Personally, I prefer to pre-empt this situation by an explicit agreement on Action Items (Who does What by When) during the meeting itself. I have a dedicated note taker who has been coached to ensure this takes place.

Ideally, no one makes mistakes and everything is well understood the first time around.

But in my experience: humans have errors (Ex: Notetaker writes down 1/2/2021 instead of 2/1/2021). Having a formal "last call" for record-changes is useful for catching these mistakes.

The aim of the prevention measure is to minimise mistakes or errors. I am not against a "last call", I don't want to get to the last call. Generally, we write a clear Action Item live on the screen - "Who does hat by When". The Action Items are locked during the meeting itself. If there are syntactic errors, these are corrected without a follow-up meeting as the intent during the meeting was clear.

In my entire management experience over multiple years, the "not well understood" part has never happened. If I were to guess, it could be due to the goal setting exercise at the beginning of a project. I, as a lead, sit down with the team and clearly outline "Roles and Responsibilities" and "Decision Making Processes". In addition, "Success Criteria" are set beforehand and are strongly linked to organisational goals (business or otherwise). Just to let you know, I work with domain experts across different unrelated industries including technology.

Can you say more about your dedicated note taker? Is this someone who personally attends meetings? Someone who gets a recording? Is this their full time position, or are they a EA?

Sure! This person attends the meeting and has the full responsibility to document Decisions and Action Items (Who does What by When). The person is the moderator of the meeting but not an individual contributor. The person has the full right to ask "Who is the Action Item for? By When will you finish the Action Item? What is the Decision we took?". All meetings are driven towards decision making and action items, no matter how small.

The role and responsibility of this person is clearly communicated to the team before the project. The person is aggressively coached before the project. In one case, live examples of note taking were provided with the note taker as a reticent participant of the meeting.

Which is exactly why you send the notes by end-of-day. People get the chance to object ASAP, and are otherwise bound to the record going forward.

Roberts Rules recognizes that if there's a conflict in two stakeholder's view of the notes, the only resolution is to call a new meeting.

(Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.)

Who is correct? Person A or Person B? Maybe PersonC or PersonD have insight into the issue. Regardless: the solution is to call a new meeting to clarify and finalize this "meta-issue".

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Since you're calling a meeting "anyway" to finalize the record, the time to finalize the notes and resolve any conflicts is during the "next meeting", whenever that is.

Bringing up those conflicts as soon as possible is important (and should be in email-form under the modern business). But determining the solution to these conflicts is the very decision-making framework that meetings are designed for.

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If the current record is on Person A's side "Three Weeks delivery date". Then the imperious is on Person B to bring up the misunderstanding no later than "the next meeting", wherein it is assumed that the previous record is finalized.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter "what was said" at the previous meeting. All that matters moving forward is the record of what was said.

> People get the chance to object ASAP, and are otherwise bound to the record going forward.

Agreed: the sooner objections are raised, the better. Though it is important to note when the record is finalized officially. "The next meeting" is the most logical time to finalize the record.

EDIT: I should note that I've upvoted you. I feel like you and I are on the same page, I'm just elaborating a bit.

> (Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.)

You should surely call a meeting to clear up the conflict as soon as possible.

Another interesting angle would be, "What can we do to make the situation doesn't happen again?". One way would be to document delivery dates in the dd/mm/yyyy format. Therefore, the action item in the meeting note should be "X does Y by 13.10.2020".

This Action Item is put in real-time on the screen during the meeting itself. So, yes I agree with you that sooner is better. In my world, the sooner happens in the meeting. Therefore, I have dedicated note takers during meetings who are coached to run meetings. Most of these note takers do not even need to be individual contributors.

tangent / "rant" about date formats: they have an actual standard^1 that is chrono-sortable:

YYYY-MM-DD

it's only ambiguous to the degree that people adopt other "conflicting" conventions.

I wish v much for its adoption. It was established over 30 years ago.

1. ISO-8601 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I am with you on this. In addition to keeping all the own dates under my own control in this format, I make it a habit to routinely use this date format in non-consequential handwritten forms (guestbooks, permission slips, checks, receipts), to build awareness of this date format and help it "win".

My rule of thumb is if the input area is free text, and the benefit of my filling in the date is to the benefit of the form-owner, I'll use ISO-8601 dates and incentivise them to learn the standard. Join me!

So much this! For all my notes, communications, and such I use YYYY-MM-DD. Only when dealing with the public (or non-technical family members) do I use more colloquial date formats, and then whenever possible I use something like Jan 2 2021 when written.

imperious -> impetus