This Meeting Could’ve Been an Email (But Probably Shouldn’t Have)

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This Meeting Could’ve Been an Email (But Probably Shouldn’t Have)

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 10/31/2025 · 16m

If you’ve worked in an office, you’ve lived my sitcom pitch: The Meeting. Every episode is the pre-meeting before the meeting—the slide polishing, the spreadsheet stitch-up, the Slack pings—cut to black right as the meeting starts. Next episode picks up with another pre-meeting. Feels a little too real, right?

That’s why “this meeting could’ve been an email” bugs me. It’s catchy. It’s also usually wrong. What people mean is, “no one knew how to run that meeting.”

We’re communal creatures. When we gather, we assume the message landed because everyone heard the same words at the same time. But watch a 40-person video wall and tell me you truly know who actually absorbed the content. Eyes down, side monitors, mental context switching—acknowledgement is not assimilation. The result is a string of ritual-less gatherings where everyone leaves with different versions of what happened.

Here’s where the sitcom becomes a process lesson: the missing piece isn’t fewer meetings or longer emails—it’s a clean acknowledgement cycle.

The email-versus-meeting debate confuses transport with confirmation. Email and meetings move information. Neither confirms that information became shared understanding. Process debt accumulates in that gap.

I’ve started running “bite-sized acknowledgement” as a change-control ritual. Short Looms. One topic at a time. No production value. Real scenarios—like “we’re swapping Column A for Column B on the Monday board.” I assign the people who need to know, and they mark it “watched.” When acknowledgements hit 100%, we deprecate the old column. If they don’t, I know exactly who to nudge.

It’s simple—because it has to be. Most teams operate on the minimum viable path through a complex tool. The tool might have a sports-car engine, but we’re driving it to the grocery store at 25 mph. If I want people to learn a new gear, I can’t bury it inside a 60-minute meeting or a novel-length email. I have to deliver a tiny, clear change and require a small, explicit acknowledgement.

Two more moves make this stick:

1. Weekly ritual, visible scoreboard. Once a week, we ask a single question: “Did you do the thing?” A small dashboard shows who’s done and who’s not. Not to shame—just to reveal. Visibility is its own governance.

2. No-notification culture. I hate notifications. They turn change into bullhorn spam. Instead, we train the team to go to the board for small updates at predictable times. Pull, not push. That rhythm is what makes acknowledgement a habit rather than an exception.

Does this replace all meetings? No. Some work needs debate, design, disagreement. But even those meetings benefit from a closing move: the group restates decisions and owners in their own words (“teach-back” style), then we capture them in the same small-bite system—so the people who weren’t there can acknowledge, too. Transport plus confirmation.

The practical test I use now: If this info changed something someone must do, where will I see proof they got it? If the answer is “nowhere,” I’m generating process debt—no matter how clever the deck or how tight the email.

Process Debt Truth: Meetings don’t fail because they exist. They fail because we treat presence as proof—and skip the ritual that turns words into shared work.