Count the meetings whose real purpose is to find out where things stand: the stand-up, the weekly sync, the project review, the leadership update that summarises the summaries. Each takes people off the work to describe it, and each produces a picture that is out of date by the next one.
The cause is structural. The work happens in one set of places and status lives in another, so someone carries it across by hand. The tracker shows what was carried and when, and a leader ends up managing the copy of the work instead of the work.
In Together the status is read from the work. Every change is recorded with who made it, when, where and the exact words: the message where Tomas says the copy can ship Friday, the document revision that cut a feature, the ticket that closed. Agents read those changes as they happen and move the project with them, so the board is current when you look, and each move links to the line that caused it.
Forecasts follow the same rule. A date set from optimism holds until it is missed. A forecast built from the team's own history, how long work like this has taken and how often its scope grew, moves as the work does, and says it is slipping while there is still time to act.
The meetings that remain are the ones worth having, where people decide, argue and plan. A review opens on a brief agents wrote from the work, every line with its source, and spends its hour on the questions that need judgement.
A leader who can see the work has no need to ask about it, and the team gets back the hours it spent describing it.
