It adds impetus to appear busy and&#x2F;or find something to report.  I think it was said higher in this discussion: recurring meetings are a form of &quot;social engineering&quot;; and I&#x27;ll follow that with an assertion that they have more affect on the structure of the team (and individuals therein) than they do on the effort the team is nominally working to achieve.<p>If you want to build software systems, you should engage in software engineering, not social engineering.  Social engineering only supports the manager hierarchy which is probably at that point misaligned with value production.<p>If I were a deep cynic (instead of just a natural contrarian), I could say they expose the manager as someone who cannot command respect unless they are intimidating subordinates into the social risk of showing themselves impotent to achieve on a day to day basis.<p>If a manager doesn&#x27;t know what his team is up to before the meeting, he&#x27;s not doing a good job.  Perhaps because he doesn&#x27;t already command the respect of the team?<p>Can &quot;drum-beat&quot; scheduling help in crunch times?  Probably.  If you are always in a crunch time, the scale of your efforts probably are probably going to shrink, and&#x2F;or you may lack time to make longer range plans and are effectively navigating without a map.