The Meeting was Pointless if there were No Decisions Captured and No Action Items Generated and Assigned

Meetings are useless if those attending don't understand the outcome and if the decisions made and additional action items are not captured in a way that can be shared and verified.

Meeting minutes or some other document must describe the decisions that are reached, open action items that are assigned, and a checklist of the original agenda items that were actually covered.

YouTube Generated Transcript

This Video https://youtu.be/2YakVsOT74g transcript with minor edits 

I'm going to do three talks about meetings

1. This first one is about making sure that somebody actually knows why they're having a meeting and they've explained it to people and provided the information that was required to run that meeting. 
2. The second one's like how to run a meeting correctly. That is the one I struggle with the most. I'm not going to cover that one yet.
3. The third one is capturing the outcome of a meeting. How do we know if it was worthwhile? I got to tell you I have been in I actually quit a job once over it. We were in a meeting when I looked outside I realized this was time I'd never get back. We were discussing that wasn't super meaningful and it wasn't actually possible we were going to solve the problem.  I realized that I'd rather be outside. I don't recommend that as a career management path. But you know how it goes.

This is me.  It is how I feel you only get so much Life Energy in you going to a meeting which

is bad enough. Then no decisions are made and no action items come out of it. This means the entire thing was wasted.  A meeting is pointless without captured decisions or assigned action items. That is really the gist of this talk. 

For every meeting:

1. An agenda prior to the meeting.  We know what we want to talk about. We knew what the backing materials were.
2. After every meeting, we need to document and capture what decisions were made. We need to assign any open Action items. Some people call those meeting minutes right. I don't really care how you do it.

I'll talk about corporate memory later. Email is great but there are other better places to

capture meeting notes like this. The meeting recap includes captured decisions and the assigned action items so you can remember later what happened or you can give it to somebody new without them having to know what was in the meeting. The point here... This is really the point of the whole thing. 

My general feeling is the meeting holder is responsible for capturing decisions and open Works items

that came out of a meeting discussion. After every meeting, there should be a communication sent to

everybody that participated or all interested parties, action owners, deciders any of those if that's a word. I think we declared that a word a while back. 

The results summary should include

1. Decisions that were made 
2. Action items that were created and 
3. The agenda that drove the decisions and required the action items? Include which items were covered and which were left uncovered at the end of the meeting.

Don't be the guy in the first image

Someone Should Do This After Every Meeting

Someone owns summarizing the meeting outcomes and future work. It doesn't have to be fancy

Meeting Notes / Docs	Descriptions	Metadata
Decisions	1. 2. 3.	Decider(s) Decider(s) Decider(s)
Action Items	1. 2. 3.	Owner Owner Owner
Agenda	1. 2. 3.	Completion Status Completion Status Completion Status

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Created 2023 05