Coming at this from another angle... >"His net impact on the meeting is generally negative, and he makes it 15 minutes longer than it needs to be." Perhaps I'

Coming at this from another angle... >"His net impact on the meeting is generally negative, and he makes it 15 minutes longer than it needs to be." Perhaps I'm making the meeting 15 minutes longer by asked pointed questions because I want the meeting to produce something more than plans for yet another meeting. I would rather spend 45 minutes to produce 15 minutes of value than spend 30 for nothing. That said, I'm only going to do this a few times. If the group or organizer is intent on holding meetings that don't generate anything of value I'll just stop attending and interfering with the status quo. >"And I suspect that no right-minded person wants meetings to be longer than necessary." Only in the case of the kind of worthless adherence to convention, meet for the sake of meeting style meeting I described above. At their core, I think many people want to cooperate and produce, they hate the typical meeting and want to end it as soon as possible because it accomplishes neither of those things. >"Of course, sometimes people roll their eyes to what are in fact smart objections, but I think most of the time most people (not That Guy) know which objections are trivial and which actually matter." Too often, the things that "actually matter" to the folks holding/attending a meeting are frankly toxic. * Wringing implied consent from an audience who has been guilted out of raising objections for fear of being "that guy". When the poor ideas presented or details omitted come back to bite the blame is ready "You were there. Why didn't you bring this up earlier?" * Simply having an audience. There are a lot of people who just love to hear themselves talk, to gesticulate in front of a whiteboard and love to see their underlings nod in approval even more. * Maintaining the status quo. Objections are likely to make work or at least require effort from people who are happily complacent and "busy" with a schedule chock full of meetings every day. Sure, in a great environment with well-run, universally productive meetings and discussions these situations don't exist and "that guy" would be genuinely captious. Thing is, most of us don't work in an ideal environment and I'd expect nearly of us have worked at some point in a place that was far from it.