The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email Was Probably Also a Bad Meeting

The standard complaint about unnecessary meetings misses the more interesting problem. Most bad meetings are bad because of what happened before anyone entered the room. The complaint about meetings that should have been emails has become so common in professional culture that it has turned into ambient background noise: present in every workplace, acknowledged by everyone, acted on by almost nobody. The complaint is also slightly wrong, or at least incomplete. The meeting that should have been an email is a symptom. The underlying condition is the absence of clarity about what the meeting is for, which is the same condition that produces bad emails, bad presentations, and bad briefs. A meeting without a clear decision to make or a clear problem to solve is not a meeting. It is a gathering. Gatherings can be valuable: they build relationships, create alignment, and give people a sense of shared context. But a gathering scheduled in the format of a decision-making meeting produces a specific kind of frustration: the people who came expecting to decide something leave without having decided anything, and nobody is quite sure whose fault that is. The fix is not to replace the meeting with an email. The fix is to answer one question before scheduling anything: what specific outcome will exist after this interaction that does not exist before it? If the answer is a decision, a meeting with the right people and a clear agenda is probably correct. If the answer is that someone will be informed, an email or a document is almost certainly better. If the answer is that people will feel more connected or aligned, a meeting might be right but should be framed honestly as what it is: a gathering, not a decision session. The email that should have been a meeting is also real. The thread that has accumulated fourteen replies and still has not resolved a decision that needed three people in a room for twenty minutes: that is a meeting that should not have been an email. The format is the last question, not the first. What outcome do we need? Who needs to be involved to produce it? How much synchronous interaction does that require? The format follows from those answers. Most workplaces get this backwards. → Short reads like this land in your inbox monthly on The Briefing. Subscribe using the link at the top of the page.