IEKV for Meetings: Measuring Collective Reasoning Quality in Organizations

Meetings are a central mechanism of coordination and decision-making in modern organizations, yet their cognitive quality remains largely unmeasured. Existing management instruments focus on outcomes, individual performance, or emotional engagement, leaving the process of collective reasoning itself opaque. As a result, organizations often fail to distinguish between discussions that genuinely advance shared understanding and those that merely consume time. This paper introduces IEKV for Meetings, a methodological framework for evaluating the quality of collective reasoning in organizational discussions. The framework treats meetings as collective cognitive artifacts—structured processes of meaning formation unfolding over time. The object of analysis is not individual participants or isolated statements, but the emergent dynamics of the dialog as a whole. IEKV operationalizes collective reasoning through a set of structural dialog axes capturing semantic gain, dialogic coherence, explicit handling of contradictions, scale consistency, epistemic honesty, and openness of interpretations. These dimensions are combined into a normalized energetic–cognitive value (EKV), which is further adjusted by a layer of non-compensable dialogic risks representing destructive interaction patterns such as stagnation, domination, or fragmentation. To account for time as a cognitive variable, the framework introduces cognitive density, measuring how efficiently discussions convert time into cognitive progress. A key feature of the approach is mode awareness. Meetings are evaluated relative to their intended cognitive function (informational, exploratory, decision-oriented, synchronization, or crisis response), preventing misinterpretation of contextually appropriate behavior. Observable communication artifacts are used as diagnostic signals to support interpretation, without attributing evaluation to individuals. The framework is explicitly non-punitive and non-instrumental. It does not assess factual correctness, decision outcomes, or personal performance, nor does it prescribe automation or enforcement. Instead, it provides an interpretable diagnostic lens for identifying structural conditions under which collective reasoning degrades or succeeds. IEKV for Meetings is presented as a methodological contribution to the study of organizational cognition and governance. It is intended for researchers, methodologists, and practitioners seeking to make collective thinking observable without reducing it to behavioral metrics or performance indicators.