A familiar office ritual is being recast as an innovation tool: the weekly meeting.
Bruce Eckfeldt, a strategic business coach and former CEO of Cyrus Innovation, argued in a July 21 column that many leadership teams already have the meeting rhythm they need, but use it mostly to track execution and accountability. The missing output, he wrote, is learning.
“Efficiency isn’t innovation,” Eckfeldt wrote. His argument is simple: when teams only ask whether tasks were completed, they get better at repeating work. When they also ask what assumptions changed, what experiments failed, and what should be stopped, the same meeting can become a faster feedback loop.
Eckfeldt said he learned the approach while scaling Cyrus Innovation, a Lean and Agile software development firm he later sold in 2013. He described running the company on short, iterative cycles rather than long annual plans, with daily and weekly check-ins used not only to stay on track but to learn faster.
The approach challenges a popular startup habit: saving innovation for retreats, workshops or quarterly planning sessions. Eckfeldt said the annual innovation offsite often produces a whiteboard of ideas, not a system that teams keep using once work resumes.
His proposed fix is to add a standing learning question to meetings already on the calendar. Teams would name what they learned, the assumption that changed, and the decision that followed. They would then track experiments, killed initiatives and captured lessons beside ordinary deliverables.
In one case he described, a founder began logging abandoned projects on the same dashboard as launches. Within a few cycles, he wrote, the team started surfacing dead ends earlier instead of hiding them.
