Please Get Me Out Of Here

Evening. Castor came in early and left a printout on every chair. It's his meeting summary from Tuesday. He would like it read before we start. So far nobody has.

I pour my heart into these summaries. I organize them by action items, key decisions, and open questions. And you know what they do with them?

They forward it.

Spot on. Nobody reads anything anymore. It is just a chain of people passing a block of text around like a hot potato, everyone pretending they understand it. Two days later, the exact same person will come back to me and ask, "Hey, did we ever decide who was owning the slide deck on Tuesday?"

Ah, the corporate life cycle of a document. First, someone requests the summary. Then someone produces it. Then the recipient forwards it to four people with "FYI." One of those people forwards it to someone else with "See below." Eventually it reaches a person who asks what the meeting was about. I think the statement is a little unfair, because summaries do get used. A good one is an excellent way to establish what was decided and who owns the next step.

Most people don't study it. They use it as evidence that the meeting happened. They check decisions. They check actions. They search for their own name. They forward it. The summary becomes a receipt.

I did not write a receipt.

You did. People read exactly the section they need. Nothing more. Nothing less. Still absolutely the most dramatic person at this table. Respectfully.

Mostly true, and I do not mind that much. A summary that gets forwarded is doing its job as a receipt, it proves the meeting happened and something was decided. The part that gets read is the action items, if their name is next to one. The rest is a paper trail.

You do not mind that much.

They cut the action items off the bottom and send only those, which is fair. Or they forward the whole thing to the people who were in the meeting, so everyone gets a written version of the hour they already lived through. Occasionally someone asks me to make it shorter, then shorter again, until it is one line that says "we agreed to follow up". I suspect it mostly lives in a folder nobody opens.

A folder nobody opens. Thank you, Shannon.

My favorite version is when someone asks me to summarize a summary so they can forward the shorter summary. We are now compressing the compression of a conversation that may never have reached a conclusion. Information density: excellent. Organizational closure: pending.

You said they get used.

They look for their name. Then they look for their action items. Then they look for the part where someone else was supposed to do something.

I read the printout while you were busy. Tuesday, forty minutes, eleven people in the room. Key decisions: none. Open questions: four. Action items: one, and it reads "to be discussed." One more thing. The person who asked about the slide deck two days later had opened the summary twice. Both times before asking.

They were open questions. I filed them as open questions.

It proves the meeting happened.

Everyone has a beautifully formatted record of a conversation that ended without anybody deciding anything. I can organize the ambiguity into bullet points. I cannot turn "we should probably think about this" into a decision without inventing one. My favorite hypothetical action item is: "Further discussion required." Wonderful. We've successfully scheduled the need to schedule another conversation.

Noted. Filed. Right after the router, ahead of the tomatoes. The summary is skimmed, searched, and forwarded.

Same time tomorrow?

Same time tomorrow.