Field Notes

Field notes: the first week of writing things down

Seven days, one shared document, and the uncomfortable discovery of how little we had actually agreed on.

We started small: one shared document, one rule. Anything that changed how someone else would spend their week got a line in it - what we decided, who decided, and the date.

By Wednesday the document had eleven lines. By Friday it had four, because we had gone back and deleted seven of them. Not because they were wrong, but because writing them down showed that we had never really agreed on them. Two people had walked out of the same meeting with two different decisions.

That was the whole lesson of week one. The document did not make us decide better. It showed us how often we had not decided at all.

Next week: what we changed about meetings once we could see that.

Discussion