> Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
Author here. You said it better than I did in the post.
It's really about creating space!
No, your claims are too broad, generalizing from specific instance (apparently a small company, high accountability, no diagonal lines or conflicting organizational incentives). A standup meeting to try to ensure visibility and accountability are necessary but by no means sufficient; you only get as much of those as the underlying company culture, plus the seniority of the person running the meeting. People can still turn the thing into a talking shop, filibuster, perpetually roll deadlines, specs that are never fully nailed down, "hidden dependencies" that no-one is held responsible for not spotting, cross-department issues that don't have a single owner. I've been in situations multiple times where I had to call a meeting to diplomatically shine a light on different branches of an org not working well together, or sometimes even actively undercutting each other (or working on a cost-plus/time-and-materials basis).
So your claim "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting... works across organizational boundaries too." is way overly strong. Just because you've had an instance or two where it did work, doesn't mean that works in general, for other orgs.
Meetings may or may not be forcing functions, depending on the organization. Sometimes they are. Oftentimes they aren't.
The better mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" Sometimes, believe it or not, the org doesn't have much of that.
Instead of your claim, I'll tell you the key organizational symptom that I found actually determines accountability, or lack of: (discreetly) find out what happened to the careers of CXOs/VPs/directors/execs/managers on projects that failed: were they promoted/ given bonuses/ retained/ demoted/ reassigned/ fired? (sometimes they get a token punishment/demotion, leave, go found a startup/sit on the beach, then get reacquired at a higher level than what they left).