There is a particular kind of meeting that consumes a roomful of expensive people every month and produces nothing. Status is presented. Heads nod. Nothing is decided. Everyone leaves feeling informed and slightly emptier. The program is no further forward than if the meeting had been an email.
Status is not steering
A steering committee exists to steer, which means to change direction. If a meeting ends and nothing the program was going to do has changed, no steering happened. The clue is in the verbs. Real governance meetings are full of "we will," "we will not," and "by when." Hollow ones are full of "we are tracking," "we are monitoring," and "we will continue to."
The deeper damage is to accountability. When a committee reviews a problem and reaches no decision, the problem has technically been escalated and technically been left exactly where it was. Ownership evaporates into the room. Everyone saw it. No one holds it.
Walk out of your next steering meeting and write down every decision that was actually made. If the page is blank, you did not attend a steering committee. You attended a status broadcast with a quorum.
Fix it or kill it
The fix is unglamorous and works. Send status in advance and ban its presentation in the room. Open every item with the decision it requires and the name of the person who will own the outcome. End each item by saying the decision out loud and writing it down. If an item carries no decision, it does not belong on the agenda; it belongs on a dashboard.
Some committees will not survive that discipline, because once you strip out the broadcasting there is nothing left to do. Good. Kill them. A meeting that cannot name a decision has no reason to exist.
Steering is a verb. If the wheel never turns, you are not steering. You are sitting in a parked car, admiring the dashboard.