The Email Thread That Should Have Been a Meeting: Asynchronous Communication
Updated: Aug 20
Somewhere in your company right now, an email chain is in its third week of life.
It began normally. One question. A reasonable one was sent to a team of six on Wednesday morning with the subject line: ‘’Perspectives on this?’’
Six people shared their ideas, thoughts and contexts with 400-word responses that raised three new questions without answering the original question. Two people replied with PDF documents, and someone replied to the PDFs, noting changes that had to be initiated. Someone else replied to the changes pointed out with their own perspective.
The subject line now reads: "RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Perspectives on this?"
No decision has been made yet; the original question wasn’t attended to, and the three other questions lie there, so many contexts with no action taken.
Thirty-four replies in, and the thread is becoming a short novella with six people who know exactly what the next step should be.
The thread now has 34 replies, and it will soon be a short novella. There is a team of six people who know too well what the next step should be. But no one wants to initiate it, not if everyone could hide behind emails.
It is a fascinating specimen.
Unlike its cousin, the meeting that should have been an email, this one does not reproduce on a weekly schedule. It just keeps growing. Silently and indefinitely until someone eventually decides they have had enough and schedules a meeting.
And everyone joins the call slightly resentful that it has come to this.
Anatomy of Asynchronous Communication: The Email That Should Not Have Been a Meeting
You know this email. Chances are, you initiated this email.
It is the one that opens with ‘’here’s a new idea’’ and closes with ‘’let me know your thoughts’’ No predetermined decision will be made, no deadline for thoughts, just a question and four cc’d team members whose input doesn’t impact the conversation but whose exclusion could lead to future political problems.
The email that should have been a meeting has a few common traits.
First: it contains a conflict, dressed in professional language. Someone does not like the direction or is unhappy with a decision and needs to push back on a plan.
But pushing back in an email requires a precision of tone that is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, so instead they write something technically polite that comes across as passive-aggressive, which generates a response that is also technically polite and passive-aggressive, and the thread continues.
Second: it contains a decision that requires more than one brain working at the same time. Not sequentially, but simultaneously.
The kind of decision where hearing someone think out loud changes your thinking, where a question asked in real time produces an answer that no one would have typed, where the right conclusion emerges from the collision of perspectives rather than the accumulation of them.
Third: it ends with "does this make sense?" which is not a question but a request for absolution.
The Executive Who Lives in the Inbox
There is a specific type of person behind this email chain who is actually thorough, considered, and genuinely invested in getting things right.
But the last thing they will do is get on a call.
Every significant communication in their professional life travels through the inbox. Feedback. Decisions. Conflict. Praise. They have developed a written voice of such practised neutrality that it is nearly impossible to know, from any given email, whether they are pleased or quietly furious.
That is the point.
The inbox is controlled. Documented.
It does not have a face that reacts before the words are finished. It does not require you to hold a position in real time while someone who disagrees with you sits three feet away, waiting for your response.
For this person, email is not a decision-making communication tool; it is a shield, a very effective one at that. And not until the moment when the thing being shielded against becomes the thing that needs to happen.
The difficult conversation, the real-time alignment, the moment someone needs to say, plainly, in a room where everyone could hear it:
"We might be making a mistake."
That sentence, sent as an email, does not land the same way. It never does, and everyone keeps sending emails until they have damage beyond control. That executive can be anyone else except you.
What Asynchronous Communication Cannot Actually Do?
McKinsey's research on communication complexity found that organisations could improve productivity by 25% with more effective communication, specifically by choosing the right medium for the right kind of exchange.
The core finding is one that most organisations ignore.
Asynchronous communication, like email, threads, recorded messages, Slack DMs, is genuinely effective for informing, sharing updates, broadcasting decisions already made or coordinating logistics. It is genuinely ineffective for collaborating, and the difference is not subtle.
When using email rather than in-person conversation, people take more than three times longer to make strategy decisions and perform 20% worse on tests of complex reasoning.
Three times longer.
20% worse thinking.
From the same people, on the same problem, using a different medium.
Tone is one reason. "I think we should reconsider this", — said calmly, with eye contact, by someone who then elaborates- is an entirely different statement when it arrives in an inbox at 6 pm with a three-hour gap before the next reply.
Nuance: The best thinking in most organisations happens in the space between one person finishing a sentence and another responding to it. The pauses. The visible reactions. The moments where the conversation takes a sharp turn toward something better than where it started.
That does not happen in an email chain. You only find it when people are actually talking.
The Real Cost of Workplace Email Overload
The consequences of over-emailing are not as obvious as the consequences of over-meeting.
Which is exactly why they stay longer. An unnecessary meeting is not hard to miss. It is on the calendar. It takes an hour; people notice when nothing comes out of it.
But the email thread that should have been a meeting is quieter about the damage it does. It just keeps going.
Slowly accumulating replies, spreading accountability so thin that nobody owns anything, turning a decision that needed three people and forty minutes into a six-person back-and-forth running for three weeks, and still landing nowhere.
A Gartner survey of nearly 1,000 employees and managers found that 38% say they receive an excessive volume of communications at their organisation — and that this workplace email overload is directly linked to lower strategic alignment and reduced intent to stay.
The delay caused by a bloated email chain does not show up as hours lost. It shows up in the things your competitors decided while you were still waiting for the sixth reply.
The conflict that never gets resolved because no one is willing to say it out loud. The team member who reads a tone into an email that was never intended, and carries it for weeks before anyone notices.
The working relationship that slowly becomes formal and distant because every important conversation is filtered through a screen, a send button, and words chosen carefully to give away as little as possible.
Asynchronous communication is efficient, but it does not build the kind of trust that keeps organisations running. Real conversations do, and that’s when you go to the Conductor app to determine the efficiency of your meeting.
Knowing When to Use Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication.
Given the cost of the unnecessary meeting and the equal cost of the avoided one, the question is not which one to eliminate. It is knowing the difference.
The meeting that earns its place looks like Cinderella's shoes on her feet, the perfect fit.
It is not called that because someone felt uneasy. Not because it is Monday and the company has always started the week with a check-in. It exists because a real decision needs to be made, in real time, by the people who actually need to make it.
Name the decision
Have that decision be named clearly before the meeting starts. With the relevant information to enable that decision already shared, the time in the room goes toward resolving something, not catching people up.
Identify the right Meeting attendees
The right meeting also has an owner. One person who called it knows what it is for and will close it with something documented. Not "let's take this offline." An actual decision. A clear next action and a deadline.
Shopify cancelled 12,000 unnecessary recurring meetings in 2023 — clearing over 76,500 hours from their calendars without stopping meetings altogether. They got intentional about the ones that stayed.
Email Threads and Meetings
The rule for when to use email vs a meeting is not complicated.
If the outcome is information, send the email.
If the outcome is a decision, call the meeting.
If neither is clear before the invite goes out, that is your answer. The meeting is not the problem.
The undisciplined meeting is the one with no owner, no real decision, and no expected outcome except the agreement to meet again next week.
The email thread is not the problem either. The one that contains a conflict dressed as a question and stays in the inbox for three weeks because nobody has the confidence to just pick up the phone—that is the problem.
The thread now has 35 replies; someone has added a new attachment. The subject line still reads: "RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Perspectives on this?"
One wonders just how long it gets before it gets out of hand.
