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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I was talking politics with an acquaintance. Explaining his positions on the issues he told me he’s a social liberal but fiscal conservative.

Not uncommon these days. But it occurred to me that while accurate, his self-description had nothing to do with liberal or conservative political philosophy, just liberal and conservative affinities.

What’s this have to do with the world of business?

There is a connection, and we’ll get to it. But with the impending election the poor quality of political discourse in this country is once again on my mind, and this sort of self-indulgent piece is the price you occasionally pay for getting KJR for free.

Let’s get to it.

“Social liberal” should mean you base your positions on social issues on liberal political philosophy. What it does mean is, you hold positions commonly associated with the Democratic party.

Likewise fiscal conservatism, which means holding positions about financial policy commonly associated with the GOP.

The two major political parties and commentariat have convinced most of us that liberalism and conservatism are opposing political philosophies — poles on a spectrum. This is bunk.

Liberalism is more or less an extension of John Rawls’ principle that a fair society is one you’d design if you didn’t know where you’d be born into it.

Conservatism is, more or less, adherence to the principle that the government is the solution only to problems that can’t be decently solved without its intervention.

Do those strike you as opposites — poles on a continuum? To me they’re entirely compatible and complementary. Neither excludes the other. If recognized as complementary principles, different people would still reach different conclusions when applying them, but with a lot less acrimony.

Because our political dialog is really all about affinity — choosing which side you’re on — a Republican candidate for office would be rejected for agreeing that you can’t fix potholes and bridges without spending tax dollars to do it. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates have to at least pretend that anything less than perfect fairness is entirely unacceptable.

And, both parties subject us to a form of political advertising best described as “here’s why the other candidate is awful.”

Imagine applying this art form to selling cars. General Motors’ ads would grimly describe the Toyotas that accelerated uncontrollably. Toyota would retaliate with Thunder Road ads — photos of the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets — excoriating GM for being so greedy it wouldn’t install safe ignition switches.

Affinity-driven political philosophy drives polarization. Affinity means understanding what makes you a member of the club. You have to learn and follow its rules.

What’s this have to do with the world of business?

As promised, there is a connection, and not a particularly subtle one, either (and thanks for indulging me): When it’s election-year politics we call it polarization. When it’s politics in business we call it organizational silos.

But while the root causes of political polarization and organizational siloes are different, their sustaining strategies and tactics are quite similar, and if you don’t think so, try defending the bureaucrats in HR to your colleagues in a badly siloed company.

It just isn’t done, and if you’re on the other side of the fence try defending the propeller heads in IT who are always chasing the latest shiny ball; the bean counters in accounting who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing; the pointy-haired bosses who, walking into the Clue Store with a plutonium American Express card would leave empty handed …

Get the picture?

Recently I’ve seen quite a bit of commentary regarding what psychologists call confirmation bias — the tendency to accept without question any and all inputs that support a position you’ve already taken while ignoring or nit-picking to death anything calling it into question. The gist of these articles is that we might as well give up on forming rational opinions, because we can’t. Confirmation bias will always prevent it, and we won’t even know that’s what’s going on in our heads.

I’m less convinced of the hopelessness of it all, largely because, over time, we’ve accumulated pretty good evidence that science works (like, the device you’re reading this on depends on it).

How do scientists … good scientists, at least … avoid confirmation bias? The good ones avoid it by not wanting to prove they’re right. They aren’t even motivated by the need to be right.

What they want is to understand how something works. Confirmation bias doesn’t ever enter the picture.

Try it. Start with HR — the discipline, not the department. You might be surprised, not just at what you learn, but at how much there is to learn.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

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.

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