Most organizations spend thousands of hours hunting for waste on the shop floor or in supply chain logistics. But there is a silent killer of productivity hiding in plain sight, and it’s likely taking up 40% of your leadership team’s week.

It’s the bad meeting.

In a recent episode of the KPI Fireside podcast, Keith Norris sat down with Evan Unger, a leadership and culture expert with 30+ years of experience, to discuss why “death by meeting” isn’t just an annoyance—it’s a direct threat to your Strategy Execution.

The Real Cost of “50% Effective”

According to Evan, most leaders judge their meetings as only 50% effective. If you apply Lean thinking to that stat, you’re looking at a staggering amount of Non-Value-Added (NVA) time.

“Meetings are where leadership actually shows up,” Evan notes. “People judge the health of an organization and the capability of its leaders based on how those meetings feel.”

If your meetings are disorganized, lacking purpose, or dominated by the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), you aren’t just wasting time; you are actively dismantling your culture of Operational Excellence.

The POPRA Model: A Framework for Better Meetings

To combat meeting waste, Evan introduced a powerful tool he calls the POPRA model. Before you hit “send” on that next Outlook invite, every meeting should have these five elements clearly defined:

  1. Purpose: Why are we meeting? (Is it to decide, to brainstorm, or just to inform?)

  2. Objectives: What specific outcomes must we achieve by the end of the hour?

  3. Process: How will we get there? (e.g., “10 minutes for data review, 20 minutes for root cause analysis.”)

  4. Roles: Who is the facilitator? Who is the timekeeper? Who is the scribe?

  5. Agreements: What are the ground rules for how we treat each other during the session?

Moving from Status Updates to Strategic Decisions

One of the biggest takeaways from the episode is the distinction between Information Sharing and Collaborative Decision Making.

In a high-performing CI culture, status updates should happen in your KPI Dashboard—not in the meeting. If your team is sitting around a table (or a Zoom screen) just reading numbers that they could have looked up on a dashboard, you’ve already lost.

The most valuable meetings are those that focus on “Go Slow to Go Fast.” This means spending more time on the design of the meeting and the facilitation of the conversation to ensure that once the meeting ends, execution is flawless and fast.

Action Steps for CI Leaders

  • Audit Your Calendar: Look at your recurring meetings. Which ones lack a POPRA framework?

  • Kill the Status Slide: Use KPI Fire to track project progress and metrics in real-time so your meetings can focus exclusively on problem-solving and roadblocks.

  • Encourage “Intelligent Disobedience”: Create a space where employees feel safe to challenge a meeting’s purpose if it isn’t adding value.

This video provides the full conversation between Keith and Evan, offering deep insights into the POPRA model and how to eliminate the “silent killer” of productivity in your organization: