6 async practices that surface buried insights (and how AI can help)

It’s a painful rite of passage for knowledge workers: You spend days or weeks on a project, only to discover a related idea you wish you’d known earlier, a piece of data that changes your work, or (worst of all) something that negates everything you’ve been doing.

Maybe you launch a survey, only to learn afterward that another team ran almost the same survey last quarter – and already answered your key questions. Or you might spend a week assembling a strategy deck, then stumble across a document with sharper thinking and fresher data that never crossed your radar.

That’s the all‑too‑familiar problem for many teams, especially those who work asynchronously: lack of visibility into work that’s already been done, ideas that have already been considered, and insights that have already been gathered.

This information may be:

• Buried in an old deck, an epic from two years ago, or a page no one can find
• Delivered after the deadline or the moment you were looking
• Shared quietly or held back completely

Either way, if knowledge isn’t surfaced at the right time or in the right way, it never gets used – leading to wasted time and energy at best, and costly mistakes at worst.

The good news is there are plenty of ways to overcome those barriers. Here’s how your team can tackle these challenges, use async benefits to your advantage, and do your best work – together.

Teams have more information than ever, but they’ve never been less informed

As the pace of work accelerates, employees are using more tools than ever and scattering data across a graveyard of disconnected work artifacts. This leaves people struggling to find and use relevant insights, like past research results or a list of ideas brainstormed last quarter.

In fact, Atlassian’s most recent State of Teams report shows Fortune 500 companies waste 2.4 billion (yes, with a “b!”) hours every year searching for information. One in two knowledge workers report that teams at their company tend to unknowingly work on the same things, and just 20% feel confident that their team has an effective process for quickly informing other teams of decisions that may impact their work.

The three things teams say they need to collaborate more effectively:

1. Clearer goals
2. Shared processes for how to get work done
3. Ability to easily find the exact information they need

Let’s dive deeper into that third benefit and explore six practical, research‑backed habits any team – especially those who work async – can use to surface knowledge faster and make even better decisions.

6 async practices to uncover existing insights

1. Write before you meet

Practice: Ask team members to write their thoughts and ideas about a topic before meeting.

One of the biggest challenges with making decisions in live meetings is that meetings perpetuate groupthink and introduce bias. One way to avoid this is to give people time and space to write down their thoughts before they meet.

Studies comparing group brainstorming to brainwriting (individually writing ideas) find that people generate more – and more unique – ideas when they write first instead of speaking in a group. Writing slows thinking down enough for nuance and clarity to emerge. People can draft, edit, and refine instead of reacting in real time. That means a designer in Sydney can write down three thoughtful concerns about a proposed UI change, rather than trying to get a word in during a rushed, late-night call.

Similarly, writing also removes pressure to respond instantly or compete for airtime, which is especially helpful for introverts, junior team members, and those from under‑represented groups.

Try it:

• Before a meeting or working session, share a short prompt for your collaborators to answer in writing. For a planning session, it could be, “What risks do you think we’re underestimating?” For a new campaign brainstorming session, it could be, “What’s the best campaign you’ve seen lately, and why?”
• Ask each person to write their thoughts in a shared document before any live discussion.
• Let people add async follow-up comments.
• Start the live meeting by reviewing a summary of themes the team wrote down and any notable outliers that may influence decisions.

Where you can ask AI to help:

• Give the tool an overview of the meeting goals, topics to discuss, and what success looks like. Then, ask it to brainstorm questions and prompts for attendees to answer in writing ahead of time.
• Cluster themes among the responses, and highlight outliers.
• Present your team’s ideas in search results when another team is looking for similar information months later.

2. Design for time-delayed contribution

Practice: Give everyone an opportunity to respond before you review.

Some people are fast thinkers and communicators. Others take more time to formulate and write their thoughts. Some team members may be in a different time zone or out of the office. The fastest replies often get the most attention, but speed isn’t a signal of insight or value. Building in time for everyone who wants to contribute levels the playing field and avoids missing potentially important perspectives.

Research on remote and virtual teams shows people are less likely to share when they feel like they’re being watched and more likely to share when they feel psychologically safe. Encouraging collaborators to share knowledge async – and giving them more time to do so – puts them in control over when and how they show up. That creates space for more robust, thoughtful input, and fewer decisions led by whoever responded first.

Try it:

• Set clear response windows for async comments, like “Add comments to this proposal by end of day Thursday.”
• Give people clear direction on what type of contributions you’re looking for. Feedback on existing ideas? New ideas? Additional context the group may not have considered? Intentional disagreement to poke holes in a concept? (See practice #3 below.)
• Send a reminder before the deadline, tagging people who haven’t responded (if appropriate).
• In your recap, you can call out key contributions that arrived later in the time window in case people who responded earlier missed them.

Where you can ask AI to help:

• Resurface lightly engaged threads before the response window closes, and summarize who hasn’t responded yet: “Only 2 of 5 assignees have replied. You are waiting on Marcos, Jennifer, and Lynn.”
• Schedule reminders for the team to contribute before the deadline.
• Flag contributions that are significantly different from earlier responses so you don’t miss something that changes decisions.

3. Intentionally invite disagreement

Practice: Build in opportunities to respectfully dissent in writing and with purpose.

Humans are hardwired to avoid conflict, especially at work. But questioning, disagreement, and arguing (respectfully, of course) can expose issues, clarify confusion, and reduce the risk of bigger problems later on. Conflict also signals that people care about a particular person or topic.

In async work, there aren’t as many obvious opportunities for disagreement. You’re not meeting live or talking back and forth with someone you can share your true thoughts and feelings with in real time. That’s why it’s important to build in async opportunities for team members to disagree.

Inviting people to share their questions and concerns in writing, on their own time, also gives those who may not feel comfortable speaking up live or face‑to‑face – especially across power or culture gaps – space to think, write, and edit their feedback before sharing.

Try it:

• Add standard prompts to big decisions, such as:
  • “What are we missing?”
  • “If this fails, why will it have failed?”
  • “What do you disagree with, and why?”
  • “What feels riskier than we’re admitting out loud?”
  • “What would a smart critic say about this plan?”
• Add “risks and concerns” fields to planning page templates and intake forms.
• Add a section to retrospective and incident review templates where people can share considerate critiques of a decision or tradeoff made.
• Run the Sparring Play to get async feedback on an idea or piece of work.
• Normalize respectful questioning and dissent as a helpful contribution to quality, not as criticism or an attack. (Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson shares three rules that contribute to building psychological safety, meaningful dialogue, and co-creation: listen more and speak less, build on others’ contributions, and respond to what’s emerging vs. pre-planning ideas.)
• Publicly thank people who disagree and say the hard stuff out loud. Show how their input shaped the outcome.

Where you can ask AI to help:

• Analyze multiple messages and flag areas of repeated uncertainty or concern, like “Several people have raised concerns about privacy.”
• Summarize themes after a sparring session.
• Automatically add a step to suggested workflows to invite disagreement, instead of relying on people to remember to do it.
• Edit dissent messages for tone and clarity so those messages are better received, like changing “This plan is reckless and ignores basic security” to “I’m concerned this plan may introduce significant security risks that we haven’t fully evaluated yet.”

4. Separate idea generation from evaluation

Practice: Don’t mix “What could we do?” with “What should we do?”

There are two types of thinking: divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking is unrestricted, judgment-free, and takes a meandering path to explore all viable (and some not-so-viable) options. Convergent thinking uses logic to narrow down ideas in a structured way.

Alex Osborn, who developed the creative-problem solving framework in the 1940s, noted that both types of thinking are essential to creativity. The problem is people often jump to convergent thinking as the most direct path to one “right” solution. If they don’t diverge first, they may make a short‑sighted decision and miss out on an even better solution.

Try it:

1. Break up the brainstorming or problem-solving process to diverge first, then converge.
2. Start with divergent thinking to generate ideas (async):
   • Share a collaborative document or form with the team for brainstorming, and ask them to share any and all observations, concerns, hypotheses, and ideas about the topic.
   • Remind them to suspend judgment. Don’t worry about what’s been tried before or what “won’t work.” There are no good or bad ideas at this point.
   • Encourage writing down every concept, even if it’s not certain or fully formed yet.
3. Then evaluate ideas (later, async or sync):
   • Shift to sharing feedback, prioritizing, and making decisions using clear criteria (e.g., impact, effort, risk).
   • Decide which ideas become experiments, tasks/issues, or backlog items.

Where you can ask AI to help:

• Label contributions by type (observation, risk, assumption, idea, etc.) so you can see what’s missing.
• Group similar ideas based on themes.
• Compare ideas to requirements or context to spot gaps or misalignment.
• Prioritize ideas based on criteria.

5. Surface summaries

Practice: Share recaps of conversations and decisions with the rest of the team.

Insights often get lost in conversation threads, notes, and documents. After doing any of these practices above or meeting live, share a summary of what was discussed and decided in a Slack or Teams channel, shared workspace, or wherever your team communicates.

Summarizing and resurfacing information not only helps close the loop, but also means the next team doesn’t have to re‑ask the same questions or repeat the same experiment six months later. Decision logs and recap notes are consistently cited as a cornerstone of effective async collaboration, as GitLab notes in their handbook.

Try it:

• Assign a teammate in each meeting or working session to share a recap with all stakeholders.
• In a simple written summary or decision log, capture:
  • What was discussed or decided
  • Key findings and patterns that informed the conversation and decision
  • Points of tension or disagreement
  • Open questions and notes to revisit later
• Store summaries where the team actually works, like a project’s Confluence page or Slack channel.
• Resurface findings at key moments: planning, retros, onboarding, or when similar work starts.

Where you can ask AI to help:

• Add an AI notetaker, such as Loom, to your meetings to take notes and automatically share a summary.
• Create insight‑focused summaries, like “Here are the four main concerns and why the group chose Option B.”
• Schedule reminders to revisit notes, open questions, and past decisions for further review and assessment.

6. Create dedicated async “thinking spaces”

Practice: Set up a document, workspace, or chat channel for random thoughts and brainstorming.

Our brains work differently when they’re thinking than when they’re doing. (Both modes are equally important.) Even when we’re not thinking, like when we’re trying to fall asleep or in the shower, ideas strike at random. That’s because people generate better ideas when they have time and space to think alone, then come together to collaborate.

It’s crucial to intentionally think before we do and to capture those thoughts before they disappear into the void. Async “thinking spaces” (like a Confluence page, whiteboard, or Slack channel) do exactly that: give team members a low-pressure place to jot down questions and blue‑sky ideas as they come up, instead of letting them disappear.

Try it:

• Create a shared place as the team’s async thinking space. This space is specifically for:
  • Questions and hypotheses, like “Is adoption suffering because of friction during onboarding?”
  • Patterns people are noticing across customers or incidents, like “Three different tickets mentioned confusion about payment methods this week.”
  • Ideas to revisit in the future
• Treat these as “slow” channels with fewer, but deeper messages and thoughts.
• Model the behavior by posting your own reflections, not just directives.
• If appropriate, share the thinking space with other teams to cross-pollinate knowledge.

Where you can ask AI to help:

• Schedule weekly reminders to add any new ideas.
• Highlight emerging themes or repeated concerns, like “Social media posts featuring real customers are gaining popularity” or “Customer trust has come up 5 different times this month.”
• Surface themes across different projects, documents, and channels to bridge silos.

How to get started: small experiments, big payoffs

Async work won’t surface every insight or replace every meeting – nor should it. But when you make small, deliberate changes to the way your team writes, reflects, and disagrees, you can turn time zones and quiet personalities into a competitive advantage. Your team likely already has valuable work and hard-won lessons just waiting to be uncovered.

The post 6 async practices that surface buried insights (and how AI can help) appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian.

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