"This is the meeting to brief everyone on the project before the actual project meeting."
I have experienced this more than once: a leader decides it is productive to hold a briefing to "socialize" a new project and answer questions. The intent is often good—transparency and alignment—but the execution is fundamentally flawed. An uninformed briefing meeting is just as ineffective as an uninformed planning meeting.
The Failure of Reactionary Thinking
When you hold a briefing without prior disclosure, you are forcing your team into reactionary thinking. You are asking for questions and feedback in the moment, based on information they have just seen for the first time.
This leads to two dangerous outcomes:
- The Vacuum of Preparation: The questions asked in these meetings are surface-level. The deep, critical queries—the ones that spot the structural flaws or the integration "gotchas"—require time to form.
- Premature Solutioning: Without full information, teams often start "solutioning" during the briefing. They commit to mental models of how to build the feature before they have fully processed the business constraints.
The Async Foundation
Effective leadership recognizes that asynchronous processes are the foundation of effective synchronous time. Instead of wasting the collective time of multiple parties without a clear purpose, provide upfront documentation and disclosures prior to any meetings. By moving the "briefing" to a document (or a video recording), you unlock the benefits of async:
- Processing Time: Engineers can read at their own pace, research dependencies, and let the problem sit.
- Critical Thinking: Async gives time for queries to mature. By the time the meeting actually happens, the team is arriving with high-value insights, not "off-the-cuff" reactions.
Protecting Your Most Valuable Resource
In any engineering organization, your most valuable resources are not your servers or your licenses—they are the time and attention of your participants.
Every time you schedule a "meeting about a meeting," you are drawing down on that resource for a low ROI. To be a more effective force multiplier for your team, you must protect that attention.
Save the sync time for the most critical tasks: resolution, debate, and decision-making. Handle the transfer of information asynchronously. You will gain the confidence and respect of your team by proving that you value their focus as much as they do.
Success isn't found in the number of meetings on your calendar; it's found in the clarity of the decisions made outside of them.