9. Principle

Because meetings cost too much valuable time and energy

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Meaningful communication is not synonymous with constant meetings. Asynchronous communication offers the solution.

Iteration Planning, Daily Stand Up, Refinement, Review, Retrospective, Big Room, Steering Committee Meeting - conferences upon conferences, across time zones. Meetings can cycle through and clock entire days. Time missing for development. Waste. “Meeteritis” is a contagious disease. It’s rampant with Scrum, Holacracy and other agile frameworks. There’s this huge need to talk all the time. Everything is supposed to be coordinated with everyone.

Clear. Growing complexity in the digital era relies on communication to align dependencies. But the best practice for issue-based and competency-based communication is asynchronous digital alignment. Self-organized decisions can be made about prioritization and speed of response. This works best across time zones and on digital channels. This saves time - which means waste is avoided.

As popular as big room meetings may be for employees as a social event. They only make sense if the desired result cannot be achieved with asynchronous communication in specially designed channels or with meetings on a smaller scale.

Especially in larger companies, there is often a tendency to flee from the actual work into meetings. With the result that highly competent employees “fritter away” the time, in which they could use their competence meaningfully for the development of products, in debates on the topic.

This is certainly overstated, but helpful as a suggestion on the subject of “meeteritis” (and how to get it under control).

Competence communicates best with corresponding competence. One prerequisite for this is the organization of the respective competencies into competency areas, called competency circles according to Augmented Leadership. Competence circles exist at all levels of the company, from business to development. Within the respective competence areas, asynchronous communication is generally preferable to synchronous exchange in meetings. However, the respective best practice must be developed in a self-organized manner and in accordance with the respective requirements.