MIDOriginal workplace satire. The stand-up scenes below are invented examples, not a real team's meeting or a real person's meeting habit.
There was a time when a stand-up was just a stand-up. Five minutes. Everyone stood up because standing makes people impatient. You said what you were doing, someone said what they were doing, someone mentioned a block, and everyone dispersed before their coffee went cold. The format did exactly one thing: it surfaced what was stuck.
That was the golden age. Nobody wrote a monument to it. Nobody booked it.
Today a stand-up is not a status report. It is a three-act play with a rising act, a mid-season pivot, and a resolution that resolves nothing. The meeting that was invented to take five minutes has grown into a structure with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that keeps going back for seconds.
The first act is the roll call. Everyone reports what they did. Nobody was asked to report what they did. It was a stand-up, not a diary. But the roll call has become a venue, and a venue fills itself with whatever people bring.
The second act is the pivot. Someone mentions a blocker — a dependency on a team that is not in the meeting — and the meeting does the thing that stand-ups were designed to avoid. It debates the blocker. It has opinions about the blocker. It reaches toward a decision it has no authority to make.
The third act is the resolution. The meeting ends with a recommendation to take the actual decision to a second meeting. The second meeting is the play in the second act, now with more cast.
Before: “What are you working on this week?” — a factual question, answered factually, moved past. After: the same question becomes a confession, a justification, and a brief review delivered to an audience of people who are trying to eat lunch. The answer is not “working on the export migration.” The answer is “navigating a cross-team dependency around the export migration that has stalled pending a decision from a working group that meets biweekly and has, in the four weeks I've attended, met zero times.”
The stand-up has now become a place where blockers go to be discussed in public, which is exactly the wrong place for them, because the people who could resolve them are not here. You have performed the problem. You have not solved it. You have, in fact, done the opposite of solved it. You have made it a recurring event.
The whole trick of the modern stand-up is that it will take any small thread and pull it into a room that does not exist. Someone says, “I'm blocked on the design system.” In a real stand-up, that is a flag. You note the block, you find the design person after the meeting, you resolve it in three lines of chat. In the three-act version, “blocked on the design system” is a thesis statement. The room leans in. Someone has an opinion about the design system. Someone else has experienced the design system. They are now comparing notes on the design system as if it were a restaurant they both visited. The stand-up has become a focus group for a problem that should have been a Slack message.
This is the central crime of the meeting-crime genre: it converts a status into a discussion, and a discussion into a decision, and the decision into a second meeting, all inside the five-minute window that was originally reserved for nothing more ambitious than awareness.
Before: “Okay, so I'll chase the design person after this.” The meeting ends. The block moves. After: “Let me circle back on that offline” — which means the meeting has concluded with a promise to have the conversation that should have happened in the meeting. The act ends on a cliffhanger. The audience files out expecting resolution and receives an email titled “Follow-up: design system” with no decision, only a question, which is the email equivalent of a “to be continued.”
A stand-up does not need three acts. It needs three questions and a door. What did I finish? What am I doing now? What is blocking me — and who is the one person I will talk to after this? That is the entire script. The moment anyone answers the third question by starting to debate it, the meeting has broken its own contract. The blocker is not yours to resolve in a five-minute room. It is a name and a channel: name the blocker, name the person, open the channel. The discussion happens there, not here.
And the parking lot. A stand-up has one legitimate artifact: a parking lot, which is a single line in a shared doc where tangents go to be forgotten. “Design system ownership question” goes on the line. It does not go on the agenda. It is not a second act. It is a note that says, later, “we should look at this sometime,” and then never does, which is the correct fate of nine out of ten parking-lot items.
The three-act stand-up is not an accident. It is a small theater where people perform competence. A five-minute status report does not make the performer look important. A five-minute status report that has blossomed into a three-act debate about cross-team dependencies makes the performer look like they are carrying the project on their back. The audience, also performing, nods at the right moments. Nobody leaves. The meeting runs eleven minutes, then fourteen, then “well, we're all here, why don't we—”
The fix is not a better moderator. It is a harder contract. Stand up. Answer three questions. Name one person for the block. Leave before the coffee goes cold, which is the only deadline the format was ever designed to keep.
Who is out or on leave this week. What each of us finishes today. One blocker each, with one name and one channel. That is it. If the meeting needs more than this, it is not a stand-up. It is a working session that has forgotten it was supposed to be five minutes. Book the working session. Keep the stand-up standing.
A stand-up is not a play. It is a smoke detector. Its only job is to notice that something is on fire and point at the fire. It is not responsible for putting the fire out. Stop asking it to be the fire department.