The older I get, the less patience I have for writing up meeting notes.
Too bad for me. While the skills known collectively as facilitation are undoubtedly the most important when the subject is running a meeting, the art of writing the notes afterward comes in closer than you might think.
As form should always follow function, start with the purpose of writing and distributing meeting notes.
If you’re feeling mentally lazy you might suggest something shallow, like, “To document the meeting.” This isn’t so much wrong, as the comedian once said, as insufficiently right.
Back up a step, because the purpose meeting notes serve comes from the purpose of the meetings being noted. While there are lots of reasons for people to meet in an organization, one way or another most meetings are part of some process whose goal is to get to an important result of some kind.
Meeting notes have to be understood within this larger context. Their purpose is to summarize what was agreed to and, if a point was contentious, why it was agreed to that way; also to establish who is supposed to do what as a result of the meeting and when it’s due.
Which is why good meeting notes aren’t meeting minutes, and why the reason Herodotus is known both as the father of history and the father of lies might have some bearing on the subject. History is storytelling, not a neutral recounting of all the small episodes that make up the events being recounted.
Meeting notes are the history of a meeting, where meeting minutes are a he-said/she-said account of who said what and in what order, not very different from the transcript from a trial. Publish meeting minutes and you’re doing a few things, all bad.
You’re (1) asking everyone in attendance to live through the meeting a second time, and wasn’t the first time bad enough? (2) asking those who weren’t in attendance to make sense of a conversation from an account that’s intrinsically incomplete — incomplete because more than half the information content of a conversation is conveyed non-verbally and therefore isn’t in the notes; and (3) shirking your responsibility to explain what happened.
Meeting minutes are like a photograph where the photographer made sure the subject was in the frame somewhere and clicked the shutter. Good meeting notes are like the same subject, shot by a photographer who carefully composed the image, paid attention to the lighting, and set the shutter speed and aperture so as to maximize sharpness while choosing a depth of field that directs the viewer’s eyes to what ought to be noticed in the picture.
Good meeting notes are a narrative — the story of what happened in the meeting, told to remind the participants and inform any other interested parties of what happened and why it happened that way.
And not just remind, but gently adjust memories so people recall a meeting that was a bit closer to the one that should have happened than the one that actually did happen.
Is this dishonest? That depends on whether the adjustment leads everyone to understand the important points that came out of the meeting better, or to think the meeting’s results were different from what they actually were.
This is part of the storyteller’s art regardless of the story being told. Any narrative that describes every possible detail is a narrative so tedious that it conveys none of them.
Minutes are merely a record. Notes explain.
And this is why distributing smartboard images and other no-effort alternatives is a bad idea: They leave the reader too much latitude to misunderstand the point of it all. They provide no context.
Accurate minutes would be worse. Imagine how they’d have to read: “George reported that progress on the new building was delayed because the vendor was unable to ship the HVAC compressor due to flooding in central China. Fred screamed at George angrily for five minutes in response, explaining why the delay is unacceptable and puts George’s career in jeopardy because “HE ISN’T TAKING RESPONSIBILITY!” George shrank down in his chair with a frightened look in his eyes.”
Don’t misunderstand. There is a place for meeting minutes (although probably a notch less accurate than my example). That place is antagonistic settings that could result in litigation. If you have to publish notes from those sorts of meetings, ask permission to record the meeting and transcribe away.
But otherwise, the nature of good meeting notes is exactly why my patience for writing them is decreasing as I get older:
They require time, attention, and worst of all, effort.
Bob, excellent article. My meeting notes (which were always labeled minutes) generally contained what should have been happened, rather than what actually happened. One technique was to put a recorder on the table, turn it on, but never listen to the recording. That tended to generate confidence in the published minutes. Decisions and assignments were clearly specified. I can’t remember ever having my minutes questioned.
Bob,
Many of the meetings I attend are structured with lots of powerpoint slides. When writing meeting notes, how much of these slides should be captured since people who weren’t at the meeting most likely won’t want to read a long deck of slides to get the interesting stuff. To me the interesting stuff is often what happened in the Q&A part.
Bob, I appreciate your addressing the Why of meeting notes, but what about How Long? My theory is that it takes twice as long as the meeting plus one hour. Therefore, a five minute meeting will take an hour and ten minutes. A one hour meeting will take three hours.
Like so many things, practice improves things. I can now usually manage to write a decent set of notes for a one hour meeting in a half hour.
But no, this doesn’t mean you can subcontract your note-taking to me.
Well, actually, you can, if you’re willing to pay Dell my standard consulting rate!
Of course the cynic will observe that another important function of meeting minutes is to make the most senior people present look good:
And so while the great ones depart to their dinner,
The secretary stays, growing thinner and thinner
Racking his brain to record and report
What he thinks they will think that they ought to have thought.
“Turn of the Tide (Alanbrooke, 1939-43)”, Sir Arthur Bryant
Hadn’t seen the verse before. It’s a thing o’ beauty. Thanks!
Bob, hopefully the meeting agenda has set expectations (what and who) before the meeting.
My meeting notes are labeled action plans. I send them within a business day after the meeting to all invitees, even if they did not attend. The first part of the minutes is a list of attendees.
The second portion is a numbered list of Who will take What action by When. Each item may include some background explanation. The numbering makes it easy to refer to a particular item in future conversations. This format makes responsibility clear, and sets the agenda for follow-up meetings.
I wish you’d written this 15 years ago! Back then. I suggested dept staff might value seeing what went on at the manager’s weekly meetings -envisioning notes as you describe vs minutes. For quite a while, I’d draft notes, get them reviewed, then sent out. But after a while, there was sufficient confidence that this was a good thing that I could send the notes out without review. Like you, with practice I got the time down, although rarely to 30 minutes. Staff really valued seeing the notes.
Thank you for this. I have believed for a long time that meetings should be interpreted rather than recorded and you have articulated what I have long thought, so thanks for that. Sometimes a lot of activity in a meeting results in a consensus of opinion on what ever it is that the meeting was about. The notes might be as simple as recording the consensus. But it might also be possible that some notation about how we arrived at the consensus is important to document. We all rely on the judgment of the note taker to understand what was important to document. It is, in fact, the second most important job.
Moreover, the note taker job is the same job as that of real historians. What you know about the American Revolution depends a lot on whether the historian who wrote that book you read thought that the important part of the American Revolution was the events happening in Boston, in Philadelphia, or at Valley Forge. We rely on them to tell us about the important parts… and they have a lot of latitude to decide. (Frankly, Thomas Jefferson disagreed with Alexander Hamilton on what the Revolution was about, so there is a wide range of interpretations. It ain’t easy being the note taker.)
I especially agree with Bob’s last sentence … basically the older I get the harder it is to find the energy to create proper meeting note. But perhaps that is because many meetings don’t follow the “three Fs” — Frontload (prepare), Focus (during the meeting), Followup. There is one bi-weekly meeting in particular that I attend. It is going to take an hour plus no matter if we have anything to say or not. It basically turns into a socializing meeting.
If there is a meeting that I really care about then I’ll make sure good notes are created.
Can you distribute a draft agenda in advance? then ask others at the beginning of the meeting to agree on the agenda. If they agree, you have a method to keep the discussion focused. If not, stop attending the meetings.
Further to your closing sentence: taking meeting notes that fulfill your objectives and requirements also takes a set of skills not generally found in the person assigned the task. Usually the political activists in the meeting recognize the power of the facilitator of the meeting and are eager to grab that assignment. Many of them do not recognize the power implied by being the person who writes the history, so they give it to the most junior or the most unresistant person they can find. What a lost opportunity!
Excellent article, Bob. I completely agree. That’s why I always decline when asked to take minutes of a meeting, but why I’m always happy to distribute copies of my own notes to anyone who asks — but with the caveat that they’re from MY perspective and emphasize the needs of me and my team, not you and yours.
— Karl