Joep Schuurkes (Posts about facilitation)

Five levels of note-taking in meetings

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMT

level 0: no one takes notes

Few things confuse me as much as being a meeting with no one taking notes. Is everyone's memory so much better than my own? Is what's being said just not that important? Are people fine with only retaining a few things and nothing else?

Luckily I'm not alone. Johanna Rothman seems to agree with me, at least for essential meetings:¹

If a meeting is essential, it will have an agenda. It will have minutes. It will have a list of action items, and someone will manage them so that people are accountable for their action items.
- Modern Management Made Easy by Johanna Rothman

That's why it's level 0. There's no reason to ever be at this level. Borrow some pen and paper. use your phone. The least you can do is take notes for yourself.

Making meetings work

Joep Schuurkes — Tue, 30 May 2023 07:31:25 GMT

Too often I've heard people say: "Oh no, not another meeting!" Usually this means they feel their time at work is split between time in meetings and time in which they do actual work. And to be fair, they have a point. I too have been in plenty of meetings that didn't achieve much of anything. It doesn't have to be this way, however. Meetings can be effective and they can leave you with a real sense of having accomplished something. And in this post I'll explain how to make that happen.

We struggle with meetings

Sisyphus by Titian

We struggle with meetings. On the one hand we keep proposing them, scheduling them, attending them. On the other hand we keep complaining about them. We feel sorry for people with a day full of meetings. When a meeting ends early, we "get 10 minutes of our lives back".

To that I say:

If you feel you do all your work outside of meetings, you're meeting wrong.

It's something I realized while I was a scrum master: my work happens during meetings. Mostly team meetings and 1-to-1s. There's prep before and follow-up after meetings, but I did the core of my job through meetings.

Structuring group discussions with K-cards

Joep Schuurkes — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 17:27:30 GMT

K-cards are often used at peer conferences to facilitate the discussion after someone has presented their experience report. Some people really hate them. In my experience they're a great tool to enable rich conversations. Since the facilitator uses the K-cards to structure the discussion in threads, K-cards allow the group to drill down to the details of the experience report. This instead of the conversation jumping around as person 1 broaches topic A, person 2 introduces topic B, and person 3 wants to return to topic A.

The explanation of these K-cards often takes the form of "This is what each card means." instead of "This is when to use this card for what purpose." And despite the elegance of the K-cards system, when you learn about them during the opening of a peer conference, it's a lot of information to digest. So I hope this blog post will be useful as a written explanation of how to use K-cards.