A lot of the real decisions in a company happen in the gaps between the official meetings. The meeting is where the decision gets announced, not where it gets made.
Sit through a week of meetings at most companies and you'll start to notice something strange. The meetings are full of discussion, but the conclusions often sound agreed in advance. Someone raises a proposal and two other people say yes in a way that suggests they already knew it was coming. A decision gets made with little friction, considering how large it is. The meeting moves on.
What you're watching is the announcement of decisions that were made somewhere else. The somewhere else is the texture of the company that doesn't show up on any calendar: the quick message on chat, the phone call between two people who needed to agree on something before the meeting so that the meeting could run cleanly. The official meeting is the moment the decision gets ratified and entered into the record. The side conversations are where it got made.
This is how most functioning organizations work. Trying to eliminate the side conversations creates a slower, more theatrical company where every decision has to be argued from scratch in front of an audience, because the meeting is a bad place to do certain kinds of work. You can't explore a rough idea with eight people on a call without it getting shot down before it's ready, and you can't disagree with a colleague in a group without the disagreement itself becoming the topic. Two people with the context can think something through faster in ten minutes on chat than eight people can in an hour.
The side conversations become a problem only when the company forgets they're happening. The official meeting has minutes and a record. The side conversation has nothing, unless someone remembers to write it up. A senior operator who doesn't pay attention to this ends up with a company whose record of how decisions got made is partly visible in the documented minutes and partly invisible in the chat logs and calls that produced them. Six months later, when someone asks why a particular call was made, the documented half says 'we decided X on this date' and the undocumented half, where the reasoning lives, has evaporated.
There are two honest ways to handle this. The first is to accept that side conversations are part of how decisions get made, and write them down anyway. Somebody captures the reasoning that came out of the side conversation and attaches it to the decision in whatever log the company keeps; often that's a chief of staff, sometimes the person who made the call. The meeting that ratified the decision gets one line in the minutes, and the real record sits alongside it.
The second is to notice when a side conversation is doing work that belongs in a meeting. A decision that needs broad support, or that affects people who weren't in the side conversation, probably shouldn't be finalized in the side conversation. The side conversation can do the thinking, but the meeting has to do the deciding, because the meeting is where the people who'll have to live with the decision get to weigh in. A company that lets every decision settle in the side conversations and then approves them in meetings without real discussion produces the specific pathology where people feel like decisions are already made by the time they hear about them, and they're right.
The test for whether the balance is healthy is what the people one level below leadership believe about where decisions happen. They're fine if they think meetings are where the real work is done, or if they think the side conversations are where it happens but can see enough of the reasoning to trust it. The failure case is when they think the side conversations are where the real work is done and they have no idea what's going on in them, because that's the company with a trust problem that will compound until something breaks.
Side conversations are part of the infrastructure. For a senior operator, the question is whether they're paying enough attention to what's happening in those conversations to tell when the meeting is the right forum and when the chat is, and whether the reasoning coming out of either one is making it into a record that lives longer than the week it happened in.