Action Points Replacing Minutes
Getting More from your Meetings than a Pile of Paper
We've all had the e-mails with 40 pages of minutes attached, but seriously, who ever reads that?
It's been office culture since the dawn of time. Whenever a meeting is called, the first question is 'who's going to take the minutes?' It usually falls to the secretary to sharpen a pencil and scribble out the shorthand.
Minutes are the essential proof that a meeting took place. They are a record of who said what, to whom and why. No meeting would be complete without them...or would it?
There's another way of looking at it that says reams and reams of minutes achieve only one thing: obliteration of the rain forest. When was the last time you honestly re-read the entire minutes of a meeting? Did you just glance at one or two things and skim the rest? Did you bother to look at them at all or did you just print them out as a desktop accessory for the next meeting, because it looks good to come prepared?
When you get down to it, minutes are 90% a log of people thinking out loud and 10%, or maybe less, a record of actual decisions being made. That's a lot of paper with very little on it.
There is an alternative.
Instead of appointing a minute taker, appoint an 'action taker'. Instead of recording what people are saying, record what needs to be done. For example:
Suggestion: Can we print T-shirts for the event?
Action: X to find out how much T-shirt printing costs
Suggestion: What's happening for the August meeting?
Action: X to e-mail information on August meeting to Y
Suggestion: Is there any need for Housing to be involved in the conference?
Action: X to meet with Y to discuss ways of collaborating on the conference.
Anyone around the table can suggest an action point, but one person must take responsibility for recording them.
There are three fundamental things to include in an action point:
Who: Who does the action involve, who will do it?
What: What have they agreed to do?
By When: It is crucial to get an agreement on when this action will be done so that people won't forget about it and you can check to see whether it has been done.
At the end of the meeting it's also essential for the action taker to read back through the actions to double-check that what has been written down is actually what people have agreed to, you'll always find something amiss and it's essential that people are clear about what they have agreed to do.
After the meeting, the actions should be entered onto an Excel spreadsheet and e-mailed to all who attended the meeting. At subsequent meetings it can be checked whether the actions have been carried out and progress can be measured. The advantage of an Excel spreadsheet is that it's almost limitless in the number of actions you can enter so you will always have a running record of previous actions and progress.
The most important argument in favour of minutes is that they record decisions made by participants however, if a decision is made an action will always follow, be it to amend a document, change a rule, hold an event, discuss something with someone - you can always turn it into an action, even if the action is to record the decision in a more official document.
Actions make sure that the important points of a meeting get highlighted instead of lost in an essay of who-said-what. It won't feel comfortable at first, the culture of minute taking is so ingrained in day-to-day business administration, but in the long-run the benefits for progress outweigh the discomfort of breaking with tradition.
I would like to thank Jo Nicholas, Business Consultant, Kigali for inspiring this article.
