A bit of a controversial take: if you need standups for this sort of communication, your work and work culture are way too siloed. With a flexible and collaborative culture, people will communicate these things naturally as part of doing their work. Issues that come up will get addressed as needed when they come up. If something is important, why would you wait for tomorrow's standup? If something isn't important, why are you dedicating an inflexible daily meeting to talking about it?
If your team is having the sort of communication problems standups are supposed to solve, it's a symptom of a deeper issue and standups are a bandaid solution. If your team already works collaboratively, standups are pure overhead at best and actively counterproductive at worst. It's easy to get into the bad habit of waiting for a standup to bring up important issues, which loses time and context. Worse yet, chances are the standup has too many people and not enough time to discuss anything in detail—I've seen so many standups where any actually useful conversation would be caught, stopped and moved to a different venue. You end up with a pro forma meeting where most of the information isn't useful to most of the attendees, but still breaks up people's schedules and focus.
In my experience, an emphasis on standups goes hand-in-hand with a view of engineering work as a ticket factory: individuals get a ticket off the queue, work just on that, get it done as soon as possible and pick up another ticket. I think that correlation is not a coincidence.
That seems like a reasonable concern to me, and something that could apply to almost any communications that are on a regular schedule, whether it’s a daily team meeting or an annual review with your boss.
My father said something to me when I was nervous before my first annual review in my first job, and it has stuck with me ever since: nothing anyone says in that review should ever be a surprise. Whether it’s good or bad, if your management are doing their job, everyone who needs to know about it should have known when it became relevant, not on the anniversary of your employment.
I suspect there is more value in some types of regular but short technical meeting at the moment, when many colleagues aren’t in close proximity at work and ad-hoc informal discussions are less likely to serve the same purpose. But as someone who’s primarily worked from home for years, I’d usually still prefer to arrange a group call or physical meeting with whoever actually needs to be there when there’s something specific to discuss, rather than assuming in advance that any particular tempo will be the right one.
When trying to schedule on an as needed basis, the next time slot where everyone is available together could be in several weeks. Especially if one or more participants are business types with impossible calendars. Standing meeting reserves a time slot and guarantees a topic can be discussed within N business days of becoming important. If there is nothing for the agenda that day then you cancel it and everyone gets some free time.
While you have a point, it's not that rare for someone to be blocked on a hard issue for a day or two, even having talked to someone, then bring that up at the stand-up. The one you talk to may not always have the solution, and it may be someone else in the team at large.
Better is better but a daily stand-up provides a common, catch all meeting with the entire team blocked off to participate.
Why wait? Well you could should tap(which we all hate), or you could email, ...or you could do something else in the mean time and bring it up in the daily.
Lets say you're blocked but don't know who to talk to? You could end up playing email tag or out on a few man hunts as you jump from team member to team member looking for who knows what ...or you could bring it up in the daily.
It solves a lot of problems, even if it doesn't solve every problem.
If your team is having the sort of communication problems standups are supposed to solve, it's a symptom of a deeper issue and standups are a bandaid solution. If your team already works collaboratively, standups are pure overhead at best and actively counterproductive at worst. It's easy to get into the bad habit of waiting for a standup to bring up important issues, which loses time and context. Worse yet, chances are the standup has too many people and not enough time to discuss anything in detail—I've seen so many standups where any actually useful conversation would be caught, stopped and moved to a different venue. You end up with a pro forma meeting where most of the information isn't useful to most of the attendees, but still breaks up people's schedules and focus.
In my experience, an emphasis on standups goes hand-in-hand with a view of engineering work as a ticket factory: individuals get a ticket off the queue, work just on that, get it done as soon as possible and pick up another ticket. I think that correlation is not a coincidence.