Meeting Memo Mayhem: A Lesson in Communication

I once sent a PSA memo to my team. It read something like this:

"Please read the meeting notes because I just did, and I did not attend THIS meeting."

You see, what happens at an agency, and often I'm sure in the real world, is someone is tasked with taking notes on a production meeting, or a briefing meeting, or a planning meeting, and it's not that the person isn't listening, but they're perhaps not hearing what's going on.

Now, there are plenty of people who lead meetings who don't hear what's going on, but that's a different issue.

The person who takes the notes and writes them up is important and often overworked and underpaid. The subsequent write-up may be slightly off because they're also likely fielding seven other things and responding to 'urgent' emails during the meeting. No devices in important meetings, please, folks.

They then do that agency thing and circulate them to the group. Almost all agency people are busy people, through no fault (and every fault) of their own. I guarantee you less than 1% of the people who were in the meeting read them, and definitely not in a timely fashion. The only people who do perhaps, maybe, sometimes, have an agenda to make sure something they said was captured. So they're not reading; they're looking for something in particular.

What happens is an email goes back from the person who ran the meeting very quickly to say, "Fab, thanks so much." And we've now all moved on.

These notes get PDF'd and filed, and this meeting, that never took place, is now recorded and did take place.

Fast forward 6 weeks. The project is in crisis, budget is tight or already blown. Creative is compromised or just not working. "Let's have a regroup meeting, team. Tommy, can you be sure to print out a copy of the kickoff meeting notes for everyone so we can all get back on the same page...” Uh oh. 😐

So now we're fixing a problem based on something not representative of where we started. But the meeting goes well, we fixed it, the client will never know. Great job, team.

Subject line: Regroup meeting notes

Lightning response: "Fab, thanks so much."

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Have you ever played telephone? I have.

Generative AI tip for corporate communications agencies.

• Audio record every important meeting.

• Use an AI tool (I like Otter) to transcribe the entire meeting in seconds.

• Feed transcript to an LLM (that's ChatGPT for the newbs).

Prompt: The following is a transcript of a production meeting. Analyze it and provide a succinct summary of the content. Highlight any action points discussed and identify five key takeaways based on the text.

Save the transcript, save the summary, job done.

Then we can all not read it, safe in the knowledge it was based on fact. But I bet you will because you don't trust the robot.

Well played Tommy, you win.

As you were,

MrMcK