>Now this is easy isn’t it? You take part in a meeting, write notes, and you have a record of everything that was discussed. Hmm.. well it’s never quite that simple. Recording what happens in a meeting should be this easy, but it’s just not. A couple of common problems:
- Who is actually taking notes in a meeting? Typically one of two situations occur. The first, where no one takes any notes, is common. Everyone assumes someone else is doing it, and nothing is recorded. The second is the opposite, everyone takes notes. This is almost as bad. Everybody takes notes on everything, but invariably different areas will be covered in varying depths. Who then pulls all of these separate notes together?
- Notes aren’t typed up, verified, and circulated to all attendees after the meeting. So you do have notes, but unless everyone agrees with what you have written they are potentially useless. You could after all write anything you wish on your notepad in a meeting. Doesn’t mean it actually happened, or was said
So good note taking requires following a few basic rules:
- One single person should act as scribe and take notes
- Someone will generally be leading the meeting. They shouldn’t take notes. If they are doing their own job properly they won’t have time to write things down as well.
- The note taker should have no other roles in the meeting. Capturing everything that is said is hard enough, without having additional jobs.
- Ideally this scribe will be a neutral to the meeting/attendees/project, so their notes don’t have a preformed opinion or bias.
- Type up and correct notes IMMEDIATELY after a meeting. The longer they are left after a meeting ends the less useful they become. If they haven’t been written up after a week you might as well throw them in the bin.
- Circulate the notes for agreement, changes, and sign off. Only once everyone agrees with them are they truly useful
The act of writing notes is probably quite a personal one, and the way people do it differs tremendously. If you can type them into a computer to start with, it will save you time. MS Word will get you going, but you might want to look at other tools for the job:
- OneNote – Part of the Office package, this note taking tool has a number of fans
- IA Writer – A Mac and iPad app. This tool strips away all but the most basic features, and offers a full screen and ‘single sentence focus mode’. It is designed to let you focus on the words, not faffing around with pages and formatting. I have to say its a real favourite of mine right now
- Ommwriter is a similar tool, available for Windows. FocusWriter is a similar tool.
Finally have a look into the art of ‘Dialogue mapping’. I looked at this a while back, and have yet to properly use it in a meeting, but it seems an extremely interesting way of taking meeting notes that everyone agrees with. Much more than it, it provides a way to discuss and analyse wicked problems.
