Recording, Notes and What to Keep

Two failure modes, both common. A team with no record of decisions repeats the same arguments annually. A team that records everything has an archive nobody searches because the signal is buried.

The distinction that resolves it is between context and artefact.

Context versus artefact

Context is the discussion: the exploration, the options, the back-and-forth. Useful at the time, occasionally useful later, low value per word.

Artefact is the output: what was decided, what was agreed, what someone committed to. High value, small volume, needed months later.

Most teams capture context in volume and artefacts not at all. The recording of a ninety-minute call is context. The three sentences stating what was decided are the artefact, and they are what someone will need in a year.

Separate them physically. Notes in one place, decisions in another findable one. Not a heading in the same document — a different location that can be browsed on its own.

What is worth keeping

Decisions, with reasoning. What was decided, by whom, when, why, and what was considered and rejected. The rejected options matter most: without them the same proposal returns every year and nobody remembers why it was declined.

Commitments. Who agreed to do what by when.

Anything a future person will need to understand why the system, process or arrangement is the way it is.

Incident timelines.

That is close to the whole list. Everything else can be discarded without loss.

Meeting recordings

Useful for people in other time zones and for anyone who missed it. Genuinely valuable, and frequently misused as a substitute for notes.

Nobody watches a ninety-minute recording. They will read a summary. Record if it costs nothing, but do not treat recording as having documented the meeting.

Say that it is being recorded, at the start, every time. In several jurisdictions this is a legal requirement, not a courtesy, and in all of them it changes what people say — which is worth knowing when you decide whether to record a discussion that needs candour.

Set a retention period. Recordings accumulate, contain personal data, and become a liability nobody has considered. Decide how long they are kept and delete on schedule.

Automated transcription and summaries

Increasingly available and worth using with caution.

Transcripts are context, not artefacts. A transcript of a meeting is longer than the meeting and nobody reads it.

Automated summaries are a draft. They miss the thing that mattered and confidently record something that was rejected. A human should confirm the decisions before they become the record.

Consent and data handling. Where recordings and transcripts are processed by third-party services, that is a data protection question, particularly for meetings involving personal or confidential matters.

Practical conventions

A decision record format, short and standard: context, options, decision, reasoning, date, owner. Half a page.

One location for decisions, browsable in reverse chronological order.

A named note-taker for meetings that produce decisions. Rotate it. Without a named person, everyone assumes someone else is capturing it.

Post the decisions where affected people will see them, not only where they are stored.

The test

A year from now, someone asks why the team does something a particular way.

If the answer requires reading chat history or asking whoever was there, the record failed. If it is a link, it worked.

That is the whole standard, and it is met by keeping a small number of things well rather than everything badly.