Standups That Sat Down

A standup begins with a beautiful lie: this will be quick. The format is clean. What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? What is blocked? Three questions. Three answers. Everyone stays standing. Nobody moves furniture. Nobody opens the ancient scrolls. Nobody says, "While I have everyone here." That is the dream. Then someone says, "Just one quick thing."

You can feel it happen. The room shifts. The quick update grows elbows. A blocker becomes a history lesson. A dependency becomes a confession. Someone mentions an approval nobody knew was missing. Someone else says, "Wait, are we still using that version?" A third person, who has been silent for six minutes, reveals that the entire plan depends on a file in a folder called Final, and that file is not final. Someone joins the call 7 minutes late and needs to be caught up.

The standup was never supposed to be a courtroom, a group therapy session, a postmortem, a requirements workshop, a scheduling summit, and a séance for the haunted tracker. It was supposed to be a checkpoint. A pulse check. A quick scan of the project body to see if anything is bleeding.

But modern projects are excellent at hiding injuries. They tuck them behind green statuses. They dress them in "almost done." They cover them with "waiting on feedback." They hide them under "no blockers," which sometimes means no blockers I am ready to name in front of this room. That is how a fifteen-minute standup becomes a full-body excavation of everything everyone was politely not saying.

The problem is not the standup. The problem is that the standup is often the first place the truth is allowed to make noise. If ownership is unclear, it shows up there. If scope changed quietly, it shows up there. If nobody made a decision, it shows up there. If a task has been wandering the halls without a responsible adult, it shows up there wearing a little backpack and asking who packed its lunch.

A good standup is a triage point. It should identify the issue, assign the next action, and move the deep dive somewhere smaller. Not every problem needs the entire team as an audience. Some problems need three people, ten focused minutes, and a decision. Some need a tracker update. Some need escalation. Some need air cover. Some need to be placed gently, but firmly, in the Trash Can of Accountability.

The fatal mistake is treating every surfaced problem like it must be solved in the same meeting where it was discovered. That is how the standup becomes seated. That is how one person's blocker becomes everyone's lost morning. That is how "quick sync" turns into "we should probably revisit the original assumptions," which is project management language for 'bring snacks; this is no longer a drill'.

If your standup routinely sits down, it is not a calendar problem. It is an information architecture problem. The meeting is absorbing work that should have had somewhere else to go. Blockers need a lane. Decisions need a log. Side quests need owners. Risks need names. Updates need discipline. And the phrase "we can take this offline" needs to be used like a rescue rope, not a decorative throw pillow.

The comedy is that everyone is still technically standing. The tragedy is that the project has pulled up a chair. The goal is not to kill the standup. The goal is to stop making it carry the emotional and operational weight of every unresolved thing. Let it be what it was meant to be: a quick signal check, a smoke alarm, a little morning lantern pointed at the path ahead.

When the standup sits down, listen to what it is telling you. Somewhere, the work has no home. Somewhere, the truth was waiting for a calendar invite. Somewhere, a "quick thing" is dragging a whole basement behind it.

Then let everyone sit down on purpose.