MEETING OF MINDS?

The suggestion of a meeting is often met with much eye-rolling.

It is usually someone else’s agenda and not your own. You’re too busy but then again you have to be there… just in case.

And of course there is the performance aspect. Some colleagues will take the floor to parade their brilliance, others will “keep the head down” and congratulate themselves for having escaped from the blame games that are often played out.

But meetings have a point and a purpose and if only 20 seconds of vital information is elicited from a two-hour bore-fest, then the meeting should have been worth the effort.

Meetings can have many purposes – to plan, to review, to inform are just a few – but they should share the same goal – a positive outcome.

And that’s why – contrary to what it says – the Department of Environment should be concerned that there were no minutes for 13 out of the 23 high level meetings that Irish Water or rather its previous incarnation, Bord Gáis, held in 2012.

The department’s reason for its lack of concern over the details revealed in RTÉ’s This Week programme was that it was not involved in the meetings itself, although of course the department’s then minister, Phil Hogan, was in attendance for at least some of them.

But whether the department is right or wrong to be blasé about the meetings it was not directly involved in, it should have been in the interests of the participants themselves to have some meaningful records.

To use a broadcasting rule of thumb, most of us speak at a rate of three words per second. It doesn’t take a very long meeting to rack up a huge volume of words and how many people would be capable of emerging from a lengthy session with an exact record of all that was discussed in their head?

Effective meetings need minutes, whether the purpose is planning or imparting information. If a record of what has been discussed or agreed is there for all parties to see, then everyone can literally be on the same page. It’s also the only way to outfox the crafty operators that hear what they only want to hear and insist that matters were agreed to their satisfaction when everyone else’s recollection is somewhat different.

It’s hard to believe then that the meetings held by Bord Gáis that were undocumented were of such elementary content that minutes –or even follow-up e-mails – were not required so that all participants would be clear on the way forward

One excuse could have been that there wasn’t time for such care and attention but that’s hardly going to stand up in the wake of the debacle that’s ensued.

Another could be that the content of the meeting was commercially sensitive but that doesn’t work either because RTÉ’s Freedom of Information requests were refused on the basis of no minutes being kept rather than the sensitivity of their content.

That leaves us with on final excuse. That no-one wanted those discussions to find their way into the public domain. Surely not!

Bob Hughes is a journalist, writer and media consultant.

He was formerly Deputy Director of News at TV3 and a producer at Channel 4 News, Sky and Reuters.

Twitter: @bobhughesnews