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In consulting and project-based work, the default response to complexity is often: schedule another call.
Stakeholder X wants to be kept in the loop. Y wants a chance to give feedback. Z needs to align with their own team first. Before you know it, your calendar is a graveyard of recurring syncs, updates, and check-ins. You spend more time managing the communication about the work than doing the work.
It feels productive. After all, meetings mean things are moving, right?
Not quite. Meetings in multi-stakeholder environments often serve more as social reassurance than actual decision-making forums. They're used to demonstrate activity, soothe anxieties, or maintain optics. But that doesn’t mean they move the project forward.
The Illusion of Alignment
One of the biggest traps is assuming that because a conversation happened, alignment exists. But alignment is not just a shared moment, it’s a shared understanding, captured and acted upon.
In the absence of a clear async layer, a written log of decisions, open questions, trade-offs, and ownership, the same topics resurface meeting after meeting. People forget what was agreed. Or worse, different people remember different things. Projects stall not because people don’t care, but because no one can quite remember where they left off.
Meetings Multiply When Ownership Is Unclear
When it's everyone's job to follow up, it's no one's job. This is especially dangerous in projects with external clients, internal sponsors, and delivery teams. Without clear roles and decision rights, even minor decisions need a full round of consensus.
So we default to what feels safe: another call. Just to be sure. Just to cover ourselves.
What Async Workflows Get Right
Async-first teams approach this differently. Instead of overloading on meetings, they build structured, transparent systems for:
- Documenting decisions as they happen
- Tagging owners for next steps
- Logging dissent or uncertainty
- Sharing context-rich updates that don’t require a call
This doesn’t eliminate meetings. It just means meetings are reserved for actual discussion, not for rehashing old ground or recapping what should already be written down.
Designing for Decision-Making, Not Just Discussion
In high-stakes projects, especially with many stakeholders, the goal isn’t just to talk. It’s to move.
Try this:
- Add a decision log to every project hub.
- Assign a rotating meeting "owner" whose job is to log outcomes and follow-ups.
- Build a culture where writing = clarity. If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.
If the only trace of a decision lives in someone’s memory or a fleeting comment on a call, expect to revisit it. Repeatedly.
Escaping the Meeting Spiral
The irony is, we over-meet in the name of clarity, but end up creating noise.
To fix this, don’t just schedule fewer meetings. Build better communication scaffolding. Treat documentation as a first-class citizen. Clarify who actually owns what.
Because in complex projects, the problem isn’t the people. It’s the process.
And better processes don’t require more calls. They require better decisions, and better ways to remember them.
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