Most people just have no practice or experience writing. Asking them to respond to or write a large response to an email is a total non-starter for them. That's the default culture in the corporate world unless you have a strong company culture otherwise.

You know how popular grammarly and 2023-24 era chatgpt were? The prospect of writing an email actually makes most people quite anxious. They are not in the comments of hacker news, as a rule - they're watching YouTube and TV and don't read blogs. Just the way most people prefer to live.

Not advocating this, just more addressing the mindset on it, but in the game of office politics people don't mention concerns ahead of time because they don't want to give the opposing view point opportunity to research how to defeat their argument in a meeting, not that they "can't" give an intelligent response. They're choosing not to in their own self interest.

"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle; for if he does not know where I intend to give battle, he must be prepared in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one-given place will be but few."

I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, and may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.

The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.

Not gonna lie, I've had the PR issue before.

The solution? Blast the PR into your shared slack noting that it isn't being reviewed on time because maybe XYZ person is busy.

Watch how fast they are suddenly free to review when their name is attached to something in public.

The real solution is to simply fire these people. There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.

I can see where this can be abused. (The PR review example is pretty rough!) I can also see where it's a strategy for triaging which tasks are a priority.

I've had projects presented to me over email that sounded great and seemed like they would have good traction, but then fizzled out once I asked if we could discuss it further in person. Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.

With any request, schedule a follow up meeting to discuss the completed work, or to perform an autopsy if there was some impediment.

Make sure to actually say “autopsy”.

“Inquisition”, “colonoscopy” or “employment review” all work well too.

If you have two Bob’s definitely get them involved.

Then have a practice of letting such meetings be cancelled if the work is done and went well.

This can be done as a consistent and transparent inside joke. Humor often generates the social permission to communicate hard truths, by also providing psychological stress dispertion.

I cannot vouch for any of this, but please share your experiences.

100% agree. Most of the time, when I hear "this could have been an email," it's from someone with a track record of not reading (or writing and responding to) emails meaningfully.

In this second case, some people live life only bothering to deal with crises, and delay anything else. It's likely not the direct threat of a meeting, but that you've made it clear it's a crisis.

How you asked them why?

It could be more productive than being angry. Or not, but worth a try.

this is to say that alignment and prioritization arent the same thing.

they agree to the thing, but making a meeting moves the priority from low to high because you are signalling through making a meeting that it is high priority

They sound like poorly run companies, management should be aware and dealing with both of these problems.

I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.

So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".

Email chains can fail to converge. Yeah, the meeting could have been an email, but what if it was going to be 20 email back-and-forths? And not everybody is responding quickly?

You ask three people what we should do about a problem. They float ideas. You think the discussion is converging on a solution, and then one of them (who hasn't been heard from for the last three days) suddenly protests where the group is going, saying that they don't agree at all, that they have several concerns, that nobody talked to this other group that needs to be consulted, and so on. Then for that other group, nobody responds for a week because they're busy on something else.

A meeting can force people to say what they have to say, now, or be ignored. That forcing function has value.

And it's not (just) that "people refuse to do anything". It's that multiple people, doing things asynchronously, on different time rhythms, sometimes means that the group consensus advances v e r y s l o w l y, if at all.

> * When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.

You hit the nail on this, a lot coming from middle managers too who still think that a busy calendar of these meetings it means they are very productive. I remember a manager I worked with, he was so keen on having meetings, a discussion between me and a colleague and he overheard it? Meeting to discuss “the conflict”!! It was soul crushing experience thankfully i left quickly, only to know later he started having meetings for meetings, so in those meetings they discuss what they will discuss on the other meetings!

Also, there are some other sinister reasons, an email is an artifact that can be traced and searched, a meeting usually is just verbal communication and even meeting minutes get challenged later.

I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.