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More companies are now embracing "agile" meetings and daily check-ins to make their teams more productive and efficient. The hard rule? Keep it under five minutes or be ready to be rudely cut off in front of your peers.

While some argue this laser approach to meetings won't get anything accomplished, The Wall Street Journal recently published a story that convincingly declares otherwise.

Time is too precious to waste in high-demand business settings. The old ritual of booking conference rooms and clogging calendars with 30 or 60-minutes of drudgery is being replaced by five-minute huddles where teams cut to the chase and make decisions on the spot.

Ask the members of any team if they want to institute better processes, and be prepared for them to roll their eyes. “‘Better processes’ means ‘more bureaucracy,’” someone will mutter. But ask that same team how much they enjoy doing projects the hard way — duplicating efforts, scrambling to meet deadlines when someone drops the ball, or bearing the brunt of customer fury — and you can expect the floodgates to open.

Why do people love to hate “process” but rail against disorganization? It is because most people associate processes with checklists, forms, and rules — the overseer breathing down their necks. Not surprisingly, leaders wanting to foster innovation and creativity are reluctant to institute such rigid controls and procedures.

Team brainstorming seems like a good idea--at least, on paper. What usually happens is this: the company is experiencing a tough problem that no single person seems able to solve, so someone decides that more minds means more processing power, and before you know it you're all gathered in the conference room.

One or two people churn out bad idea after bad idea, while everyone else stares at the wall or multitasks. There are no major breakthroughs and most of you are irritated at the waste of time.

Sound familiar? Why is this such a problem?

Groupthink is a worry for many organisations. Encouragingly, new research suggests it is not as widespread as might be feared.

In the ideal meeting, all attendees participate, contributing diverse points of view and thinking together to reach new insights. But few meetings live up to this ideal, in large part because not everyone is able to effectively contribute. We recently asked employees at a large global bank a question: “When you have a contribution to make in a meeting, how often are you able to do so?” Only 35% said they felt able to make a contribution all the time.

There are three segments of the workforce who are routinely overlooked: introverts, remote workers, and women. As a leader, chances are you’re not actively silencing these voices — it’s more likely that hidden biases at play. Let’s look at these biases and what you can do to mitigate their influence.

The unconscious bias: Smart people think on their feet.

What happens: A program manager calls a meeting to think through a resourcing issue. She summarizes the situation, shares results of a recent staffing analysis, and then tees up the discussion. This works great for extroverted thinkers (those that talk to think). But from the get-go, the introverted thinkers (those who think to talk) are at a disadvantage....