The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email (But Actually Shouldn't)
"This meeting could have been an email."
This phrase has become the corporate rallying cry of our time, right up there with "let's circle back" and "ping me later." It's emblazoned on coffee mugs, celebrated in Slack reactions, and whispered with the reverence of a prayer as another calendar invite materializes in our already-stuffed inbox.
The sentiment isn't wrong as many meetings absolutely should be emails. Or better yet, well-structured documents, thoughtful Loom videos, or simply not exist.
But our zealous meeting-bashing has created a new problem: we're treating all synchronous collaboration as wasteful overhead, missing the vital distinction between coordination theatre and genuine collective, creative thinking. It's like firing the entire orchestra because the cellist kept missing cues.
The Coordination Theatre Epidemic
Let's be honest about the meetings we hate:
Status updates where everyone takes turns reading bullet points aloud with all the enthusiasm of automated customer service recordings. Decision reviews where the decision was made three conversations ago in a hallway that half the attendees weren't even invited to. The dreaded "going around the room" to hear opinions that could have been collected asynchronously while you mentally redecorate your colleague's home office background.
These meetings deserve our scorn. They're coordination masquerading as collaboration, information transfer pretending to be knowledge creation.
But the pendulum has swung too far. In our race to reclaim calendar white space, we've started optimizing for efficiency over effectiveness. We've created cultures where "just send me a doc" becomes the default response to complexity, even when complexity demands something else entirely.
When Synchronicity Matters
Complex problems with multiple interdependencies, competing perspectives, and no clear answer rarely yield to asynchronous documentation alone. I've seen teams spend months passing documents back and forth, adding comments and suggestions like ornaments on an increasingly gaudy Christmas tree, while making zero genuine progress on thorny problems.
This is because certain types of understanding can only emerge through real-time, human interaction:
Detecting unstated assumptions. The gaps between what we think we agree on and what we actually agree on only become visible in real-time conversation. Someone says "customer experience" and three different people hear three different things.
Creating collective intelligence. True collaboration isn't just aggregating individual thoughts like ingredients in a bowl. It's the chemical reaction that happens when they mix together. The difference between raw eggs, flour and sugar versus the cake that emerges from the oven.
Building shared context. Documents explain what and sometimes why. Meetings, when done right, build the rich contextual understanding that helps people interpret information correctly and make good judgment calls later.
From Coordination Theatre to Collaborative Alchemy
The problem isn't meetings. It's bad meetings. Gatherings that fail to create the conditions for shared understanding, like hosting a dinner party where you forget to introduce anyone and serve only individual TV dinners.
I once worked with a product organization to improve their meeting culture. Using Design Thinking, I interviewed participants about their meeting experiences and mapped their frustrations. The clear pattern that emerged was that meetings were being designed by default rather than intent.
We developed practical principles for better meetings: meaningful participation, clear purpose, and thoughtful facilitation. When we approached meetings with the same care given to product design (thinking about user needs, journey mapping, and experience flows), the improvement was immediate and measurable.
Instead of the tired "could this meeting be an email" question, try these:
Does this problem require discovery or delivery? Delivery of known information works fine asynchronously. Discovery of unknown connections and solutions often demands synchronicity.
Are we converging or diverging? Async works for convergence on predetermined options. Synchronous shines for divergent exploration of possibilities not yet articulated, when you need to riff off each other like jazz musicians rather than following sheet music.
Is this primarily about information or interpretation? Pure information transfer rarely needs a meeting. Creating shared interpretation almost always does.
When you do need synchronous time, design it deliberately:
Start with individual thinking. Give people time to form their own thoughts before group discussion to avoid groupthink.
Create thinking structures. Use frameworks that help people engage with the problem rather than just taking turns talking.
Embrace productive conflict. Design for respectful collision of different viewpoints rather than false harmony. Tension that creates diamonds, not division.
Make it visual. Shared visual spaces create collective understanding faster than sequential conversation.
The New Meeting Literacy
What we need isn't necessarily fewer meetings, it's meeting literacy. We need the ability to distinguish between synchronous work that creates value and synchronous work that wastes it.
The teams that thrive arn't the ones who eliminate meetings. They're the ones who eliminate unnecessary synchronicity while mastering necessary synchronicity. They treat meeting design as a strategic competency, not an afterthought.
Consider this: what if we approached meetings with the same user-centred design rigour we apply to products and services? What if we prototyped meeting formats, tested them with participants, and iterated based on feedback?
The next time you find yourself typing "this meeting could have been an email," pause and consider: Or maybe this email should have been a much better designed meeting. One that creates value no document ever could.
