Why Meetings Don’t Scale Decision Making (and What to Do Instead)
As teams grow, meetings tend to multiply. What once felt like efficient alignment slowly turns into a calendar full of syncs — design reviews, planning calls, decision meetings, follow-ups.
Yet despite all this time spent talking, teams still struggle with clarity, ownership, and consistency of decisions.
The problem isn’t meetings themselves.
The problem is using meetings as the primary decision-making system.
Meetings Optimize for Speed — Not Memory
Meetings are great at one thing: real-time convergence.
They are not good at:
- preserving context
- documenting trade-offs
- showing who owned the decision
- explaining why something was chosen months later
Once the meeting ends, the decision usually lives in:
- someone’s memory
- a Slack summary (if you’re lucky)
- a Jira ticket with no rationale
This works at 5 people.
It breaks at 15.
It collapses completely at 30+.
The Scaling Problem No One Talks About
As organizations grow, three things happen simultaneously:
- More decisions are made
- Fewer people are in the room
- The cost of reversing a bad decision increases
Meetings don’t scale across time zones, roles, or context depth. They favor:
- the loudest voice
- whoever was present
- whoever joined last
Meanwhile, everyone else is left guessing.
This is how teams end up re-litigating the same decisions again and again.
Async Decision Making Changes the Unit of Work
In async-first teams, the unit of work is not the meeting.
It’s the decision artifact.
A good async decision:
- has a clear owner
- captures context and options
- documents the final call
- can be revisited later
Instead of “we decided this in a meeting”, you get:
“Here’s the decision, here’s why, and here’s when we’ll revisit it.”
This shift alone removes an entire class of follow-up meetings.
Engineering Example: Architecture Choices
Meeting-driven approach:
- 60-minute call
- whiteboard diagrams
- half the team absent
- decision summarized later (maybe)
Async approach:
- short written context
- explicit options with trade-offs
- comments over time
- clear final decision
- future revisit date
Result:
- fewer interruptions
- better design discussions
- less second-guessing
Product Example: Feature Trade-offs
Product decisions often fail not because they’re wrong — but because their rationale disappears.
Async decisions allow product teams to:
- capture constraints
- explain why certain ideas were dropped
- align stakeholders without endless reviews
- say “no” with context
Weeks later, when the question comes back, the answer already exists.
Meetings Still Matter — Just Not for Everything
Async decision making doesn’t eliminate meetings.
It rescues them.
Use meetings for:
- brainstorming
- conflict resolution
- sensitive conversations
Use async systems for:
- decisions that need to persist
- decisions that will be questioned later
- decisions that affect people who aren’t present
The Real Goal: Calm, Persistent Decisions
Teams don’t need fewer decisions. They need fewer forgotten decisions.
Async decision making creates:
- clarity without urgency
- alignment without exhaustion
- accountability without micromanagement
And most importantly — a shared memory your team can rely on.
If you’re exploring how to move decision-making out of meetings and into a calm, async workflow, that’s exactly the problem we’re working on at Asynq.