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That Email Should’ve Been a Meeting



We made it another week. And strangely, the thing on my mind today is something Charlie Munger said decades ago about directing aircraft in the military: “Figure out what’s going to make people die, and don’t do that.”


It’s classic Munger — direct, a little dark, and weirdly profound. And it got me thinking about a modern workplace mantra we all love to repeat: “That meeting could’ve been an email.” Cute, sure. But in the spirit of Munger… what if the opposite is true?


What if the real risk — the thing quietly killing your team — is that the email should’ve been a meeting?


The Problem With Email as a Town Crier

We like email because it’s quick. It’s clean. It removes the emotional discomfort of asking someone to do something. And with AI writing the drafts? A message that looks thoughtful takes ten seconds. You fire it off, sigh with relief, and think: Great, that’s no longer my problem.


But email is the town crier of knowledge work — standing in the village square yelling your request into the void. There’s no acknowledgment. No confirmation of understanding. No shared context.


You might get a read receipt, but that’s not the same as “Yes, chef.” Kitchens figured this out centuries ago. Knowledge workers still haven’t.


And because email is asynchronous, all the energy lives with the sender: I communicated. But none of the responsibility transfers unless the receiver actively accepts the work. That gap — between communication and confirmation — is where so much process debt accumulates.


Why Meetings (the Good Kind) Actually Work

Here’s the surprising bit: in the last year, some of our best process breakthroughs at Magic Button Labs came from doing the opposite of the cliché. We moved emails into meetings.


But not the chaotic “who’s got updates?” version of meetings. We started using living agendas — a running shared doc anyone can add to, link from, and improve over time.


Suddenly the meeting wasn’t a time slot. It became a ritual:

  • Pull up the doc.

  • Click the links.

  • Look at the actual work where it lives.

  • Move to the next thing.

  • Repeat.


It sounds boring, but boring is where good process lives. Boring is where consistency hides.


And something else happened: When different team members took turns leading the meeting, they naturally stepped into a more managerial posture. They noticed things they would’ve missed. They asked better questions. They learned how the system works because they had to operate it, not just react to it.


You can’t get that from email. You can’t get that from Slack. You can only get it from shared attention.


Reports Need Meetings Too

We joked in the call: “Does your report have a meeting?” Because a dashboard without a ritual might as well be a receipt blowing across a parking lot.


BI analysts know every pixel. Executives know none of them. And assuming both parties “see the same thing” is organizational self-delusion.

If the information matters, give it a meeting. If the work matters, give it a ritual. If the process matters, give it communal visibility.


Because accountability doesn’t come from a task. It comes from being seen doing the work.


Process Debt Truth of the Week

Reduce your emails by having better meetings. Not more meetings — better ones. The kind that create shared context, shared responsibility, and shared understanding. Because in knowledge work, the thing most likely to make your project fail isn’t the work itself. It’s everyone assuming someone else heard the town crier.

 
 
 

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