Just talking
The simplest meetings have people just talking to each other. The just talking pattern is vulnerable to the following problems:
- false agreement, that is, people believing there is agreement due to misunderstanding what was said;
- repetition due to exceeding working memory, that is, people forget that they’ve already talked about something so they keep cycling on the same points;
- repetition due to unclear acknowledgement, that is, people keep repeating points because they’re not sure they were heard.
Live notes
Slightly better meetings have a scribe to capture live notes. For example, someone at the whiteboard or a shared doc.
A bad variant during video calls is scribing in a hidden fashion, that is, not sharing the document, from a mistaken belief that it’s better to see each other. Hidden notes eventually does address false agreement (if notes are reviewed at the end) but doesn’t address any of the issues that cause unnecessary repetition of points.
The single scribe pattern is good for capturing ideas and not so good for generating ideas given the bottleneck of one person writing.
Multiple scribes
For idea generation, it’s more effective to have multiple scribes and eventually integrate into a single thread. Shared docs and writing on physical whiteboards are not good at this and never were. Index cards on a table are better. Virtual whiteboards like Mural and Miro also work.
