What about the aside conversations?
One of the prerequisites of minute taking as we know it is the process of the meeting being linear and not too fast. “Please just one person talks at a time, otherwise I can’t keep up”.
So what, isn’t that how we operate in our meetings? Well, yes and no. In traditional meetings, only one person can talk at a time (learn more) and there are many reasons why what is said is not necessarily what people think (learn more). This makes deliberation not just slow but sometimes forces the real discussion outside the meeting or conference. People have their conversations in twos and threes, where they are more comfortable and feel at liberty to be more open about their ideas, motives and observations.
From a perspective of documentation this is worst case. Such deliberately informal multi-threaded conversations cannot be recorded. They are willfully ‘under the radar’. At best (or worst) such side discussions are documented in personal memos which keep track of arrangements and favors owed.
A Loss of context
Reduction of the minutes to conclusions and actions comes at a price even if perfectly executed. A good discussion produces a lot more than just a conclusion which is, of course, its most immediate result. Beyond that, a good discussion or brainstorming produces context and lots of useful information. After all, that discussion or brainstorming or multi-criteria analysis was by people specifically invited to and entrusted with deliberating that issue.
Let’s look at two situations in which this loss of information might matter quite a bit.