The internet, briefly, decided that most meetings should have been emails. The internet is, on this point, half right and exactly wrong about which half.
The meetings that should have been emails are the ones in which a single person needs to inform a group of a decision already made. The status update. The "here's where we are." The all-hands that exists because the calendar invite has not been deleted since 2019. These are, broadly, theatre, and yes, they could be a paragraph. Send the paragraph.
But there is a second, larger category that the internet missed, which is the email that should have been a meeting, and this is the one that costs companies money.
It looks like this. A question arises. The question is genuinely difficult, with two or three reasonable answers. Someone, sensing the difficulty, decides to "put it on email so we have it in writing." A long thread begins. By message four, the original question has split into three sub-questions. By message seven, two participants are arguing, in a measured tone, about what was meant in message three. By message twelve, someone CCs the legal team, and the thread, like a river finding the sea, dies in a wide swampy delta of carefully neutral sentences.
Three weeks later, no decision has been made. The original question has acquired a small folder. People speak about it in hallways. A meeting is, eventually, scheduled. The meeting takes thirty-five minutes. The decision is made by the second coffee. Everyone leaves slightly resentful that the email thread happened at all.
Email is good for things you already know the answer to. It is, in my experience, almost useless for things you don't. The reason is not technological. It is that email removes the two ingredients that move difficult questions forward: the ability to interrupt, and the ability to see someone change their mind in real time.
Interruption is treated as bad manners online. In a room, it is the central method by which a group thinks. A senior person says something that is forty per cent right. Someone interrupts, gently, with the sixty per cent. The senior person, in the room, can adjust without losing face, because the adjustment is invisible, folded into the next sentence. On email, the same correction has to be written down, archived, and reread for the rest of the company's life. Almost no-one will do this. So the senior person's forty-per-cent answer becomes the company's official position, and the better answer is left in someone's head.
Watching someone change their mind is the second thing email cannot do. In a meeting, the moment of change is visible. The shoulders drop. The pen stops. The eyes go to the window for two seconds and then come back. Everyone in the room sees it, registers it, and moves forward together. On email, change of mind has to be formally announced, which feels like a defeat, so most people don't do it. They simply stop replying. The thread fades. The disagreement continues underneath the silence, costing the company something every week.
So the better question, when something difficult arrives, is not could this have been an email. It is has this already been an email three times, and is anyone willing to admit that.
If yes, you do not need a longer thread. You need an hour, in a room, with no slides, and ideally no laptops. The agenda is the thread, printed out. The chair is whoever is least invested in the outcome. The first thing you do is read the original question out loud. Often, on hearing it again, the room realises that two of the three sub-questions were never the question, and the actual decision takes nine minutes.
The remaining fifty-one minutes are extremely useful. They are the conversation the company should have had three weeks ago, and they are the reason that, six months later, when the same kind of question arises, someone will say let's just put a meeting in and no-one, for once, will roll their eyes.