I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer.
e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons.
In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them.
I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.
Not shilling, but Microsoft Teams with a Premium license does this, and it works very well. I am not sure how I feel about this, though - not everything needs to be 'on the record'. It's beneficial for most topics, but most != all.
In one conversation, their AI saw right through me tiptoeing around a delicate matter where a problem was caused by a client's inaction. The meeting summary laid it out correctly, but it wasn't great from a relationship perspective.
Whisper-X does speaker-annotated transcripts nicely. I’ve used it for running multi-hour TTRPG sessions with friends and it worked hassle-free after setup.
I have tried a few of the LLM solutions. So far for me https://fathom.video is head and shoulders above the rest, excellent speaker annotation and LLM summarization, full video recording and matching video position to transcript (i.e. click on section of transcript to go to that part of the video), reasonable pricing, decent free tier. I have no affiliation at all with Fathom, just enjoy their product!
People may hate Jira and Atlassian, but let me tell you that one of the most magical things ever is recording a meeting in Look, having the action items immediately turned into Jira tickets or Confluence tasks, and a summary of the meeting posted to a Confluence page, tagging the appropriate people and with a link to the full recording.
This is built into Atlassian’s Teamwork Collection.
I thought that, too, but I'm seeing lots of companies in tech implement this almost by default because it's built-in to tools that are adding a lot of tangible value.
This seems like it might have the second order effect of increasing meeting volume, though, until the equilibrium point of it not actually reducing your workload.
e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons.
In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them.
I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.