Once upon a time there was a thing to be done. Huge meetings were held, and goals were set for how much of the thing should be done per month. Metrics were set up to track how much of the thing had happened. Over a hundred people were invited to these meetings, and countless man-hours were spent on defining goals. Many more hours were spent on measuring progress toward those goals. Group emails were sent, vaguely confused words were spoken, and spreadsheets sprang forth from the void.
None of this affected the people whose job was to actually do the thing. They did as much of the thing as could be done in the time they had. The goals came from the void and the metrics went into the void, and no echo was heard.
... And "once upon a time" means, in this case, "a few months ago at a big company where I work." The really funny thing, though, is that most of these jobs make local sense. The managers who went to the meetings and so on? They were sheltering their people from all this so that things could get done. Even the people who set all this in motion were probably well-meaning, since they wanted the thing to be done and took actions that they perhaps thought might plausibly lead toward this. I can't hate any of the people involved -- and yet the end result of it all is complete waste; utter horrifying destruction of irreplaceable time and energy. It would be better to light large piles of cash on fire, because it would be much cheaper and at least then we'd be able to stare at the flames.
How do you prevent this sort of situation?