Meetings are important. So is private thought. Newton developed Principea in isolation. Einstein developed both Special and General Relativity mostly in isolation. Dirac had his epiphany while alone, watching a fireplace.

Meetings are crucial for (1) revealing connections between people's ideas, and for (2) discovering perspectives that you were not aware of. Private thought goes deeper, and private thought is what leads to most groundbreaking insights. By "insights" I don't mean connections: I mean an entirely new way of looking at something. Meetings are not good at producing those.

Our model of organizational agility has a submodel of what effective collaboration looks like. We believe that effective collaboration about complex issues requires five things, over time: reading, writing, talking, listening, and deep private thought. And none at the same time.

Meetings matter. They are part of the mix.