Meetings often allow seeing when there is a lack of clarity in the objectives. That’s true anytime that a meeting ends with a sense of wonder if the meeting that just happened was what it was for.

One reason this question might come up is that the team didn’t feel safe enough to talk about what they needed to talk about.

But when the meeting was there to discuss a task at hand and how it should be done and you find the conversation going back to the fundamentals, that is why something is being done, then there is a lack of understanding of what the team is meant to do.

It’s either the purpose or the vision which have not been accepted or understood yet by the team. It might not be necessary to go back to the drawing board, but it serves to go back and review if the story you are telling is clear enough.

It might help to entertain the hypothesis that the story isn’t yet clear enough to yourself. That might make it easier to test it with others and learn from them what is missing.