---
name: mohitagw15856/standing-meeting-audit
source: https://app.decimal.ai/s/mohitagw15856-standing-meeting-audit@1/SKILL.md
source_sha256: b1624e8a3801
---

# Standing Meeting Audit Skill

Standing meetings are organizational scar tissue: each was created for a reason, the reason healed, the meeting remained. Nobody audits them because each is individually defensible-ish and collectively they're the calendar. The audit tests each slot against three questions — does the original purpose still exist, does the attendance reflect it, what has it produced lately — renders verdicts (keep / shrink / merge / kill / experiment), and deploys the un-arguable tool: *cancel it for two weeks and see what breaks.* Almost nothing breaks, and what breaks reveals the meeting's true minimal form.

## What This Skill Produces

- **The inventory** — every recurring meeting: origin purpose, current attendance, recent outcomes, annualized cost (via [meeting-cost-meter](../meeting-cost-meter/SKILL.md))
- **The verdicts** — keep / shrink (length, cast, or frequency) / merge / kill / two-week-experiment, with reasons
- **The experiment protocol** — how the pause runs, what "broke" means, and the decision rule at the end
- **The re-accretion guard** — expiry dates on new standing meetings, and the quarterly re-audit

## Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:
- **The calendar's recurring population** — the standing meetings with their casts, lengths, frequencies; the audit needs the census, not the impressions
- **Per meeting, the archaeology** — why it was created (ask the oldest attendee), what it decided/produced last month (check the notes — absent notes are themselves a finding)
- **The dependencies** — which meetings feed others (the prep meeting for the review meeting is a chain; verdicts consider chains whole)
- **The authority** — who can actually kill what; auditing meetings the auditor can't touch produces resentment reports, not calendars

## Framework: The Audit Rules

1. **Origin vs. present tense:** every standing meeting was born for a purpose — the audit asks whether that purpose still exists in present tense ("the launch coordination sync" for a launch that shipped in March). Purpose-expired meetings are the easy kills, and there are always more than expected.
2. **Attendance is testimony:** chronic optional-izing, half the room multitasking, the same three people talking while nine watch — attendance reality testifies about value more honestly than any survey. A nine-person meeting that's actually a three-person conversation gets shrunk to the conversation.
3. **Outcomes or ritual:** last month's notes show decisions and actions, or they show weather. Meetings producing only status updates get the [async-instead](../async-instead/SKILL.md) conversion test — status moves in documents; discussion needs rooms. No notes at all = the meeting itself doesn't believe it produces anything worth recording.
4. **The two-week experiment beats debate:** contested verdicts get the pause — cancelled two cycles, with a visible parking lot for what would have been raised. Outcome A: nothing broke → kill confirmed. Outcome B: two things broke → the meeting returns as those two things (shorter, smaller). The experiment converts opinion wars into evidence, and its reversibility is why owners accept it.
5. **Guard the re-accretion:** every new standing meeting gets an expiry (12 weeks default) — renewal requires the three-question test again; and the audit itself recurs quarterly at 30 minutes, because scar tissue regrows. The guard is what makes this an immune system instead of a purge.

## Output Format

# Standing Meeting Audit: [team] — [N] recurring slots, ~$[annual total]

## The Inventory & Verdicts
| Meeting | Origin purpose (still live?) | Attendance reality | Recent outcomes | Annual cost | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## The Experiments
[Contested meetings → the two-cycle pause · the parking lot location · the decision rule at cycle end]

## The Merge Map
[Overlapping slots → the combined form · chains resolved whole]

## The Guard
[Expiry-by-default on new standings · the quarterly 30-minute re-audit, owned by (role)]

## Quality Checks

- [ ] Every recurring slot is in the inventory with cost annualized
- [ ] Origin purposes were checked in present tense, not assumed alive
- [ ] Verdicts cite attendance and outcome evidence, not vibes
- [ ] Contested kills route through the experiment, not the argument
- [ ] The expiry default and re-audit cadence are installed

## Anti-Patterns

- [ ] Do not audit by survey — people defend meetings they multitask through; behavior testifies, opinions perform
- [ ] Do not kill by decree what an experiment can kill by evidence — reversibility is the political unlock
- [ ] Do not shrink everything politely instead of killing anything — ten 25-minute zombies still eat the calendar
- [ ] Do not ignore the chains — killing the prep meeting while keeping the review it feeds breaks both
- [ ] Do not audit once — without the expiry guard, the calendar regrows to baseline in two quarters