To Async or Not to Async

So you identified a meeting people won’t miss one bit in your organization.

Let’s say it’s a daily check-in. Standup. Scrum. The name doesn’t change the fact that this is an often-mentioned issue people have with approaches such as Scrum, EOS, Scaling-up, SAFe.

Want to improve this event? You can try increasing focus via visualization. Reviewing team structure to ensure people actually need to collaborate. Making sure the purpose and flow of the meeting are about issue identification and problem-solving rather than collecting status reports. Focusing just on exceptions to flow rather than everything.

Those are all well worth trying. What I’m starting to encounter more and more frequently is a desire to reduce the amount of meeting time, regardless of meeting quality.

You could (and many of you do) argue that if the meeting quality was really “Level 10” people won’t mind them. Maybe.

There’s another possibility.

Maybe by insisting on solving the issues with these meetings and sticking to them, we’re enforcing our generational preferences on younger generations who don’t share our preference for in-person meetings and formal communication. And its not just generational. People’s preferences have changed (for example due to COVID19) and they are growing especially wary of virtual meetings.

So, what would a Gen Z Scrum/EOS look like?

Maybe I should go to TikTok/Insta and find out…

The point isn’t necessarily whether these meetings make sense: Sync, Async, or some hybrid.

It is about evolving our ways of working in a way that balances empathy for the needs and wants of our “customers” (those using these ways of working) with the original intent.

Async or not Async isn’t the question. Evolve or Die is.

If you are redesigning collaboration rhythms across teams, Create a Business-level Operating System leveraging Agility is a practical next step.