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The Conversations That Don’t Happen on Zoom
I’ve been hosting more in-person events in Chicago lately, and I keep noticing something. The conversations we have around a table are very different from the conversations we have on Zoom.
It’s not that one is more productive than the other. I spend plenty of my week on video calls, and there’s a reason we all embraced them. They’re convenient. They make geography almost irrelevant. You can fit a lot more conversations into a day when nobody has to get in a car or on a plane. But we’ve also gotten very good at making our conversations efficient.
There’s a calendar invite. There’s an agenda. We join the call, get through what we need to discuss, agree on next steps and move on to the next square on our calendar.
And somewhere along the way, we lost some of the conversation around the conversation.
The best part is often the tangent
Sit down with someone over dinner and something different happens.
You start by talking about work. Then someone mentions a challenge they’re having with their team. That turns into a conversation about hiring. Someone else has been through the same thing and shares what worked for them. Twenty minutes later, you’re talking about something nobody would have thought to put on the agenda.
Those are often the conversations I remember.
Not because they produced an immediate opportunity or ended with a clear action item, but because I learned something about the people around the table. How they think. What they’re working through. What they care about. What they’re seeing that I’m not.
You get context that’s difficult to pick up when everyone has joined a call for a specific reason.
Networking got a little too transactional
I think the word “networking” has picked up some baggage because we tend to associate it with an outcome.
- Who should I meet?
- Who could introduce me to someone?
- Could this person become a client?
- Is there an opportunity here?
That mindset can make networking feel like another business development activity. And if every conversation needs to produce something, we start optimizing those conversations the same way we optimize meetings.
LinkedIn has made this easy to do. A connection request turns into a sales pitch two messages later. Relationships get measured in follower counts and engagement. Liking someone’s post starts to stand in for actually catching up with them. And you can repeat that cycle at a scale that was never possible in person. But there’s a limit when interactions are digital, not in person. That’s the human element.
The platform is genuinely useful, and I’m not knocking it. But it has taught a lot of us to treat our network as something to grow and manage digitally, rather than a building relationships with people we know and care about. The focus shifts to having a network, ideally a big one, rather than a good one. You learn less from the people in it, and it gets harder to point to the real impact any one of those connections has had.
Some of the most valuable professional relationships don’t begin with a clear reason for knowing each other.
You meet someone interesting. You have a good conversation. You learn something from them. Maybe you will see them again a few months later. You introduce them to someone they should know. They send something your way because it reminds them of you.
Over time, you build a real relationship.
There isn’t always a straight line between that first dinner and whatever comes from it later. That’s part of the point.
There’s still a place for the efficient meeting
I’m certainly not suggesting we abandon Zoom and put every meeting back on a plane.
The ability to work remotely has opened up relationships and opportunities that would have been much harder to maintain otherwise. There are people I can work with regularly because neither of us needs to be in the same city.
But I don’t think convenience and connection are interchangeable.
A thirty-minute video call is excellent when we know what we need from each other.
It’s less effective when we don’t know what the interesting conversation is going to be yet.
That requires a little more time, a little less structure and occasionally, sitting across the table from someone with nowhere else to click.
The more events I host, the more convinced I am that there’s still enormous value in making room for those conversations.
You may not leave dinner with an action item, but I’m convinced you’ll leave with something better: a new perspective, a stronger relationship or an idea you never would have gotten to on the agenda.
