As all diligent fans of continuous improvement, I listen to Jeff Bezos (who I think is a bit of a problematic figure overall) when he talks about management. And like so many others, I was struck by the practise of “meeting memos” quite some time ago.

What are Meeting Memos?

If you’re not aware: those are documents written in continuous prose to lay out all required information and possible choices for the participants in a meeting. At Amazon, this practise seems to be employed and replaces using slides in meetings. Everyone sits in the meeting and quietly reads the text, then discussing it afterwards. This way, everyone is (literally) on the same page; reading activates much more thinking – and writing forces the presenter to be much more clear and concise in their analysis and presentation.

We tested this approach in a few meetings and generally liked it a lot. So now it’s something that will grow over time and make us work a little better.

But while I wrote the first memos for myself, I realised how strong the effect on my own thinking was to write a couple of pages of prose. It will not surprise a reader that I like to write, so I hypothesised: do others experience a similarly strong positive effect on their thinking when writing memos?

Experimentation

I set out with my team to test it, starting with asking some people to prepare meeting memos instead of presentations. They all reported that initially, it was a bit hard, but after a while they got into it and looking back, they enjoyed the increased quality of their thinking and the presentation of their results. Sounds good!

But I felt there is more power to the method. So I sat down and reflected some more on the advantages of writing (and reading). This is what I came up with, under the assumption that regular feedback on the texts would lead to the writer taking writing seriously:

• Logical Reasoning: Writing instead of talking or making a PowerPoint slides forces you to think through the entire reasoning logically, because it has to be laid out logically.
• Comprehensive Thought Process: Writing leads to a much more comprehensive thought process: you immediately notice flaws, missing arguments, find more possible conclusions and so on, because you’re reading while you’re writing – and your reading brain exposes these things (as long as you keep an open mind about it).
• Focus: Writing focuses you – while some people can multitask a bit while writing, most can’t, and either way you are still focusing a lot more on writing than on, say, putting some bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. Writing also has another subtle effect I really enjoy: because you need to focus, interruptions cost you a lot of effort – so most people will try to reduce them and stay focused on writing, which means they’re staying focused on the topic!
• Accountability: Writing creates accountability, because your reasoning is clearly laid out. Others can read it and hold you easily accountable on what you propose in your memo, there’s much less wiggle room compared to slides because in a prose writeup, you also convey a lot more context, anchoring your reasoning. It also increases accountability on the entire team if they, say, accept your written proposal – they have all read and understood a much more stringent and comprehensive argument than agreeing after sitting (sleeping) through a presentation.
• Documentation: Writing produces documentation. That part is almost trivial it seems, but have you tried to go through a slide deck 5 years after it was presented to you? Try it! In the written memo form, if it’s done well and in a self-contained form, you can easily pull it out 20 years later and understand.

I’m sure there are more advantages, and of course, there are cons to doing a lot of writing as well: it takes a lot of time, it is hard for some people to write continuous prose, and reading through a document takes more time than skimming a couple of slides. As an aside, I think writing fits perfectly into the LLM world of chatGPT – you can summarise a long document when in a hurry, or can ask AI to correct your style and spelling.

A Natural Place for This Tool: Leadership

So, with all of that analysis done – where is a natural place for this tool? I think it’s in leadership. Leaders need to be razor-sharp in their thinking, they need to communicate well, they need to be accountable, and they need to understand what to focus on.

Introducing The Leadership Diary

I tested it with my leadership team and invite anyone to try it out (and please tell me how it worked out for you). This is my format, which I call “The Leadership Diary”:

Every two weeks, everyone in my leadership team prepares an individual continuous prose-style document of at least one page. As a minimum requirement, the document should contain the important activities, issues, and learnings of the past two weeks; and it should contain reflections on the long-term implications, priorities, and plans for everything they are responsible for.

We upload these documents into an online whiteboard which never changes (so we can go and look back to compare) before a set meeting. At the beginning of that meeting, we make sure that psychological safety is very high – we check in as persons (not in our roles at the job only), find out how everyone is feeling, and casually repeat that the meeting is a forum to discuss the most important items of our organisation, and not criticise individual decisions or actions.

After that, we all take the required time to carefully read through everyone’s document and make notes – comments, questions, suggestions, assessments, and even notes about (dis)satisfaction – about the content of every note (we don’t explicitly discuss style, because I find that in this case form follows function and a badly styled memo will lead to a lot of comments and questions, autocorrecting the behaviour). This often takes half an hour.

Next, everyone reads carefully through all notes on their own document, and prepares to answer questions, take up a discussion, argue for a decision etc. If any items come up that require a longer conversation, we pull them into another meeting to specifically address them, potentially with a different group of participants. Due to the regular cadence, we can follow the journey of everyone’s priorities and issues through time, and sometimes go back if there are unexpected events or outcomes.

Feedback

What does the team think, you ask? They don’t love it! They don’t hate it either. It takes a lot of time for them to write these “diaries”, time they have to carve out of a busy schedule. And discussions about everyone’s priorities can sometimes feel irrelevant to someone’s individual requirements. But – they realise that the increased focus and rigour in their priority setting helps them to avoid issues. They say that knowing what is important for other parts of the organisation helps to plan and create synergetic activities. They feel more connected to each other because everyone is being vulnerable and shows weaknesses, like mistakes they made or where they need help.

I would say, as a leader all that is very valuable, and after we stopped doing it for a while, my team asked to restart it – which is all the signal I need, that it is after all valuable to them, too.

In closing, I would like to encourage everyone to try it out!
And ping me on LinkedIn or via mail if you have questions or learned something cool!