I am often in the position to be a silent witness to some of the great facilitated conversations we have with our customers. I’m there for a purpose: to document the session with photography and a transcript. A transcript is one of many tools we use to help our customers, and its existence has a wide variety of effects. This is the first in a series of blogs describing these effects.

A highly selective view from the front of the room. Photo credit: David Frackelton

So why does The Canoe Group use a transcript to document group planning discussions? While there are many reasons, the most important is to capture what really happened at the meeting.

We have all participated in meeting where someone was driving a particular agenda. Agendas are a shorthand for what I would call stories we are committed to. Planning meetings are rich with stories and here is an abecedarium of agendas I’ve witnessed and transcribed:

• We should get rid of A (person, practice or program) in our organization that is in the way of the progress we should have been making on B (person, practice or program).
• I’m afraid that if we start doing the C project everyone is excited about, critical issues D and E will become much worse.
• We have a new opportunity here to do F better and I’ve got to personally push it or it won’t happen because G (person, practice or program) is in the way.
• We are in a deep crisis and leadership by H (person or committee) is required.
• We continue to be stuck talking about issue I all these years and yet the problems of J and K have not gotten any better in spite of many conversations like these in the past.
• Those big personalities (L, M and N) do most of the talking and we need to hear other voices in the room, particularly from O.
• I’ve got to get a complement in about P (person, practice or program) from Q (funding institution) so that they pay attention to me the next time R (funding request) happens.
• The R, S and T board committees aren’t doing their job and that needs to be fixed by U right away.
• I’ve got this wonderful story about how things used to be and how important it is to remember V (person, practice or program) as it applies to current situation W.
• X is what we have been doing successfully for years and we need to continue to improve it before we look at Y and Z programs.

I’m sure that some of these stories sound familiar, as this is the normal “stuff” of facilitated meetings. Individuals’ preoccupation with their stories is not misbehavior or even a problem, but rather what happens when groups of people get together to talk about things they are passionate about.

These stories frequently find their way on to flip charts and into the group exercises used in facilitated meetings. When passed through the filter of group decision making, the stories influence and guide the subsequent reports, action plans and operational activities. Stories are the important learnings that need to be exposed in order to support the next stage of development of an organization.

So about our frequent use of transcripts… we’ve found they are an important part of a thorough technical analysis of a planning session (one of several I’ll be talking about over these next few entries). Transcripts provide a meaningful way for participants to review and reflect about the meeting. They are frequently essential documents when an organization has a lot of history or a critical problem to solve.

Next time I’ll write about what we do with these transcripts and particularly the use of wordle.net as an analytic tool during and after the meeting.