Sometimes having a lot of meetings is not due to poor process but poor culture. If teams have to seek consensus and buy-in, mostly due to fear of having failure

Sometimes having a lot of meetings is not due to poor process but poor culture. If teams have to seek consensus and buy-in, mostly due to fear of having failures, every step of the way, then they will have tons of meetings. If every single design has to go through a 20-person committee, then there will be tons of meetings. If a company value so-called "coordination" over engineering, then there will be tons of meetings. On the other hand, if a company assigns a huge chunk of responsibility to every engineer and value "show and tell" or "freedom and responsibility" in general instead of "get permission first", then there will be very few meetings, just like Netflix did in the early 2010s, or as AWS did with true 2-pizza teams. The question is, does the leadership in your company has the stomach or means to cultivate the culture of encouraging individuals to carry out big enough tasks?