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Most organizations waste tremendous time and potential in unproductive meetings, when the real collaboration could happen before anyone enters the room.
When Matt Mullenweg, cofounder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, showed me his company's workflow system, I glimpsed the future of collaboration that 85% of companies still haven't awakened to. His 1,900 employees across 93 countries work with virtually no standing meetings. Instead, they collaborate through a custom-built system where ideas, debates, and decisions unfold transparently, often asynchronously, and permanently—what he calls an "organizational blockchain" of decision-making.
"We've used this now for fourteen years. Every major decision, every design, every button, every pricing change, everything we have ever discussed and debated is here and it's permanent," Mullenweg told me. "Whenever a new hire anywhere in the world needs to onboard into any collaboration and understand how we got here, we have a simple link for every debate we had and decision we made. And that will never change as long as the company exists. That's why I call it an organizational blockchain. It's a store of everything that's ever happened."
This isn't just another remote work strategy. It's a fundamental reimagining of when, where, and how collaboration happens. And it contains a powerful lesson for every organization drowning in meeting requests: the most productive collaboration often happens before anyone enters the room.
Our research with more than two thousand teams during the pandemic reveals a startling reality: only 15% of teams had questioned and reinvented how they were working. The vast majority simply migrated their office-based meeting habits to video calls, celebrating this minor shift as digital transformation.
Meanwhile, research across twenty industries by organizational psychologist Dr. Steven Rogelberg shows that at least one in three meetings is entirely unnecessary. For a company with 5,000 employees, eliminating these unneeded gatherings would save more than $100 million annually.
The problem isn't meetings themselves—it's our over-reliance on them as the primary form of collaboration. We've been indoctrinated to believe that real collaboration happens when people gather synchronously, whether physically or virtually. This "meeting-first" mindset leads to calendars packed with ineffective discussions, where the best ideas often go unheard.
This transition from meeting-centered to asynchronous-first collaboration represents one of the critical shifts from traditional leadership to what I call "teamship."
What exactly is teamship? It's the ultimate competitive advantage that separates the world's elite teams (the top 15%) from everyone else. Teamship is driven by co-elevation—teammates committed to lifting each other up and pushing each other higher—combined with modern collaboration practices that enable bolder innovation and faster decision-making.
For two decades, I've been researching what makes the world's best teams different. The conclusion is clear: while most organizations focus on developing better leaders, the real untapped opportunity lies in developing better teamship. And one of the fundamental shifts required is moving from meetings as the default collaboration method to more inclusive, asynchronous approaches.
In today's environment, this means upending traditional notions about when collaboration happens.
World-class teams view collaboration not as individual meetings but as a complete "Collaboration Stack" with four distinct layers:
The most important yet least utilized layer? Asynchronous collaboration—and it should come first in your process.
When collaboration starts asynchronously, several transformational things happen:
The Decision Board is a powerful teamship practice that transforms how teams make decisions. Here's how it works:
Identify a key decision or project that requires input from multiple stakeholders.
Create a shared document (like a Google Sheet) with all potential meeting attendees’ names listed in one column.
Set up critical questions across the top row such as:
Share the document a week before any meeting is scheduled, with clear instructions for everyone to complete their responses.
Analyze responses and recalibrate your meeting plan—who really needs to attend, what's the focused agenda, and what's already been resolved asynchronously.
This simple practice shifts whole cycles of collaboration ahead of meetings, dramatically reducing the time needed for synchronous discussion and increasing the quality of decisions.
One manufacturing company I coached used this practice for a long-delayed retooling project that had stalled repeatedly. The Decision Board surfaced a critical insight from someone three layers removed from the original team—someone who would never have been invited to the traditional meeting—that ultimately unlocked the entire project.
Another powerful practice is Asynchronous Stress Testing—a method for gathering unfiltered feedback on projects or proposals before meetings occur. Here's the streamlined approach:
The project owner creates a one-pager outlining:
Share with a spreadsheet where team members can provide:
Give people several days to provide thoughtful, comprehensive feedback.
Analyze input to determine if a meeting is even needed, and if so, with whom and focused on what specific issues.
This practice taps into collective intelligence much more effectively than standard meetings. Our research shows that psychological safety in smaller groups is significantly higher than in full-group meetings, as people feel safer expressing concerns or challenging assumptions when not on the spot.
Ready to transform your team's collaboration? Start with these steps:
Conduct a "Calendar Bankruptcy" exercise. Delete recurring meetings with no clear agenda or decision to be made. Organizations like Shopify have eliminated up to 76,500 hours of pointless meetings through similar audits.
Choose one upcoming important meeting and convert it to an asynchronous-first approach using the Decision Board format.
Schedule specific time blocks for asynchronous preparation. This critical collaboration deserves dedicated calendar space just like meetings do.
Communicate the "why" to your team. Help them understand that this isn't about adding work but about making collaboration more effective and inclusive.
Be patient but persistent. New collaboration patterns take time to establish but quickly prove their worth through better decisions and time savings.
The most innovative companies have already made this shift. Drew Houston at Dropbox moved from ten physical spaces to thirty global neighborhoods, where instead of an office, he had small studios of collaboration space geared for meaningful in-person connection. Leaders like Matt Mullenweg at Automattic have demonstrated that asynchronous-first doesn't mean never meeting—it means meeting with purpose, after the groundwork has been laid.
This transformation is part of a larger revolution I've observed coaching hundreds of teams worldwide: the shift from traditional leadership to teamship as the true competitive advantage. As I explore in my bestselling book, Never Lead Alone, organizations that continue to rely solely on leadership will miss the opportunity to extract billions of dollars of shareholder value from the interdependency of talent in and among teams.
The choice is clear: continue the meeting madness of gathering people before ideas are ready, or embrace the asynchronous-first revolution that leads to better thinking, more inclusion, faster decisions, and fewer wasted hours.
It’s time to stop assuming that meetings are collaboration. Start asynchronously, and you'll be amazed at what your team can accomplish together—both before and during whatever meetings still truly matter.