In Praise of the Meeting That Could Have Been an Email, Actually

Somewhere, in every regional office that has imported its workplace culture from the international consulting class, there is a colleague who has, over the course of this calendar year alone, pasted into the team chat the meme about the meeting that could have been an email at least ninety times. The same colleague, this morning, was deeply and visibly grateful that the difficult conversation about the project's missed deadline happened in a meeting room with four other adults rather than asynchronously over a thread on the messaging tool. The colleague would not, in their better moments, admit the inconsistency. We will, instead, do them the favour of admitting it for them.

What the meeting is structurally able to do that the email is not

The meeting is able to surface the disagreements that the email format systematically buries. A colleague who, in writing, would have signed off on a proposal with a brief acknowledgement and a private resolution to do the opposite, will, in a meeting, be visibly reluctant in a way that the room reads correctly. The visible reluctance is, in operational terms, the information the project actually needed in order to proceed safely. The email format suppresses the information by design, because the email format rewards the appearance of agreement over the substance of agreement, and the substance is the part that determines whether the project ships in the form everyone said they wanted.

The meeting is also able to compress, into a single sitting, the multi-round exchange that the email would have required. A complex decision that takes seven email rounds to converge on, across twelve calendar days, with diminishing engagement in each round, will take forty five minutes in a meeting that the participants actually attended. The forty five minutes are, on net, a more efficient use of organisational time than the seven rounds, and the colleague who keeps citing the meme persistently ignores the calendar arithmetic that the comparison requires.

Where the meme came from, and why it caught on

The meme caught on because there is, undeniably, a category of meeting that should have been an email. The status update meeting where each attendee reads aloud a slide they could have shared. The project review meeting whose only purpose is to demonstrate that the project is being reviewed. The introductory meeting that exists because the calendar tool encouraged the host to schedule one rather than do the work of articulating the question in writing. These meetings exist, they consume organisational time, and they deserve the criticism the meme delivers. The criticism, however, is criticism of those specific meeting categories rather than of the meeting as a format, and the meme has, over its years in circulation, lost the distinction.

The loss of the distinction has produced a workplace culture in which the meetings that should have happened are, increasingly, also not happening. Difficult conversations that should be face to face are conducted on messaging tools where the visible reluctance the room would have caught becomes a passive aggressive sequence of half-formed sentences. Decisions that should be made together are made by the loudest voice in the chat, with the quieter voices recording their disagreement in private one-to-ones that the decision maker will, in most cases, never hear. The culture is, in operational terms, less effective than the culture the meme was meant to criticise, and the meme has, in retrospect, contributed to the new failure mode more than it has corrected the old one.

A modest proposal for the next meme

The next meme should, in our view, be about the email that should have been a meeting. The email whose three rounds of replies could have been settled in fifteen minutes if the parties had simply walked into the same room. The thread whose seventh participant joined on day eleven and required the previous six to summarise the context from scratch. The disagreement that festered for a fortnight because nobody wanted to be the one to suggest, in writing, that the conversation was not converging. These emails exist, they consume more organisational time than the meetings they were trying to avoid, and they deserve their own meme. The meme will not, we suspect, catch on as well as the original, because the meme would require its propagators to acknowledge that the meeting they have been ridiculing was, much of the time, the right call. Acknowledgement is, in workplace culture, harder to share than ridicule. The work continues regardless.