by Serguey Shinder
We turned on automatic meeting notes in January 2025 with some relief. Nobody had ever wanted to take minutes, and the minutes we did take arrived late or not at all. The tool's notes were tidy, arrived within a minute of the call ending, and finished with a list of decisions and actions with names beside them.
In April a team lead in our logistics group began building a change to how we batched outbound orders. When somebody asked him why, he pointed at the notes from a call three weeks earlier, which said under Decisions: agreed to move to hourly batching from the first of May. I had been on that call. We had not agreed that. What had been said, and I went back to the recording, was that hourly batching was worth looking at, that the warehouse manager had real doubts about the afternoon shift, and that we would come back to it once she had spoken to her team.
The tool had not invented anything. Every part of its sentence had been said by somebody. What it had done was take a conversation that ended deliberately unresolved and resolve it, because a summary that closes with a list of decisions looks like a better summary, and the likeliest thing to follow the words we discussed hourly batching is the word agreed.
Two weeks of work went into the change before the warehouse manager heard about it. She had not read the notes. Almost nobody reads the notes of a meeting they attended, because they assume the notes say what they remember. The people who read them closely are the people who were not there, and they have no way of telling a decision from a hope.
I went through two months of notes after that. Most were fine. In seven I found a decision or an owner that I did not believe had been agreed, and in three of those somebody had already acted on it.
We kept the tool, because its notes are genuinely better than the ones we used to not write. What changed is who owns them. The draft goes to whoever chaired the meeting rather than to everyone who attended, and it is not circulated until the chair has read and corrected it. And the last three minutes of any meeting with a decision in it are now spent saying the decisions out loud, so that the tool is transcribing a conclusion rather than supplying one.
What I had underestimated is how often uncertainty is the most accurate thing said in a meeting. We will come back to it is information. A record that turns it into agreement reads better and is less true, and the people who act on records are nearly always the ones who were not in the room to know the difference.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply