Companies frequently find that meeting load grows much faster than the team does. The cause is arithmetic rather than culture, though culture determines whether anything is done about it.
Connections grow faster than people
Adding a person to a team does not add one relationship. It adds a relationship with everyone already there, so the number of pairs rises steeply as headcount climbs.
Where coordination happens through conversation, the demand for those conversations follows the number of pairs rather than the number of individuals.
A team that coordinated comfortably at six can find the same approach unworkable at fifteen without anyone having changed how they work.
Structure exists to limit the connections
Departments, reporting lines and defined interfaces between teams are mechanisms for reducing how many people need to talk to how many others.
They work by making most coordination happen within a group and only summarised information cross between groups.
Organisations that grow without adopting that structure keep the coordination cost of a small team while carrying the headcount of a large one.
Meetings absorb the ambiguity nobody has resolved
Where it is unclear who decides something, a meeting is the natural response because it assembles everyone who might have a claim.
Each such meeting is a symptom of an undefined decision right rather than a coordination need, and it recurs because the underlying ambiguity is never addressed.
Recurring meetings with large attendance and no decision are the clearest signal of this, and they are also the hardest to cancel because everyone assumes someone needs them.
Attendance grows through risk avoidance
Being absent from a meeting where a relevant decision is made is costly, while attending one that turns out to be irrelevant is merely tedious.
That asymmetry pushes people to attend anything that might matter, and organisers to invite anyone who might object later.
Invitation lists therefore expand steadily unless somebody with authority is willing to shorten them and absorb the resulting complaints.
The cost is measured in fragments, not hours
The real expense is not the meeting itself but the way scheduled interruptions break the day into pieces too short for concentrated work.
Three separate meetings can consume a day that contained no more than three hours of meetings, because the gaps between them are unusable for anything demanding.
Organisations that consolidate meetings into defined parts of the day recover far more capacity than those that simply try to hold fewer of them.