There is a peculiar kind of grief attached to the corporate meeting. Not the dramatic kind, not the atmosphere of a televised collapse, but the quieter sort that comes from watching a room of smart people gather to discuss a problem that could have been solved in a single paragraph and a decent calendar invite.
Everyone arrives with purpose. Everyone is late to the point of being theatrically punctual. Someone opens with a summary, another person reframes the problem, and before long there is a slide deck that has more emotional depth than the team itself.
We call it alignment, but alignment is often just a way of saying, “I need everyone to agree before I can make a decision.” We call it collaboration, even when the real outcome is a dozen people quietly waiting for someone else to say the hardest thing in the room. We call it efficient because efficiency is a nice word for pretending the process was not a little humiliating.
The illusion of momentum
The modern office has become very skilled at generating the sensation of motion without any actual movement. Meetings serve this purpose beautifully. A task gets discussed. A concern gets aired. A decision gets deferred. Everyone leaves with the sense that something happened, even if the only thing that happened was a newer set of reasons not to do anything at all.
There is an emotional economy here. We are required to look engaged, to have an opinion, to contribute value in real time. But value is not truly value if it appears only as a performance of attention. At the end of a meeting, no one is more convinced than the person who has now given three minutes of their future to a topic they would have handled in a memo.
Why the email is a better witness
A well-written email has a kind of honesty that meetings often lack. It creates a record. It sets expectations. It gives people time to think before they react. It doesn’t demand the speed of a room at the same time as it denies the complexity of the problem. An email is slower, yes, but slower is not always worse. Sometimes slow is the only way to avoid the nonsense of collective improvisation.
The people who are best at work are often the ones who have learned to replace drama with clarity. They write the note. They share the rationale. They attach the fact. They do not need a 45-minute call to say, “Let’s make this simpler.”
So what do we do with the meeting?
We probably do not abolish it. We are not interested in a revolution that ends in a silent Slack channel and 14 unresolved decisions. But we can become more honest about what meetings are: a tool for coordination, not a substitute for leadership; a space for difficult conversations, not a ritual of reassurance; a final check, not the first attempt at understanding.
If a meeting can be summarized in a sentence, maybe the sentence should be written first. If it can be solved by a shared document, maybe the document should open the conversation. If the purpose is simply to make everyone feel heard, perhaps we should stop pretending that is the same as making progress.