Ineffective meetings are expensive, so is explaining decisions badly.

The problem: this is costing you real money, right now

For a 100-employee organisation, unproductive meetings cost an estimated $2.9 million a year. At 5,000 employees, that climbs to roughly $145 million (Business Insider, via Flowtrace’s 2026 meeting data). Zoom out further and the picture doesn’t improve. Flowtrace’s research puts the workforce-wide cost at 24 billion wasted hours a year in meetings that go nowhere (Atlassian), and 71% of senior executives admit their own meetings are unproductive and inefficient (Harvard Business Review). In the UK, INC estimates the annual cost of unproductive meetings alone at $58 billion (via Flowtrace).

That’s only half the bill – any decisions made still have to be explained afterwards, to a client, the board or someone who wasn’t in the room. Adding further cost. Grammarly and The Harris Poll estimate that poor workplace communication costs US businesses up to $1.2 trillion a year. Business leaders in their study reckon their teams lose the equivalent of almost a full working day every week to it, which works out to roughly $12,506 per employee, per year (Agility PR Solutions, reporting on Grammarly/Harris Poll research).

So the real problem isn’t one bad habit. It’s two: a group that can’t think together efficiently enough to reach a decision, and an individual who then can’t explain that decision clearly enough for it to stick. Most businesses pay for both failures without ever identifying either.

The fix: two workshops, built for each half of the problem

Most training budgets only tackle one side of this. Indigo runs two long-established, licensed workshops that were designed to solve each half on its own terms, which turns out to be exactly why they complement each other so well:

• Six Thinking Hats® developed by DR Edward de Bono. The method gives groups a structured way to think together, separating facts, feelings, risk, benefit, creativity and process so a team actually reaches a decision instead of circling the same argument for the third time that week.
• Think on Your Feet® has its roots in Dr Keith Spicer’s work on structured, spontaneous speaking. It’s since been delivered to over a million professionals in 30+ countries (Think on Your Feet® International – Our Story). It teaches people to turn a decision, or any complex idea, into a clear answer on the spot, without notes.

Six Thinking Hats® fixes how a team decides. Think on Your Feet® fixes how a person then explains it. Train only one and you’ve closed half the gap that’s costing you money, not all of it.

What it’s worth: to the individual, the team and the business

Individually, the two workshops build a genuinely useful pressure-performance skill set. People gain the confidence to contribute properly inside a structured discussion, plus the ability to walk out of that discussion and represent its outcome clearly to whoever wasn’t there.

At team level, meetings stop being a debate and start being a structured process. Because every voice gets heard under the same “hat” at the same time, discussions actually reach a conclusion. As a result, the team collaorates and leaves with a decision people can repeat consistently outside the room, rather than five slightly different versions of it.

Financially, the case comes down to a few concrete outcomes:

• Fewer meetings feeding into that $2.9 million-a-year drag, Six Thinking Hats® will shorten discussion times, force a decision and consensus – rather than let it drift.
• Fewer decisions that quietly get revisited or ignored months later, because nobody outside the room understood them properly the first time.
• One shared way of deciding and communicating confidently.
• An easier case to make to whoever holds the L&D budget: two named, costed failure points, addressed by a single investment.

Erradicate ineffective meetings and bad communication

Six Thinking Hats® is a one-day workshop. Think on Your Feet® is a two-day workshop. Both are licensed programmes, delivered online or face-to-face, worldwide. Learn one to fix half of what’s costing your business money or both to close the gap entirely.

More about Six Thinking Hats® →

More about Think on Your Feet® →

Find out more about training for a group or team →

Sources:

• • Meeting Statistics 2026: 100 Data Points on Time, Cost, Productivity — Flowtrace (citing Business Insider, Atlassian, Harvard Business Review and INC)
  • “Bad connection: Study finds poor communication costs businesses $1.2 trillion annually” — Agility PR Solutions, reporting on Grammarly/Harris Poll research
  • The Story of Think on Your Feet® — Think on Your Feet® International, Inc.