Using AI to Build Accountability in Meetings

Key Takeaways

• Uncommunicated expectations are unlikely to be met, so clarity must be created deliberately.
• AI-generated meeting notes can help capture decisions, actions and direct quotes without disrupting the flow of conversation.
• Structured preparation and documented follow-up make reviews, one-to-ones and offsites more effective.

Topics

• Leadership
• Team Management
• AI & Machine Learning
• Productivity

Transcript

Frustration is defined by the feeling of expectations not being met. But if you haven't communicated those expectations, then what's the chance that they're going to be met, right? And actually, I have in the past, again, being a bit of an entrepreneur, just get stuff done, go. I didn't put enough time and thought into being very methodical about things like how we're going to work together. And actually, I'll give people a pro tip for this one. Something I do now is I record the meetings I'm in locally on my machine and I transcribe them. Then I use Claude, or your other preferred AI tool, to create meeting notes. I've written a whole load of prompts for my regular things. I literally stick the transcript in there, edit it, put it into a rolling Google Doc, and now we have accountability, right? So I can still be very present in the discussion, like I am being with you now, and I'm not writing things down. Because really, when we have to write things down, you're really writing down just the actions. You're not really capturing it. One of the other things I do in my meeting notes is I always ask AI to directly quote from the conversation to support the point they're making, and then obviously you share it with the other people. And when you've got that, you can just go back and say, Let's check in. Let's just look at what the actions were from last time. Let's look at what we were talking about. How's that moved on? And you start to build more of a thread through your one-to-ones. And I think too many times one-to-ones are just like chats, catch-ups, check-ins. Like, nothing wrong with it, but also a bit unproductive, a bit like, meh. But actually, you can start to— I'm going to be doing all of my reviews next week for our six-month review. I'll just be going straight back to my one-to-one notes, and it's going to write half of my review for me. You start to get yourself organised up front. You can actually really achieve a lot, and that accountability, that black-and-white accountability, is just there. And then you take all of this hearsay and feelings and vibes, or whatever you want to call it, take that off the table. Let's just be clear. And when we're clear, things happen. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think what I see or what I listen there is slowing down to speed up. As you were talking about, entrepreneurs are do, do, do. And what you're talking about, like even using AI in that way, and to have a quarterly offsite or like a biweekly check-in, requires you to slow down, which is many times counterintuitive to traditional entrepreneurship way of thinking, like it needs to get done now. Add one thing to that: it would be slow down and prepare. So when we do the offsites, we will define the agenda at least a week before of what all the topics are.