First, a meeting is primarily not a way to spread knowledge. Knowledge should be spread in a format that is more resilient to time than our memories (which are surprisingly untrustworthy over even tiny time scales). For example; written text. The greatest benefit of text is that it can be asynchronously consumed, multiple times. Meetings are primarily for two things:

I think this makes sense in the abstract but not always in practice. I have been in many long back-and-forth Slack conversations explaining some piece of knowledge that would be better as a 20 minute meeting.

And so I think a better "mental model" of meetings might be functionally the same as human communication in general: for smaller and faster-acting groups, live communication (meetings) is often more efficient than writing. Especially when the team is small and needs to act quickly, because then the time cost of 5-20% of your manpower spending an hour to write out something that takes 10 minutes to explain via a video meeting walkthrough is not optimal.

But the more people your group has, the more you'll need to shift to a text-based communication method.

(This is also why I think remote work makes sense in many contexts, but does somewhat become less efficient in smaller, fast-moving companies. Unless you replace the in-person ad hoc meeting with a rapid on-demand meeting culture, you'll have some inefficiencies and move slower.)

I have seen some attempts to use AI transcription bots as an attempt to square the circle here and commit ephemeral meeting information into durable text information, and in general they aren't too bad actually.

Ultimately, in my experience, it often requires both. Written and oral communication.

Some don’t listen, some won’t read. It’s not only a function of the specific person but also depends on the day who reads and who listens.

So, yeah, in theory, in an ideal world with perfect co-workers you wouldn’t need so many meetings.

In the real, messy world we live in, meetings are one tool to make sure important messages come across.

The value of written notes really adds up over time, though. Once a meeting is over, it's over; a Slack conversation is preserved for new hires or absentees or yourself when you return to it after your vacation.

I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation size, however.

I think that says more about Slack than it does about meetings or written communication. Slack is meant for short, almost-but-not-quite ephemeral dialog. It's great for giving a quick blast of information, updating others, and seeing if someone is available for a call (Not by their status, but by asking), but too many people also see it as a repository of information, which is not what it's meant to be.

Then you can combine it with a meeting.

1) send knowledge to people who need to know it, tell them there's gonna be a Q&A meeting about it in X days.

2) have said meeting.