What the Minutes Don't Say
Every meeting now writes itself down. That is not the same as being remembered.
The document
At the end of every meeting now, a document appears.
It is useful. It really is. I find in it what slipped past me — a figure I hadn't written down, a decision made while I was already thinking about the next one. I won't pretend otherwise: these automatic summaries have caught me more than once.
But I work in a profession built on listening to what isn't said.
What it cannot see
The machine gathers everything that was said. That is its whole job, and it does it well.
It does not see who went quiet.
It does not see the moment someone changed their mind without announcing it. It does not see the glance that settled a disagreement before anyone had to name it. It does not see the sentence delivered in a tone that reversed its meaning. It does not see the person who started three times and gave up.
None of that is decoration. In a room, that is very often where the decision actually happens. The words are only the part that surfaces.
What it decides
And there is something else, harder to sit with.
These summaries are not neutral. They rank what was never ranked. They assign intentions. They turn hesitations into positions, and half-formed thoughts into commitments. I have read the minutes of meetings I attended and not recognized what happened in the room.
This isn't a flaw waiting to be patched in the next release. Any summary has to compress, and compressing means choosing — what leads, what follows, what disappears altogether. Something is making that choice.
As the first part of this series put it: what we are dealing with is not an intelligence. It is an automaton. It has no view of the room. It has a method, written by people we will never meet, and the method decides.
Then the document gets filed. It is what we reread in six months. It is what the person who missed the meeting will read instead of asking. It is what settles the argument about who agreed to what.
It becomes the record.
No one decided this
That is the part that stays with me. Not the technology — the absence of a moment of decision.
Nobody in your organization sat down and agreed that the official memory of your meetings would be produced automatically, by a system nobody chose, according to criteria nobody has read. It arrived, because it was useful. And it was.
We didn't say yes. We didn't say no. We said nothing.
There is a modest way of taking that decision back, and it costs almost nothing. Read the summary before it circulates. Add the one line the machine could not have written: who wasn't heard, what was left unresolved, what the room actually felt like. Say plainly that the document is a summary, not the meeting.
That isn't resistance to a tool. It is authorship over your own team's memory.
The question that remains
Your last meeting is now a document.
Somewhere in that room, someone spoke and was recorded. Someone else didn't, and wasn't.
If this document becomes the memory of that meeting — who has disappeared from it?
Second of four in the series What We Hand Over. First part: This Is Not an Intelligence.
Carole Proszowski
Commentaires