The Minutes

The meeting lasted two hours and ten minutes and produced no decision, which was neither anybody's intention nor anybody's fault. Four things had to be settled in a particular order, and the first of them could not be settled until a figure arrived that had been requested three weeks earlier and was not expected before the following Monday.

What the room did instead was discuss the second, third and fourth items conditionally, on the assumption that the figure would be one of two values. This was not wasted effort. It meant that when the figure came, the remaining decisions could be taken by circulation rather than in a room.

The difficulty lay in recording it. A minute that says the committee considered items two to four and reached no conclusion is accurate, useless and, in six months, actively misleading: it will be read as evidence that the committee was unable to decide, which is the opposite of what happened.

Roskilde, who took the minutes, wrote instead a paragraph setting out both branches, naming the figure that would decide between them, and stating in a single sentence what would follow in each case. It ran to less than a page and it took her most of an afternoon.

Emeka, reading it a year later in circumstances nobody had foreseen, was able to establish in ten minutes what the committee had thought, what it had been waiting for and why the eventual decision had gone the way it did. No other document from that year permits anything of the kind.

The convention that grew out of this is unglamorous and has survived four changes of chair. Where a meeting reaches no decision, the minute records the condition on which the decision turns, in terms specific enough that a reader who was not present can tell whether that condition has since been met.

It is worth saying what this does not solve. It does not make meetings shorter, it does not prevent the figure from arriving late, and it places a demand on the person taking the minutes that not everyone can meet. What it does is stop a year of careful conditional thinking from disappearing into a sentence that says nothing happened.