Today we held the regular production management weekly meeting. Every week, previously raised but unresolved issues are brought up again for tracking and discussion. I actually quite liked this meeting format before, because many problems are usually stuck between departments and hard to push forward, but as long as the plant manager is present, at least someone can make decisions and apply some pressure, so things won't stay forever at "let's see" or "discuss later."
But after doing this for a while, I gradually realized that once some issues are formally raised, they fall into a black hole and can never be closed.
For example, the system line progress dashboard requirement I mentioned before was originally quite simple—just integrating scattered information so production status could be more intuitively interpreted. Later, because of the CIP project extension, the discussion expanded to more structures, more departmental needs, and more functions. Eventually, it went from "I want a dashboard" to "What kind of management model should the company establish?" The issue kept growing larger.
Ideally, these discussions are all good, but the problem is everyone is already busy to the point of exploding.
Weekly meetings keep getting longer, no issue has real progress, and new problems keep emerging. In the end, everything is being discussed, but nothing is truly implemented. Over time, I even started hesitating to raise new issues, because sometimes I just wanted to solve a small pain point—finding the right person privately and spending half an hour could handle it—but once it enters formal meetings, people start digging into root causes, wanting to make it perfectly complete all at once, or extending it to other problems. Not only does the matter not become simpler, but it also adds a lot of ongoing tracking pressure.
Later I gradually understood that the meeting itself isn't the problem; rather, "knowing what belongs in a meeting" is also a skill. Some things are suitable to bring to the table because they require resources, cross-departmental coordination, or someone to make a decision. But some things are better handled quickly in private—getting things moving is more efficient than staying stuck in meeting minutes, especially when work is already so busy it feels like fighting fires every day. What many people really lack isn't more discussion, but less internal friction.
So now, I'm also slowly learning to distinguish which matters need to be formally raised and which ones I should just handle myself first. This is probably the kind of experience that only comes after working for a while.