Rather a stand up meeting than a Dutch sit down one
I remember a lot of sit down meetings when I was working in The Netherlands that would make you eagerly look forward to your stand up meetings.
Things always looked good at the beginning of the meetings with an almost empty agenda and everyone needing to get back to work asap in order to hit the next deadline. "Hope springs eternal" they say but somehow it would always take 45 minutes to get to the "Any Other Business" part of the meeting. Of course the AOB section in the agenda which was always blank at the start of the meeting would fill up with at least four substantial discussion points relating to the project just after the "Chair" of the meeting asked if there was "Any Other Business" to discuss.
It was a good day if we got out of the meeting in an hour and a half later. This was mostly due to two main cultural characteristics of the organisations.
1) the concept of the "Chair" of the meeting was not really known in the organisations I worked in.
2) many of the organisations had been created by forcing companies with very different cultures together and/or had staff who had been working together for decades.
This meant that
a) no-one really accepted the "Chair" pointing that the discussion had gone way off topic and could we please return to the original discussion
and b) there were a lot of people with old axes to grind who would take every new opportunity to continue the sometimes decades old disagreements. See point a)
Stand up meetings? You were lucky! I used to dream of stand up meetings,
Biting the hand that feeds IT
