Organizational Memory
Meetings card, MethodKit for Memory & Reminiscence
Card 34 of 66 · MethodKit for Memory & Reminiscence
  • ThemeOperations & Process
  • CardCard 34 of 66
  • Questions5 to explore
Operations & Process

Meetings

How you conduct meetings & when

How an organization runs its meetings reveals a lot about how it makes decisions, and the patterns are worth making explicit.

Meetings are one of the main ways organizations coordinate, and yet the norms around them are usually unwritten: which meetings are recurring, what they are for, how they are run, who needs to be there, and what good output looks like. People carry those norms in their heads and apply them inconsistently.

Making meeting culture explicit does not mean adding more rules. It means capturing what the organization has already decided works: the cadences that matter, the formats that produce useful output, and the expectations people should be able to rely on.

For new people especially, understanding how meetings work is one of the less obvious but important parts of understanding how the organization operates.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

Recurring meeting cadences

The regular meetings that keep the organization running, including their purpose, frequency, typical attendees, and who facilitates.

Meeting norms

The expectations the organization has around how meetings are run: preparation, agendas, decisions, notes, and follow-up.

Decision & note-taking practices

Where meeting notes go, how decisions are recorded and communicated, and who is responsible for following up on actions.

When not to meet

What the organization considers a good reason to skip a meeting or replace it with something asynchronous.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

  1. Which meetings are essential and recurring, and is the purpose of each one clear to everyone who attends?

  2. How are decisions made in meetings recorded and communicated to people who were not in the room?

  3. What are the informal norms around preparation, punctuality, and follow-through, and are they consistent across teams?

  4. Where do meeting notes live, and can someone who missed a meeting reliably find out what was decided?

  5. Which meetings feel like they could be replaced by something else, and what does that say about how work actually gets coordinated?

Things to notice

  • Meeting culture is easy to describe aspirationally but hard to document honestly; the written norms often reflect how people wish meetings ran rather than how they actually do.
  • If decisions made in meetings are not recorded anywhere, those decisions effectively disappear for anyone who was not present.
  • Recurring meetings that no longer have a clear purpose tend to persist because stopping them requires a decision no one makes; documenting the original purpose makes it easier to evaluate whether they still serve it.