I’ve been listening to career-related podcasts on my commute to and from work lately and one of my favorites is Manager Tools. They are basically two management consultants (Mark Horstman and Michael Auzenne) who talk about tips and tricks to being a good manager, which if you have supervised others at work, you know is not as easy as it seems.
One of the “casts” (that’s how they refer to the individual podcasts) dealt with running meetings, a topic that I have discussed previously. They highlighted the fact that as the meeting leader, you should not be trying to manage the documentation of the meeting because your role is to facilitate and if you are struggling to write things down, you aren’t focused on moving the discussion forward. They say you need a dedicated note-taker to transcribe the discussion.
That sounds great when you are having a daily, weekly or monthly staff meeting and all of the participants in the meeting are your direct reports and you can easily delegate the responsibilities of note-taker to someone on your team, but in my world, the majority of folks that I have meetings with (when I am the meeting organizer) are either peers or senior to me. I can’t just say, “You there, VP of Engineering. Please take notes during this discussion and distribute them to everyone present by the end of the day.” Well, I could, but it’s not likely that I would leading many more meetings (or anything else) at that company soon after.
So, it’s up to me, which brings us back to the podcast about meetings. Another recommendation that the folks at Manager Tools make is that the note-taker use something called the Cornell Method of Note-Taking. This piqued my interest because for as long an I can remember, I’ve never used a “method” for taking notes, either in school or in a business setting, although I’ve most likely been using some form of outline notes, since I tend to try to organize the notes into a hierarchy as I am writing them.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
During the podcast, Mark and Michael described the Cornell Method at a high-level and explained that there is a process for how you write the notes and what you do with them afterwards. The process involves dividing the note page into discrete sections that each have a unique function. There’s a notes, cues and summary section which are broken out on the page roughly 60/20/20.
The details of the discussion are written in the notes section and are distinct items that you hear in meeting. The folks at Manager Tools identify these as the who-what-when elements. Whenever you hear one of those things in a meeting, write it down in the notes section.The cues area is for supplemental notes that tie details together, diagrams or questions for follow up. In the Cornell Method, which was originally designed for college students, the cues are to be written after the lecture or chapter is completed and you have finished writing in the notes section, but for business notes, it makes more sense to use this area for alternative content such as organization charts, workflow diagrams or mindmaps.
Lastly the summary section is for capturing next steps, action items or surprise, surprise–a summary.
The benefit of this whole process is to help with the absorption of the information. In an educational setting, it helps students better understand and remember the information that they hear in class and read in their texts. The steps of capturing, reviewing and re-writing the notes in various ways helps to ingrain the content in their memory and gives them ways to assimilate the information together into their body of knowledge.
For business users, it provides a mechanism to capture different types of information in an organized way, even if the information is not presented in an organized fashion. The challenge of many meetings, especially at software companies and at startups in particular, is that the discussions in meetings are non-linear. They don’t move from topic to topic gracefully. They are more like a teenager trying to learn how to drive a car with a manual transmission in a parking lot. They lurch and stop and change direction and sometimes just go around in a circle. The Cornell Method could be a better way to capture all of the information, digest it, and make it easier to distribute to others.
Now, after having gone through all of that, I have a confession. I have NEVER used the Cornell Method. But, I am anxious to try it out. I have been doing some research on it and there are some online wizards that can help you make the templates for Microsoft Word or PDF. I plan to just manually divide my current notebook pages to save some trees, but I know that others prefer to have task-specific tools and I don’t begrudge them that choice.
If you have experience using the Cornell Note-Taking Method (or other similar methods) in either an educational or business environment, I’d love to hear what you like/dislike about it. I’m excited to try it out for myself.
(Note page layout image: University of Maine at Fort Kent)