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Six years ago, we discovered that almost everything could be a Teams meeting.  The pandemic forced perhaps the fastest change in working culture any of us have experienced. Almost overnight, meetings, conferences, training sessions, interviews, catch-ups and conversations (and family gatherings) moved online. What might previously have required a train journey, a meeting room and half a day in the diary could suddenly happen with the click of a link.  And remarkably, it worked, after some shaky starts.

There is plenty about that revolution that I would not want to lose. Online meetings save travelling time and money. They make it possible to bring people together from different parts of the country without asking everyone to sacrifice hours to the journey. They can be focused and efficient. They have improved access for many people and made participation possible where distance or other circumstances might previously have excluded them. Technology is increasingly doing the administrative hard work too, capturing transcripts, producing notes and helping us remember decisions and actions.

All of that is progress.  But six years on, I wonder whether we are all becoming just a little tired of it.

Not necessarily tired of Teams, Zoom or the technology itself. I think we are becoming tired of a culture in which the online meeting has become the automatic answer to almost every need to communicate.  And something seems to have changed in our behaviour.

We all know the signs. Cameras that remain resolutely switched off. The slight downward flicker of somebody’s eyes that tells you another email has arrived and is almost certainly being read. The unmistakable movement of someone typing while somebody else is talking. The occasional pause when a question is asked and everyone waits, wondering who will be brave enough to unmute, or whether they were listening at all.

Then there is perhaps the strangest development of all: the rise of the person who is technically at the meeting but is “just here to listen”.  There is absolutely a place for listening. We probably need more of it. But listening is an active thing. It involves attention, curiosity, response and connection. There is a difference between listening and simply having a meeting running in the background while doing something else.  If you’re chairing the meeting and seeking to generate rich discussion, a role I am frequently in, it can sometimes feel like trying to push water uphill.

We increasingly seem to have created a culture of being present without necessarily being present. I do not say that critically. I have done it too. An hour-long online meeting can appear in a busy diary and the temptation to answer a couple of emails at the same time is enormous. I admit I have sorted many expenses claims, rejigged diaries, and booked countless rain tickets myself.

We tell ourselves we can multitask. Perhaps we occasionally can. But I suspect that the more we normalise divided attention, the more we lose something important from the meeting itself.  If multi-tasking becomes the norm, we are doomed to surface level engagement, and that’s not good.

Perhaps the problem is that online meetings have become almost too convenient.  Before the pandemic, arranging a meeting required a little more thought. If six people were going to travel somewhere and give up several hours of their day, there needed to be a reasonably good reason for doing so. Now we can drop a 30-minute Teams meeting into six diaries with almost no friction at all.  Too many people do that, and don’t leave gaps between meetings either.  That ease can disguise its cost.

Six people attending an hour-long meeting is still six hours of people’s working lives. It does not become free simply because nobody had to get on a train.  And there is another cost that is much harder to measure.  Human beings do things when they are together that are difficult to replicate through a screen. We notice body language. We have the conversation before the meeting starts and the one that continues as we walk out of the room and along the corridor, or my favourite car park conversations. Someone says, “While I’ve got you…” and a problem is solved in five minutes. Someone else mentions something over coffee that was not on the agenda but turns out to be the most useful conversation of the day.  Relationships develop in those spaces.  Trust does too.

For those of us working in leadership, partnership and systems, that matters enormously. Collaboration depends upon more than exchanging information. It depends upon understanding people, developing relationships and creating enough trust to disagree, challenge, explore and think together.  You can maintain a relationship online remarkably well. I am less convinced that you can always build one there.  That’s why those with the purse strings and the timesheet police, need to recognise the enormous savings already achieved, and be more generous when the rare and important need to travel and be in the same space at the same time manifests.

None of this means turning the clock back to 2019. I certainly do not want a return to spending five hours travelling to attend a meeting that could perfectly well have been dealt with in 45 minutes online. That would be nostalgia rather than progress.  However, I rather did enjoy my thinking time looking out of the train window. 

Instead, perhaps the next evolution of hybrid working is about becoming much more intentional.  Rather than asking, “Could this meeting be online?”, because the answer is nearly always yes, perhaps we should ask, “Would this meeting be better if we were together?”

If the purpose is to exchange information, provide a quick update, make a straightforward decision or bring geographically dispersed people together efficiently, online may be exactly right.

But if the purpose is to create something, wrestle with a difficult problem, develop a new relationship, rebuild trust, challenge assumptions, welcome somebody new, think strategically or simply reconnect as human beings, perhaps travelling to be in the same room is not an inefficiency at all.  That is worth the investment.

Perhaps it is the work.  There is something else we might need to relearn too: how to behave in meetings.  Presence matters whether a meeting is physical or virtual. If we have decided that a conversation is important enough to put into everyone’s diary, surely it deserves our attention. Cameras do not always need to be on and there can be perfectly good reasons why they are not, but habitual invisibility changes a conversation. So does constant multitasking. So does joining a meeting with no expectation of contributing to it.

We should perhaps ask ourselves a slightly uncomfortable question: if I am only here to listen while simultaneously doing something else, do I actually need to be here at all?  That might be the next great meeting efficiency.  Fewer meetings. Shorter meetings. Better online meetings. And, paradoxically, more investment in the face-to-face meetings that really matter.

Because the lesson of the pandemic was that we can work differently. The lesson six years later should not be that everything therefore needs to happen through a screen.  Technology has given us extraordinary flexibility. The challenge now is to use that flexibility intelligently.  So I am going to make a conscious effort to spend a little more time in rooms with people. Not for every update, not for every catch-up and certainly not for meetings that could have been an email. But for the conversations where relationships, creativity, challenge and connection matter, I increasingly think the journey is worth making.

After six years of proving that we do not always need to be together, perhaps 2026 is a good moment to rediscover why sometimes we really do.

We have become very good at naming things.  Possibly too good.

Across education, early years, health, social care and wider public services, there is an understandable desire to diagnose, define and categorise. We want to know what something is. We develop criteria, thresholds, pathways, acronyms and descriptors. We seek an explanation for why a child behaves in a particular way, why somebody finds something difficult, why a family is struggling, or why an individual needs more support.  This behaviour that has become well-established in children’s lives, is now permeating adulthood, and occupying the attention of the chattering classes.

And, of course, there can be enormous value in that. A diagnosis can bring recognition after years of uncertainty. A definition can unlock understanding. A label can help someone make sense of their experiences, find others who share them, secure support or simply replace the distressing question of “what is wrong with me?” with a much more constructive understanding of difference and need.

But I increasingly wonder whether we have started to mistake naming the problem for solving it.  There is something reassuring about a definition. Once we have found the right word, generated the assessment, completed the referral or allocated somebody into the correct category, it feels as though something important has happened. Administratively, it probably has. For the individual, however, the most important question remains stubbornly unanswered: What do you need, and what are we all going to do about it?  That is a much more demanding question. Because people do not experience labels. They experience life.

Two children with exactly the same diagnosis may need completely different things. Two families experiencing poverty may have entirely different barriers, strengths and circumstances. Two people experiencing loneliness will not necessarily benefit from the same intervention. Two children described as having additional needs cannot be adequately served simply because we have successfully identified the category into which they fit.

Definition tells us something. It rarely tells us everything.  Yet our systems are often built the other way around. We identify the category and then reach for the corresponding response. If you are X, you receive Y. If you meet this threshold, here is the service. If you do not quite meet it, perhaps you receive nothing at all.  The individual gradually disappears behind the definition.

And sometimes labels inadvertently give services permission to become bland, generalist and even tone deaf. We can say we have “provided support” because the programme exists. We can say we are “meeting need” because somebody has been referred. We can demonstrate that an intervention has been offered without asking the uncomfortable question of whether it was actually the right intervention for that particular person.  There is a world of difference between offering a service and meeting a need.

That distinction matters enormously in early years and childcare. We quite rightly talk about inclusion, SEND, disadvantage, vulnerability, school readiness, speech and language, parental engagement and countless other areas of need. These terms help us organise our thinking and resources. But children themselves stubbornly refuse to organise themselves into neat strands of a strategy document.

A four-year-old does not wake up thinking they belong to an intervention category.  They wake up as themselves.  They arrive carrying the experiences of their home, family, relationships, health, community, language, personality and development. They bring what happened yesterday and what happened that morning. They bring extraordinary strengths alongside things they find difficult. They may need encouragement, predictability, food, quiet, movement, reassurance, challenge, familiarity or simply an adult who notices them properly.  That last point increasingly feels important to me.

Noticing is different from diagnosing.  Noticing requires curiosity. It asks us to remain interested in the person after the paperwork is complete. It says: I know what the assessment tells me, but I also want to know you. The danger otherwise is that diagnosis actually reduces curiosity. Once we think we have the explanation, we stop looking.

“They do that because they have…”

“She struggles because she is…”

“That family is…”

“This community is…”

The sentence is completed and, subtly, so is our thinking.  I worry about the implications of that for services too. A definition can become an excuse for a standardised response, particularly in systems operating under enormous pressure. It is understandable. Budgets are stretched, professionals are busy, demand is high and services have to operate at scale. Categories make complexity manageable.  But people are complex whether our systems find that convenient or not.

Perhaps the real test of a good service is therefore not how sophisticated its definitions are, but how effectively it adapts once it understands the person in front of it.  That requires a shift from “What are you?” to “What do you need?”  And perhaps another question: “What would make a difference?”  Those questions sound deceptively simple. In reality, they require more of us.

They require listening rather than assuming. They require professional judgement rather than simply following a pathway. They require us to understand strengths as well as deficits. They require flexibility in services and sometimes the humility to recognise that the thing we have available is not necessarily the thing somebody needs.  Most importantly, they make us accountable for what happens next.

That may be why definitions can sometimes feel more comfortable. Diagnosis can locate the issue within the individual. Meeting need places responsibility partly back on the rest of us.  If a child cannot access an environment, is the question only what condition they have, or should we also ask what needs to change about the environment?

If a parent cannot use a service, do we simply describe them as “hard to reach”, or ask how reachable our service actually is?  If somebody does not respond to an intervention, do we conclude that they have failed to engage, or wonder whether the intervention failed to engage them?  Those are very different ways of looking at the world.

None of this argues against diagnosis, assessment or definition. Quite the opposite. Good assessment can be enormously powerful. The challenge is what we do with the knowledge it provides.  A diagnosis should open a conversation rather than close one. A definition should increase our curiosity, not diminish it. An assessment should be a route towards personalised support, not simply evidence that the system has done its job.

There is also something fundamentally human about resisting the temptation to reduce people to one characteristic. We are all collections of contradictions, strengths, experiences, relationships and needs. What works for us can change from one day to another, never mind from one stage of life to the next. 

Perhaps we need to become a little less obsessed with asking “What is it called?” and much more determined about asking “What will help?”  Because ultimately, people do not need us simply to understand the definition of their needs.  They need us to meet them.