Have you tried not having a meeting?

Since meetings, especially large, unstructured ones, are low return on investment, what are some alternatives? This depends on the goals of the meeting:

Share Status

The status meeting is the most common meeting, and likely the least necessary! Most project management systems should have something in place to indicate if current projects are behind, on, or ahead of schedule. They should also let you provide more descriptive details as needed. If your project management system doesn’t allow for this, a simple email may provide all that is needed:

Project: Top Secret Acme Rocket
Expected Date: Launching September 1st Status: Behind Schedule
Needs: Fix for fuel issues

The rocket project is going well overall but we are running into an issue with the fuel system. We need someone who specializes in…

This allows for sharing status, keeping track of what’s going on, and consistency in communication.

Incident Reviews

Reviewing previous incidents is a great way to improve your organization, but documenting your learnings is critical. Performing written reviews allows you to fully document the situation and keep track of decisions. These reports can be easily shared allowing wider dissemination information, even to new hires in the future!

Due to the asynchronous nature of writing, this also allows people to review the initial report, ask questions and provide feedback, which can be brought back into the original report. This helps ensure it fully captures the entire situation from everyone’s perspective.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming sessions are best argument for having meetings, especially if it’s an in-person meeting. Replicating a highly effective in-person brainstorming session digitally, especially asynchronously is extremely difficult.

There are tools like Miro than can mimic the experience of a whiteboard session. Having an infinite canvas, copy/paste, and undo/redo are very helpful but is a pale comparison to real interaction.

What I am saying is, if you are doing a brainstorming session, you have my permission to do an in-person meeting. That said, try Miro. It might work well for you.

But I Hate Writing…

Ok, I hear you. This sounds like a lot of writing. Maybe. But it doesn’t have to be.

There are tools like Loom or VidYard that make it easy to share short video, even letting team members reply. These tools have basic editing built in, but since these are short, personal videos, they don’t have an expectation of being highly polished like a marketing video.

In addition, new AI tools can still turn these videos into text so you can still search. This gives you the best of both worlds.

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So next time you are thinking about holding a meeting, maybe don’t.