We killed the all-hands. Nobody's coming back to it.

Every Monday at ten, the whole studio would down tools and gather for the all-hands. Updates, roadblocks, a bit of morale. It felt responsible. It felt like the sort of thing a proper studio has. It also, we eventually admitted, put fourteen people in a room to hear things that concerned two of them.

The problem with the standing meeting is that it never has to justify itself. It’s on the calendar, so it happens, so it must matter. We only questioned ours because a designer — mid-project, deep in the good kind of focus — quietly asked if she could skip it. And the honest answer was yes. Of course. It changed nothing whether she was there. That should have been alarming, and it was.

So we cut it. In its place we put two things: a short written update anyone can read in three minutes on their own time, and a genuine studio lunch on Fridays with no agenda whatsoever. The written note carries the information. The lunch carries the actual point of an all-hands, which was never the updates — it was the feeling of being in something together. We’d been trying to get connection out of a status meeting, which is a bit like trying to get a good night’s sleep on a train.

Six months on, nobody’s asked for it back. The work is calmer. People protect their mornings. And the thing we were secretly worried about — that the studio would drift apart without the ritual — turned out to have it backwards. The ritual was in the way. Culture isn’t the meeting. It’s what people do when the meeting’s cancelled.