I joined a meeting the other day and, for a moment, it was just me and the notetaker.
Not for the whole thirty minutes – five other people eventually arrived, each with an apology about a call that ran long – but for the first four minutes it was just the two of us. Me and the notetaker. Naturally, I found myself doing the thing you do when you’re alone with someone that’s paying such close attention. I said good morning, sat up a little straighter, and maintained eye contact with, well, no one…
The notetaker sat there in the participant list with its small icon and its parenthetical (Recording) fully present and entirely ready. I thought he was being a bit judgy and faintly reproachful – like that guy I used to work with who always did the pre-work/pre-read before any meeting.
Then the others showed up and the meeting was par for the course: nine people invited, six who came, and four cameras on. During a stretch around minute nine the conversation drifted into a story about a former co-worker we all despised so we shared some hearty guffaws. Then, at about minute twenty-one, Troy and Selena talked over each other, stopped, and then never returned to their respective points. Underneath all of it ran the ordinary current of a working meeting as half the people present were doing something else with most of their attention. Everyone knew this and nobody minded.
The transcript, of course, captured none of that.
Clean, Attributed and Wrong
What the AI transcripts capture in these sorts of meetings is nine thousand words of clean, attributed, evenly weighted discourse in which every participant is fully present, fully engaged, and speaking with equal deliberateness. It reads the way a court reporter’s record of a poker game would read: every bet accurately logged and not a single facial expression described.
Sarcasm arrives in the document as sincerity, jokes are preserved as commitments, and the lengthy silence after somebody asks about the potential for layoffs – the single most informative event of the hour! – appears in the file as nothing at all.
Silence, extraordinarily powerful yet absent a voice that our notetaker can turn into notes, loses all meaning.
Then the summary lands, and the summary is its own genre. There are Key Discussion Points, written in a register of pleasant executive neutrality that not a single soul in the meeting would have used. There are Decisions, a generous descriptor, since a decision requires that somebody decide, and what happened was that a senior person said she thought the team was aligned and nobody objected quickly enough.
And there are Action Items which are entirely their own form of fiction. The notetaker has taken someone’s offhand comment – “I can probably take a look at that” – and converted it into a task with an owner, a priority level and a due date.
Nobody Reads the Transcript
None of that concerns me really; these notetakers are a timesaver and an invaluable assistant when folks can’t make a meeting. They’re certainly much more reliable than the person who used to capture “meeting minutes” on the back of a paper agenda.
What concerns me is that the summary becomes the record.
Obviously, nobody reads a nine-thousand-word transcript. And almost nobody opens the recording. So what circulates is the summary. And then, let’s imagine it’s a project or initiative that has regular meetings over months and months and months – what ultimately begins to circulate is a summary of the summaries. All assembled from a shared folder and transcribed and interpreted by a “notetaker.”
Therefore, the institutional memory of what your organization decided in the second quarter now sits three generations of abstraction away from anyone’s specific and human recollection. And every one of those generations was produced by a system that cannot distinguish between a person making a commitment (“I’ll do it!”) and a person being polite (“I can probably take a look at that”).
Understanding that distinction is part of our jobs…isn’t it?
Mr. DeMille, I’m Ready for My Close-Up
So then, I got to wondering, because they know the record will exist – in perpetuity – won’t some people merely begin performing for the notetaker? Maybe somebody will say, a little more loudly than the moment requires, that they want to be clear they raised the timeline concern. Now that is a sentence addressed to no one in the meeting but to everyone in the future.
So the tone begins to shift a few degrees toward “on-the-record;” the way it shifts when the defendant’s attorney walks into the room on Law & Order. Suddenly, the best parts of a meeting – the loose thinking, the half-formed ideas, or the nonsensical brainstorming that might turn into something super cool – will cease to happen because the notetaker is there preserving every single utterance.
It’s the Hawthorne Effect in real life; the disturbance of a system by the act of observation. Now embedded in the Weekly Sync of the Acme Corporation’s Operations Team.
And another thing that gives me pause is that showing up becomes optional in ways it never quite was before. The person who would once have accepted now freely declines because she figures she can catch up later. Invitations expand because that becomes the “mailing list” with one click while attendance and participation erode because it costs less to skip. The notetaker’s summary, after all, becomes the primary version of the event for most of the people it concerns.
The meeting has thusly been converted, without anyone deciding to convert it, from something a group of people did together … into a document a machine produced about them.
Dancing with Myself
Which brings me back to a story I keep hearing from people who swear it happened to them: the recurring invite that ran its full half hour with exactly one participant present, that participant being the notetaker. So, the notetaker transcribed the silence and produced a summary anyway. Two lines (start time/end time) distributed via email to eleven people – none of whom replied.
I’m not arguing for less technology or even fewer notetakers; I would rather have today’s artifacts than the versions from the past when we reconstructed meeting minutes out of memory and self-interest.
But we do have to decide, deliberately, which meetings exist to produce a record, and which exist to produce a judgment. And then we need to staff them accordingly, because if the machine is going to memorialize what was said … someone who was there still must memorialize what was meant.
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