Desperately Seeking Information

I have actually attended regularly scheduled post-meeting meetings to talk about what we heard in the meeting and make sure we all got the same message. That was painful.

Can I get an AMEN?

Psychologists can probably tell us why this happens. They describe one important, business necessary behavior as “Information seeking behavior.” This label describes the set of heuristics we use to find information that we have encountered before. We cannot recall everything, so our brains make use of their most powerful component, the visual cortex, to locate information we have encountered before. We recall whether the information was on the right-hand page or the left-hand page. We recall whether it was near the top, middle, or bottom. We choose this way of finding information before we attempt to recall the page number!

So why do we routinely ignore this powerful tool? If we publish minutes of the meeting after the meeting is over, no matter how well written, there is no visual cue to connect the minutes to the memory of the attendees. This problem is compounded when the minutes are edited for political acceptability or are very long.

We have literally crippled the ability of the attendees to access the meeting’s information content.

You may ask, “Why don’t they just take notes?” Because notes are a one-way street. They are a single lane, single direction channel that bypasses our reasoning. Almost nobody is effective at both transcribing and formulating a response. Notes work in a lecture, but nobody in a lecture is expected to participate. They fail miserably if the attendee is expected to contribute to the meeting content. Either there will be no notes, or there will be no participation, or there will be half useful notes and sub-standard participation.

Good news! There is a way past this. Use a business-smart artist to literally draw the meeting content live, in the view of all the attendees. Watching the drawing evolve as the meeting unfolds will provide the visual information seeking tools the attendees need, while the board itself provides a pleasing display of the meeting content for later reference. Then if you have a scribe typing notes at the back of the room, combine the two in book form for post-meeting reference.

This may not be the approach for all business meetings. However, when you want highly participative meetings with deep content, this is the perfect method. I would suggest you consider this approach for the following types of meetings:

1. Strategic planning meetings and conferences
2. Operational planning meetings and conferences
3. Design option meetings
4. All-hands meetings
5. Meetings that introduce difficult or controversial decisions, for which you want feedback

If you are interested in this kind of service, there are some options you might consider.

1. Send one or more of your team members to training in graphic recording.
2. Bring graphic recording training on-site to your team.
3. Retain the services of a graphic recorder.

There are a lot of options available. You don't have to live in status-quo.