Life's a Journey; Take Good Notes

Take notes to take note

Here's a brief recap of my last five posts:

1. You Are a Grand Synthesis - You are the sum total of a complex myriad of inputs. You are a unique synthesis. Be aware of all the puzzle pieces you've been collecting and incorporating into your worldview.

2. Raising Your Own Awareness - A journal can help raise your awareness, which can lead to summoning your inner observer more regularly and more intentionally.

3. Habit-Propelled - Make writing part of your routine. Practice makes better.

4. Nuance and Generosity - You have to observe with an open mind to not miss wisdom from unlikely places.

5. Mining for Gems - There are nuggets of wisdom everywhere. The more you look for them, the more you will find.

From Private Victory to Public Victory

Bringing all of this together, the overarching goal is to keep a better record of your own journey. In the moment, having access to this record will make it easier to recall the observations you've had and the gems you've discovered. And over the long run, reviewing and reflecting on this record will give you more opportunities to spot trends in your thinking, which can help lead you to the discovery of your passion, your philosophy, and your mission.

This private victory sets you up for public victory. Armed with this growing record and this growing awareness, you will bring more value to all of your interactions. Your insights will have more depth and your note-taking will be a model for others to follow.

Uplevel Your Meetings

Just as your own journey benefits from high quality notes, so does a team's journey. And with meetings being a vital component of team operation, they are a great example to showcase how your upleveled observing and capturing can add value to the team.

A meeting is good when it drives progress. A meeting is great when that progress is captured. What decisions were made? What options were ruled out? How does this impact the overall plan? What are the concrete next steps, and who owns each of those?

Drive Progress

You can help drive progress by modeling observing. In Raising Your Own Awareness, I went through the crawl/walk/run progression for developing your inner observer. The next step in this progression is to model observing to others, and meetings are a great place to do this. As the team members (yourself included) are interacting, what are you observing? What is the dynamic in the room? How well is the conversation staying on topic?

Periodically create space during a meeting to check in on how that meeting is going. "We're at a good transition spot, so why don't we take a step back for a second. I really like how structured we were for that topic, but did anything jump out at you as being an opportunity for doing it even better?" If no one has anything, be prepared with an addition of your own to stimulate the topic.

Capture Progress

Whatever progress is made in a meeting, it is short-lived if it is not captured effectively. If you didn't write it down, then you're relying on the memories of all the attendees to ensure that the appropriate actions are taken. And, further, you are subject to the interpretations of those attendees. Clarity comes from capturing the progress.

If you want to ensure that notes are captured during a meeting, then start the meeting off by projecting the notes (virtual meetings: share your screen; in-person meetings: project to any available display in the room) for all attendees to see. Leave these notes displayed whenever possible, only switching away when other content needs to be presented. Secondly, make sure that all attendees have access to and can edit these notes. Encourage people to add to the notes as the meeting progresses.

Then start your modeling. Rather than using your own private observer journal, in the meeting just start capturing your observations directly in the public meeting notes. When attendees see that the notes are not just capturing what has been said, but also what you have observed, they will start to notice more themselves … and then hopefully add their observations to the notes.

Synthesis Mindset

Most meeting software comes with transcription capabilities. And with that comes the ability to have AI-generated notes of the meeting. If you've ever missed a meeting and had to use these AI results to catch up, what have you found? The AI-generated notes will most of the time correctly summarize what was said in the meeting. And sometimes it may attempt to capture the mood of the room. But, for the most part, these AI notes are clinical. Standing on their own, they are missing a lot of team context.

The more that your inner observer is showing up in the meeting notes, the more of your Grand Synthesis you are leveraging, and the more value you are bringing to the discussion. As more participants follow your lead and contribute their observations, these all contribute to the team's collective synthesis. You are all bringing more context, and connecting more dots. You are all contributing a verse to the team's collective story.

AI is great at summarizing what has been given to it. Spoken words in the meeting. Written words in the meeting notes. But AI can't summarize your thoughts. So bring more of your thoughts into all of your meeting notes, and the results will be more profound.

Take more notes. The future you will thank you for it. And share more notes. The present and future team will thank you for it.