In today’s bulletin, Charlie talks about transcribing in meetings and looks into the pros and cons of recording meetings.

I was having a long discussion with my colleague, Jamie Lees, this morning all about a talk we are giving for Business Continuity Awareness Week. We have a working title of “Man or Machine: Who Should Run Your Next Crisis? A Real-Life Comparison of AI and Humans Managing an Incident”. The purpose of the webinar will be on how to use AI for incident management, where does it add value, and where is it a distraction or doesn’t help at all. We debated whether we should use AI as part of the logging role to transcribe incident team meetings at any level. So in this week’s bulletin, I will share some ideas on the pros and cons of using AI in team meetings to produce a log of what happened.

When I wrote the first version of our Loggist training course, there was discussion as to whether you should record incident team meetings using a small tape recorder, or whether you should have the incident room recorded with CCTV to capture sound. There was no right answer to this and each individual organisation had to make up their own mind about whether to use recording devices or not.

The reasons for using recordings were as follows:

1. It recorded exactly what happened in the meeting which loggist notes might miss.
2. It took the pressure off the administration coordinator or Loggist, as they could go back to the recording if they missed anything.
3. There was a contemporaneous record of the meeting, so there was a recording of how decisions were made, what was agreed upon when, and by whom.
4. The tone of the meeting was recorded, which is difficult to capture in the notes.
5. Can record side meetings or meetings outside the main meeting where decisions may be made or information shared.
6. In a fast-moving situation with multiple meetings, it may be difficult to have enough Loggists to capture all the information discussed and all the decisions made.
7. Loggists, while they will try to be objective, may apply their own biases in what they record, or they may, under pressure, not capture all relevant points from the meeting.
8. Information not seen as relevant at the time and not logged may become important later.

The reasons for not using recording were as follows:

1. People may not want to express their true feelings or feel inhibited if they know they are being recorded.
2. All recordings are admissible legally, so they would have to be made available to anyone who is legally entitled to them.
3. Comments said in the heat of a meeting from people under pressure may be taken out of context or used against the participants.
4. Recordings can produce vast volumes of data which have to be indexed and stored.
5. If recordings were transcribed, this could be time-consuming and costly as it had to be done by a person.

To get the best of both worlds, a colleague said that they recorded the meeting and then the Loggist deleted the recordings once they had the information they wanted. This was the worst of both worlds in that you didn’t have the recording as evidence, but deleted evidence, which might be construed that you had something to hide, and that’s why the recordings were deleted.

In my experience, most organisations did not record incident meetings as they felt that, on balance, the benefits of recording were outweighed by the benefits of not recording the meeting.

Within the last few months, many organisations have started using the transcribe function of Zoom or Teams or standalone meeting transcribing software such as Otter, to record general business meetings. These systems transcribe your meeting verbatim, and then turn it into a set of notes which contains key points and actions. You need to check them and sometimes rewrite sections, but they are fairly accurate. We used to have a notetaker for our weekly team meetings, but we now no longer do this as we have the team meeting transcribed.

For me, the benefit of having notes transcribed automatically is a game changer for incident team meetings, and I now come down on the side that we should use the technology. The benefits are that we have notes of the meeting fairly instantaneously after the meeting. They should be checked, but they then allow the Loggist to concentrate on what people are saying and recording the key actions, rather than trying to note the whole meeting. If Loggists aren’t available, then the technology can be used.

There being a full transcription of the meeting is one of the downsides and reasons for not recording, so off-hand or inappropriate comments will still be captured, and could be evidence in litigation. At the moment people seem a lot more comfortable with transcribing meetings. We ask at any external meeting if the participants are happy to have the meeting transcribed, and to date, we have not had anyone ask us not to. We do a little censoring of the meetings we transcribe, and if we don’t know the person or it is a sensitive industry, we don’t even ask and wait until we know each other better.

There are some limitations with the technology as it is not always accurate. It also works well in a meeting where all participants are online as it then knows who said what. If a meeting is face-to-face, many systems cannot differentiate between different voices, and so they attribute all conversations to the person who logged onto the system. Some of the nuance, then, of who said what and what actions and comments were allocated to whom, would be lost. I am sure this will get better as technology improves and systems are able to differentiate between different voices in face-to-face meetings.

I think the recording/transcribing of meetings should be revisited, and be used in an exercise to see if it adds value and saves time. So go out there and see if it works for your incident team, and if yes, write it into your incident management plan or procedures.