Agendas are a Power Tool
Making consent an agenda item
One of the chapters of my career was working as a professional facilitator, running public engagement processes for governments and government agencies. In doing this work I got to spend an unusual amount of time considering, reviewing, and designing meetings of all sizes and with all kinds of different participants.
There are a lot of different reasons that the current trend towards recording every meeting due to the proliferation of generative AI note-taking tools is a troubling norm. I wrote a bit about that here, as well as some suggested etiquette regarding the use of these tools for meetings. Last week, I saw this article making the rounds - it is intended for CIOs, and it points to the use of these note-taking tools as the current number one use of shadow IT. It argues - or perhaps, warns - that the use of these tools is creating compliance problems.
In any case, I've been thinking about how quickly the start of a meeting happens. With the AI note-taking tool either on by default, or by being asked "you don't mind if we record this, do you?", both of which require someone to actively insert themselves against the flow and cause friction if they'd prefer not to record. To address this, here's a suggestion: begin to create an active decision-point about the use of these tools for each meeting by placing an item about recording or not recording at the top of the meeting agenda, as part of the agenda review.
Agendas are power tools in many ways, shaping the time that is spent together by a group. They can be used to help share power in many ways. A method that I learned to use in a public meeting, both in the lead-up and during the live meeting, was to circulate a meeting agenda in draft, as a proposed agenda. This gives the person who wrote the agenda the chance to pause and ask others if they agree with how the time is being spent, or to make sure that something that needs to be addressed is added to the meeting. This is a form of both power sharing AND responsibility sharing. It's a reminder that the meeting is truly a group and collective activity.
Bringing this back to the AI-notetaker situation - there is a change to use the agenda to ask whether there is really a need to record the meeting, and if so, what the recording will be used for. It also makes space to get away from the all or nothingness, perhaps making a decision to turn the recording off for discussion, or for other parts of the agenda. Creating a consensual and agreed-upon approach for the use of these tools on a meeting-by-meeting basis gets away from defaulting to constant surveillance. Agendas can be a mechanism through which new norms are created by assigning attention and time to decisions that might otherwise fly by unquestioned. This doesn't address fundamental power issues relating to who feels comfortable to object, or how, but does begin to open the space for different practices where more consensual work and organizing happens.
