Meeting briefs and follow-ups

By the end of this chapter you will have three habits around every meeting: a briefing for yourself before it, a briefing on the people you are meeting, and a follow-up after. The point is the one Facts, evidence and the record made: you have to be the most prepared person in the room, and these days there is no excuse not to be. This is a short chapter, on purpose. The newsroom has not written this workflow up yet; the article that proposed this part asked the journalist to start with it, and asked me for my own step by step. Until both arrive, here is the shape.

Why it is cheap now

All of this was overhead in the past. It could only be done by a very specific type of person. Building a system that gave you this kind of information could cost hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds, from my memory of what such systems cost, so it was very rare, and even then it took so long that it was not effective. Now it is a brief and a feedback loop. You want to be known as the person who has the facts, the person who knows what is going on, the person who is well briefed: the person nobody can throw sand in the eyes of, or hand half-baked material, because they know you will check.

If you are the one doing the hiring, read that paragraph the other way round. The candidate who arrives briefed on your company, on you and on what you have said in public, and who follows up with what was agreed, has shown you the workflow they would bring. It is evidence, not a claim.

If you are the founder, the meeting is with a first customer, or with someone who might fund you, and the three briefs are the same. Sell is the chapter on what you say in the room. This one is about arriving with the facts and leaving with the record, which is most of what a small company has to offer against a large one.

The three briefs

A briefing for you. What is this meeting for, what was last agreed, what is open, what do I want out of it. If you have built the folders from An agentic workflow from zero, this is the Prepare exercise there: one message to the agent, which reads the person's folder and briefs you from it. If you have not, it is still one message, with the material pasted in.

A briefing on who you meet. Who they are, what they have said in public, what they care about, where you have crossed before. Following a rabbit hole is now a prompt away, and this is a rabbit hole: never take the first page at face value; ask where that came from, and where that came from. The newsroom's rule holds here too: "Not found is not false." A brief that says what it could not find is worth more than one that fills the gap.

A follow-up. What was said, what was decided, what each person owes, and by when. Written the same day, from your own debrief, which is the Debrief exercise in the same chapter: speak into your phone on the way out, and let the agent turn it into the note and the next step. This is the half most people skip, and it is the half the other person remembers.

Make the brief a brief

There is a second sense of "brief" in this book, and the two meet here. The briefs so far, the newsroom's audit of everything it had asked of itself, ends each open item with a session brief: the goal, the files and notes to read first, the first deliverable, and how to know it is done. "A session can start from that paragraph alone." A meeting brief should pass the same test. If an agent, or a colleague, could not prepare the meeting from your one paragraph, it is not a brief yet.

So write the brief for the agent the way you would want to be briefed yourself, and name the session for it. The newsroom's habit is one session per topic, named "project | what we are working on", so that the brief for Thursday's meeting does not borrow facts from last month's. And before you close the session, ask the question the newsroom asks at the end of every one: what did you check, against which source, and what are you not sure of. That last line belongs in your briefing, not in the agent's memory.