In 2026, organizational theorists have officially declared the arrival of the Committee/Working Group Singularity: the precise moment in bureaucratic history where the rate of new committee and working group formation becomes infinite and uncontrollable by human intervention.
The Phenomenon
The Singularity occurs when the sheer volume of sub-committees, task forces, and "working groups" generates a gravitational pull so strong that it warps the fabric of the workday. At this event horizon, the time required to schedule a meeting to discuss a meeting exceeds the total time remaining in the known universe.
Key Indicators of the 2026 Singularity:
The Infinite Loop: A committee is formed to investigate why no work is being done, which eventually appoints a sub-committee to investigate the committee, leading to a recursive feedback loop that consumes all available coffee and bandwidth.
The Post-Human Agenda: In early 2026, a "Steering Committee on Committee Proliferation" became the first entity to achieve sentience, immediately voting to adjourn itself for a three-week retreat to discuss its own mission statement.
The Quorum Collapse: So many committees exist that every human on Earth is now a member of at least 4,000 boards. Consequently, a "quorum" can no longer be reached because everyone is currently double-booked in a breakout room on Zoom.
Action Item Decay: At the point of singularity, "Action Items" become theoretical particles that vanish the moment they are observed by a Project Manager.
Survival Strategies
Experts at Singularity University suggest that the only way to survive the 2026 Committee Singularity is to "reply all" with a calendar invite for a "Pre-Meeting Sync" scheduled for the year 2045. By the time that meeting arrives, it is hoped that the AI will have evolved enough to simply delete the entire Outlook ecosystem.
In my experience, now retired, the Prime Directive, is/was 'no errors', 'no misjudgments', 'no consultation missed' world in which, in particular, the public sector lives. Errors result in embarrassment and political pain, which must be avoided. Best way to do that is to annihilate each and every possible risk and 'take the time to do it right'. Of course, little gets done and despite all the effort, blunders happen with distressing frequency - hullo Phoenix Pay System.
As a generality, auditors, public sector or private, have no end of material on which to comment. We need to pay attention to the unpleasant truths thus revealed.
If we want efficiency and speed, we have to accept mistakes as part of the price. You cannot make everyone happy and accept it. And, we have to accept that some of our shibboleths need ignoring in order to get things done. Government can't do everything, so, for example, we need a mixed healthcare system with a robust role for insurance, private services and public services. That's what most of the world has and we might want to think about our increasingly disfunctions system. And on it goes...
Hello from 🇬🇧 where I assumed you were writing this from, given how accurate a description it is…. I spent 17 years in various bits of the public sector, ending up in a pretty senior position.
My approach to meetings was always, always to NEVER take any papers, any ability to take notes, definitely not a pen. First thing someone says is ‘whose turn is it to take the minutes?’ Not mine, that’s for certain.
Second was to always sit back, wait for people in more senior positions to start talking nonsense - and then play dumb to ask silly questions. They think I’m being thick, but in reality I’m resting their logic and assumptions in front of the rest of the group, so they can carry on making themselves look silly. Great sport.
And outside of meetings, I just did whatever the hell I wanted 99% of the time, usually without consulting anyone.
There are a variety of reasons to have meetings. The only legitimate ones are "I am genuinely soliciting feedback on this plan that I intend, and ensuring the plan is understood by those who will execute it" and "we should all be in the same room occasionally to discuss issues of general import."
We need to let 90% of the bureaucrats work from home and encyst their inputs from and outputs to the real world with AI-generated completely fictional data.
After a year of this, reveal that they have been doing nothing real the whole time, and fire the lot of them.
I’ve worked for big oil most of my career, and everything you’re saying equally applies to large private firms. The larger the organization, the more entrenched meeting culture becomes.
Don’t just pick on the public sector although their behaviour is egregious. For those of us who agree with this self evident truth, Covid was a golden opportunity to deal with it. If I would have had my druthers, we would have kept the front door of our office closed permanently.
We have, in Provincial and Federal systems, created an over abundance of junior and middle managers, policy analysts and comms staff.
Recently most of these people seem to have no technical competence or practical experience in the area they are managing.
The technically competent are now generally no longer considered suitable for promotion to management realms due to a lack of academic qualifications and are pushed aside to employ inexperienced degree holders as policy analysts and managers. The belief that anyone with a BA or other degree can manage any group.
This results in a perceived need for meetings to generate explanations and understanding along with consensus positions. This generates an additional need for discussions at mid/senior levels with little technical knowledge and usually circling back multiple times to ensure no one is involved in being "wrong" as that can be career limiting.
The barriers to upward mobility of technically competent people also reduces the trust and free flow of support to the managers who often have no experience or understanding of the programs and processes they oversee.
This has thickened the "middle" of the organization chart to get multiple management voice and created much of the "bloat" we see in Senior Governments. By sharing the decisions the blame is also shared.
It is interesting to note the relative stagnation in the number of frontline and technical staff compared to the growth of the numbers of non-contact staff (policy analysts, communications advisors as well as junior and middle managers) to oversee that which was functioning more effectively previously.
I think, admittedly with little research, that this stems from our education system. Everything is collaboration and team work. Classrooms are praised for getting away from individual desks and moving to group tables in order to work collaboratively. No one is trained to work on their own, or to make their own decisions and then defend them. This culture is then carried over to the work place.
In the public service, management has been perverted to evaluate the success of a program or project based on whether or not the participants believe the process to have been sufficiently collaborative and if they feel their contributions were valued. Whether the thing actually produced the desired outcome is now irrelevant. All that matters is that we asked everyone for their opinion and patted them on the back,
In our public service meeting culture, work productivity is measured in the number of meetings attended. Any actual results or decisions made are secondary to the importance of showing the boss that you have a full calendar. It's a symptom of malaise in an environment where the focus is on being seen to be busy and no one is accountable for outcomes.
The magic and mayhem of public service can be found in the concept of “churn”. The movement of people in and out of positions means always having to bring someone up to speed.
This column reminded me of a conversation I had with the ceo of the company where I’m in upper management. We discussed the weekly staff meeting - originally started to build team culture but the continued just because it was on the schedule. We now have a culture and the weekly frequency wasn’t needed. We changed to monthly meetings with me still having weekly meetings for those who report to me. We keep them tight and focused on issues that need discussion and decisions. We actively avoid unneeded meetings recognizing them as a poor use of resources.
The other thing we do is make decisions in upper management and then we announce the rationale and wha to expect and roll any needed changeout to the res of the team. Buy in is nice but it’s not necessary when you have a strong culture and a workplace with high trust. That is what it sounds like the government public service is missing. Not everyone needs to agree at the start, you just need managers comfortable with leading needed change. And someone also willing to evaluate whether change is needed or whether it’s change for the sake of change.
The PowerPoint example is ridiculous - I’ve given hundreds of presentations, many to large crowds. No matter how careful you are someone won’t like something, but the majority won’t care about minutiae. So it’s not a good use of time to be that picky. It’s a bit stunning that the public service has nobody who is saying that loudly and repeatedly. Maybe it makes their life easy because it’s meaningless work tasks. Undoubtedly it’s things like this that contribute to low productivity in Canada.
It’s a fun read, but I think oversimplifies things. Thankfully zoom has made most meetings quick and remote but less interactive and engaging.
I take exception to the general theme that frames this as a public sector problem though. That seems a bit ideological. But maybe I’m just defensive. I’ve worked in both public and private. The wastefulness and failures seemed equivalent.
In 2026, organizational theorists have officially declared the arrival of the Committee/Working Group Singularity: the precise moment in bureaucratic history where the rate of new committee and working group formation becomes infinite and uncontrollable by human intervention.
The Phenomenon
The Singularity occurs when the sheer volume of sub-committees, task forces, and "working groups" generates a gravitational pull so strong that it warps the fabric of the workday. At this event horizon, the time required to schedule a meeting to discuss a meeting exceeds the total time remaining in the known universe.
Key Indicators of the 2026 Singularity:
The Infinite Loop: A committee is formed to investigate why no work is being done, which eventually appoints a sub-committee to investigate the committee, leading to a recursive feedback loop that consumes all available coffee and bandwidth.
The Post-Human Agenda: In early 2026, a "Steering Committee on Committee Proliferation" became the first entity to achieve sentience, immediately voting to adjourn itself for a three-week retreat to discuss its own mission statement.
The Quorum Collapse: So many committees exist that every human on Earth is now a member of at least 4,000 boards. Consequently, a "quorum" can no longer be reached because everyone is currently double-booked in a breakout room on Zoom.
Action Item Decay: At the point of singularity, "Action Items" become theoretical particles that vanish the moment they are observed by a Project Manager.
Survival Strategies
Experts at Singularity University suggest that the only way to survive the 2026 Committee Singularity is to "reply all" with a calendar invite for a "Pre-Meeting Sync" scheduled for the year 2045. By the time that meeting arrives, it is hoped that the AI will have evolved enough to simply delete the entire Outlook ecosystem.
Clever and a little too accurate. :-)
In my experience, now retired, the Prime Directive, is/was 'no errors', 'no misjudgments', 'no consultation missed' world in which, in particular, the public sector lives. Errors result in embarrassment and political pain, which must be avoided. Best way to do that is to annihilate each and every possible risk and 'take the time to do it right'. Of course, little gets done and despite all the effort, blunders happen with distressing frequency - hullo Phoenix Pay System.
As a generality, auditors, public sector or private, have no end of material on which to comment. We need to pay attention to the unpleasant truths thus revealed.
If we want efficiency and speed, we have to accept mistakes as part of the price. You cannot make everyone happy and accept it. And, we have to accept that some of our shibboleths need ignoring in order to get things done. Government can't do everything, so, for example, we need a mixed healthcare system with a robust role for insurance, private services and public services. That's what most of the world has and we might want to think about our increasingly disfunctions system. And on it goes...
Hello from 🇬🇧 where I assumed you were writing this from, given how accurate a description it is…. I spent 17 years in various bits of the public sector, ending up in a pretty senior position.
My approach to meetings was always, always to NEVER take any papers, any ability to take notes, definitely not a pen. First thing someone says is ‘whose turn is it to take the minutes?’ Not mine, that’s for certain.
Second was to always sit back, wait for people in more senior positions to start talking nonsense - and then play dumb to ask silly questions. They think I’m being thick, but in reality I’m resting their logic and assumptions in front of the rest of the group, so they can carry on making themselves look silly. Great sport.
And outside of meetings, I just did whatever the hell I wanted 99% of the time, usually without consulting anyone.
Eventually I got paid off, quite handsomely too.
There are a variety of reasons to have meetings. The only legitimate ones are "I am genuinely soliciting feedback on this plan that I intend, and ensuring the plan is understood by those who will execute it" and "we should all be in the same room occasionally to discuss issues of general import."
All other meetings are failures of leadership.
We need to let 90% of the bureaucrats work from home and encyst their inputs from and outputs to the real world with AI-generated completely fictional data.
After a year of this, reveal that they have been doing nothing real the whole time, and fire the lot of them.
Ender's Game in reverse.
I’ve worked for big oil most of my career, and everything you’re saying equally applies to large private firms. The larger the organization, the more entrenched meeting culture becomes.
Don’t just pick on the public sector although their behaviour is egregious. For those of us who agree with this self evident truth, Covid was a golden opportunity to deal with it. If I would have had my druthers, we would have kept the front door of our office closed permanently.
We have, in Provincial and Federal systems, created an over abundance of junior and middle managers, policy analysts and comms staff.
Recently most of these people seem to have no technical competence or practical experience in the area they are managing.
The technically competent are now generally no longer considered suitable for promotion to management realms due to a lack of academic qualifications and are pushed aside to employ inexperienced degree holders as policy analysts and managers. The belief that anyone with a BA or other degree can manage any group.
This results in a perceived need for meetings to generate explanations and understanding along with consensus positions. This generates an additional need for discussions at mid/senior levels with little technical knowledge and usually circling back multiple times to ensure no one is involved in being "wrong" as that can be career limiting.
The barriers to upward mobility of technically competent people also reduces the trust and free flow of support to the managers who often have no experience or understanding of the programs and processes they oversee.
This has thickened the "middle" of the organization chart to get multiple management voice and created much of the "bloat" we see in Senior Governments. By sharing the decisions the blame is also shared.
It is interesting to note the relative stagnation in the number of frontline and technical staff compared to the growth of the numbers of non-contact staff (policy analysts, communications advisors as well as junior and middle managers) to oversee that which was functioning more effectively previously.
We no longer government very good!
Amen, Joel. Now if we could just embed the notions of objectives and attainment measures, we'd have something!
I think, admittedly with little research, that this stems from our education system. Everything is collaboration and team work. Classrooms are praised for getting away from individual desks and moving to group tables in order to work collaboratively. No one is trained to work on their own, or to make their own decisions and then defend them. This culture is then carried over to the work place.
In the public service, management has been perverted to evaluate the success of a program or project based on whether or not the participants believe the process to have been sufficiently collaborative and if they feel their contributions were valued. Whether the thing actually produced the desired outcome is now irrelevant. All that matters is that we asked everyone for their opinion and patted them on the back,
In our public service meeting culture, work productivity is measured in the number of meetings attended. Any actual results or decisions made are secondary to the importance of showing the boss that you have a full calendar. It's a symptom of malaise in an environment where the focus is on being seen to be busy and no one is accountable for outcomes.
The magic and mayhem of public service can be found in the concept of “churn”. The movement of people in and out of positions means always having to bring someone up to speed.
This column reminded me of a conversation I had with the ceo of the company where I’m in upper management. We discussed the weekly staff meeting - originally started to build team culture but the continued just because it was on the schedule. We now have a culture and the weekly frequency wasn’t needed. We changed to monthly meetings with me still having weekly meetings for those who report to me. We keep them tight and focused on issues that need discussion and decisions. We actively avoid unneeded meetings recognizing them as a poor use of resources.
The other thing we do is make decisions in upper management and then we announce the rationale and wha to expect and roll any needed changeout to the res of the team. Buy in is nice but it’s not necessary when you have a strong culture and a workplace with high trust. That is what it sounds like the government public service is missing. Not everyone needs to agree at the start, you just need managers comfortable with leading needed change. And someone also willing to evaluate whether change is needed or whether it’s change for the sake of change.
The PowerPoint example is ridiculous - I’ve given hundreds of presentations, many to large crowds. No matter how careful you are someone won’t like something, but the majority won’t care about minutiae. So it’s not a good use of time to be that picky. It’s a bit stunning that the public service has nobody who is saying that loudly and repeatedly. Maybe it makes their life easy because it’s meaningless work tasks. Undoubtedly it’s things like this that contribute to low productivity in Canada.
It’s a fun read, but I think oversimplifies things. Thankfully zoom has made most meetings quick and remote but less interactive and engaging.
I take exception to the general theme that frames this as a public sector problem though. That seems a bit ideological. But maybe I’m just defensive. I’ve worked in both public and private. The wastefulness and failures seemed equivalent.