"I hate planning meetings!"

Maybe. Maybe it would help if you saw people actually _planning_:

- changing the plan to reflect changing reality
- taking our anxiety seriously about missing deadlines
- figuring out what to say "No" to, then actually saying it

What do you think?

@jbrains agreed. I recently held two such meetings at a customer. The first was the initial desires of the company. The second was the reality check once the dev team got a chance of going over those desires