between attendees, the discussion is real but the record isn't — and that gap is usually where the actual cost of "bad meetings" hides.
Worked example: running the test on a real meeting
Take a weekly product steering committee. Right after it ends, ask the three questions to two attendees separately, without letting them compare notes first:
Attendee A says "we decided to prioritise the mobile fix." Attendee B says "I thought we were still deciding between the mobile fix and the reporting bug — we were going to circle back." Both attended the same meeting. The disagreement itself is the signal: there was no single, stated decision that both people walked away with the same way.
Both attendees independently say "we decided to ship the mobile fix first, Priya owns the rollout, and the reporting bug carries over to next week because we're still waiting on data from analytics." Same facts, same owner, same understanding of what's still open. That consistency is what a decision record is supposed to produce — the test just checks whether it actually happened.
Running this test doesn't require new tooling — a facilitator can do it from memory in thirty seconds at the end of a meeting. What it exposes is whether the group is leaving with a shared, specific understanding, or a shared feeling that "the meeting went well."
What to do when a meeting fails the test
Failing the test doesn't mean cancel the meeting — some meetings are genuinely for discovery, relationship-building, or surfacing disagreement, and forcing a premature decision out of them can be worse than no decision at all. It means the group needs an explicit closing step, not a new tool:
- In the last two minutes, state out loud what was decided (or that nothing was) and who owns each resulting action.
- Write it down somewhere the whole group can see, before people leave the call — not from memory afterwards.
- Start the next meeting by reviewing what was still open, rather than starting fresh.
This is the same discipline covered in more depth in our meeting accountability guide and the effectiveness and cost guide — the steering-committee test is just a fast way to notice the gap before you invest in fixing it.
Why this matters more for recurring meetings than one-off ones
A one-off meeting that produces a fuzzy outcome is a minor annoyance — you can always follow up individually to clarify. A recurring meeting that fails the test week after week compounds: each session starts from an unclear baseline, re-litigates ground that should already be settled, and slowly trains attendees to treat the meeting as a discussion rather than a place where things actually get decided. The cost isn't the wasted hour; it's the accumulating uncertainty about what the group has actually agreed to, which eventually surfaces as a much more expensive argument about who said what.
That's also why the test works better as a habit than a one-time audit. Running it once tells you whether last Tuesday's meeting worked. Running it for a month tells you whether the meeting, as a recurring institution, is actually earning the time your team puts into it — and gives you a concrete, specific thing to fix (a missing closing step, an owner who never gets named, an open-items list nobody reviews) rather than a vague sense that "our meetings could be better."