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By Guest Author Shoham Adizes

This concept was originally developed by Dr. Ichak Adizes, founder of the Adizes Institute and creator of the Adizes methodology for organizational management.

When teams sit down to make a decision, there are really only two ways the meeting can go, and most people don't realize they're choosing between them.

The first way is the short-long approach. The meeting is quick. Someone proposes an idea, the group nods along, a decision gets made, and everyone heads back to their desks. Nobody wants to be the person who slows things down by asking "but how exactly will this work?" — those questions are hard, they can be uncomfortable, and they tend to drain the energy out of a room that was ready to wrap up. So the group skips past them. The meeting feels efficient. People leave in a good mood.

Then implementation starts, and that's where things unravel. All the questions nobody wanted to ask in the meeting show up anyway — they just show up one at a time, out in the field, usually at the worst possible moment. Who was supposed to handle this part? What do we do if this piece doesn't work the way we assumed? Nobody agreed on that. So people stop, figure it out, argue about it, and move on, only to hit the next unresolved question a week later. The short meeting turns into a long, stop-and-start implementation that can drag on for months.

The second way is the long-short approach. The meeting itself takes longer, sometimes much longer, because the group forces itself to work through the uncomfortable details up front: exactly who is doing what, by when, and what happens if something doesn't go as planned. This is a slower, more tiring conversation. People get frustrated. It can feel like the meeting will never end. But when it finally does end, something different happens: implementation moves almost immediately, because there's nothing left to argue about. The hard thinking already happened in the room, together, instead of being scattered across weeks of confusion afterward.

Here's the part that surprises most people when you actually compare the two: if you add up the total time — the meeting plus everything it takes to get the decision fully implemented — the long-short approach is faster. Not just more thorough. Faster. The short-long approach only looks efficient at the moment the meeting ends. Once you count the delays, the backtracking, and the arguments that happen later during implementation, it's almost always the slower path overall.

The lesson is a little counterintuitive: if you rush your meetings to save time, you usually end up paying for it later, with interest. If instead you slow down and push through the harder, more tedious parts of the conversation while everyone is still in the room together, you actually get to the finish line faster. A longer meeting isn't a sign that a team is inefficient. Often, it's a sign that the team is doing the work once, instead of doing it badly now and doing it again later.

This is one small piece of the much larger Adizes methodology for management and organizational change, developed by Dr. Ichak Adizes over five decades of work with companies and governments worldwide. To learn more about the full methodology, visit the Adizes Institute at adizes.com.