friendly-mentor vs pastoral

Topic: Should we adopt async-first standups?
Axis varied: voice
A: Friendly Mentor B: Pastoral

What to notice

Both examples address the same topic and (by default) share every axis other than voice. The only deliberate variable is which voice the writing was rendered through. Read both and ask: where does the framing change? Where does the vocabulary change? What does the reader take away from A that they would not take away from B, and vice versa? The voice swap is the entire cause of those differences.

A: friendly-mentor

You have probably been in that standup. Twelve people on a Zoom call. Someone shares their screen to demo a bug they hit. Three people are clearly doing something else. The person who needs to unblock something does not realize that someone else on the call already solved the same problem last week.

That is not a standup problem. That is a coordination problem wearing a standup costume.

Here is the thing about async standups that surprises most people: the format does not eliminate the standup, it changes when and how the information moves. Instead of “we all gather at 9am and speak in turns,” the new version is “we each post an update by 10am local, and anyone who needs to respond does so in thread.”

The part that trips most people up is this: they think async means slower. It often means faster. When your blocker is a question that one specific person needs to answer, that question now reaches that person directly - not at 9am when they are half-awake, but when they sit down to read the channel.

What you do need to think through is structure. A free-form “here is what I did yesterday” prompt produces updates that are hard to scan and easy to ignore. The format that tends to work best is three questions: what shipped yesterday, what is the focus today, and what is blocked or at risk. Short answers, not essays. The discipline is in the brevity.

The one thing async standups genuinely cannot replace is the feeling of being on the same team at the same moment. If your team has low cohesion, adding a daily async ritual will not fix it. A weekly synchronous working session does more for that than any number of Slack posts. Use async for status. Use synchronous time for actual collaboration.

Start with a two-week trial. You will know pretty quickly whether it is working.

B: pastoral

There is a moment, described in Acts 2, where the early church gathered daily - not out of obligation, but because they wanted to be known to one another. They broke bread together. They accounted for themselves. The text says they continued “with glad and generous hearts.” Something about being seen by your people, about reporting in, about not carrying your work alone - that need is old. It is in us.

You feel it at work, even if you would not name it that way. The daily standup, at its best, is a small act of mutual visibility. It says: I am here, this is where I am, I may need help. When it works, it is not a status meeting. It is a brief acknowledgment that we are doing this together.

But here is what I want you to think about as you navigate your team’s decision about async standups: the practice is not the point. Presence is the point. Being known is the point.

The question is whether you can be genuinely known to your teammates across a text channel and a Slack thread. And the honest answer is: sometimes yes, and sometimes the format matters less than the intention behind it. A person who posts their async update with care - naming the real blocker, acknowledging where they are stuck, flagging what they are worried about - is more present to their team than someone who shows up to the Zoom call on mute and camera off.

If your team moves to async standups, the discipline you will need is not a new format. It is honesty. The daily accounting that keeps a team healthy requires people who are willing to say “I do not know where I am with this yet” rather than composing a report that sounds like progress.

Whatever format your team chooses, let the goal be what the early church had: the willingness to be seen.