There is a specific kind of meeting where everyone is looking at a diagram on a screen and nobody is saying anything useful. You know this meeting. The architect has prepared a beautiful diagram. It has swim lanes and color coding and little icons for each service. Everyone nods. Someone asks a clarifying question. The architect answers it. More nodding. The meeting ends. Nothing is decided.
I've been in hundreds of these. I've run a few of them myself, early on.
Here's what I do now: I don't bring a diagram to the meeting. I bring markers.
I roll the mobile easel into the room and I start drawing while people are still finding their seats. I draw badly. The boxes are uneven. The arrows don't quite connect. I label things with abbreviations and then forget what the abbreviations mean and have to ask. It's a mess.
And people talk. They say "no, that arrow should go the other way" and come up to the board and fix it. They say "you're missing a layer here" and pick up a marker. By the time we have a clean diagram on the board, everyone in the room has touched the marker at least once. The diagram belongs to all of them.
That never happens with a Figma doc. Nobody edits someone else's Figma doc in a meeting. It would feel rude. The prepared diagram carries the implicit message that thinking is done — you're just here to be informed.
A bad drawing on a whiteboard carries the opposite message. It says: this is still open. Help me figure it out.
I'm not making an argument against documentation or prepared diagrams. You need those. After the whiteboard session ends, someone should turn the result into a clean doc that lives somewhere findable. But the session itself — the actual thinking, the part where decisions get made — that should happen standing up, with a marker in someone's hand.
The easel is worth it specifically because you can bring it to where the conversation is happening. Meeting room, kitchen table, someone's office. The thinking doesn't have to happen at the wall with the permanent board. It can happen anywhere you can wheel a piece of furniture.