by George Pór

What is a living report?

When a report of an event or collective process connects group input with future action in ways that facilitate the group's momentum, we call it a "living report." In its advanced version, it is a collaboratively scripted workflow, based on the record of a (real-time or asynchronous) conversation, and complete with links to resources relevant to the ensuing action.

In its simpler version, it is a well structured and tagged summary presented on a wiki page, which has links to related materials, references, and physical or virtual spaces designed to facilitate further collaborative action.

A living report is a tool of a team, organisation or community, for strengthening and mobilizing its collective intelligence. Each time a new living report is added to its knowledge ecosystem, it is linked in the collective memory in multiple ways. The web of hyperlinks pointing to and from it is to enhance the clarity of the relationships between what has been said and what can be learned from and acted upon it.

What are the functions of a living report?

It can serve a wide range of functions, depending on the organizational context. For example, living reports can support:

• Consultations of international government agencies with stakeholders in the Member States

• Sharing the deliberations of issue-oriented groups within a professional community with the community as whole, and its external stakeholders

• Meeting follow up by management teams and taskforces

• Catching up by those who had to miss a meeting and want to act on its deliberations, without having to read long and (typically) poorly structured meeting minutes

• Hosting and connecting conversations among participants of a workshop, who want to form a community of practice

Why we need living reports?

When we read a book or participate in a meeting try to summarize what we learned from it, we are making sense by attenuating the complexity of the information received into a couple of essential highlights.

There is a whole art of summarizing, focused on effective ways to distill the essence of large volume of information into smaller chunks that are easier to manage and re-use. No matter how well professional summarizers or summarizing software do, when we use their output, we integrate it with our pre-existing knowledge, thus amplifying the complexity of what we know.

Depending on the quality of the transitional object (whether a book summary or a meeting report), in this two-step move of attenuating/amplifying complexity, much meaning and valuable opportunities for action can be lost. Living reports are a means to minimize that loss.

In addition, there are a number of other reasons why living reports excel where more traditional ones fail. Here are some:

• Chronologically taken meeting minutes are re-establishing the linear, sequential order of utterances and don't reflect the pattern of meaning that can emerge from their inter-relatedness.

• Traditional meeting minutes are frequently too long to read, and their essence is not summarized to match the interest of the various audiences.

• The frozen media (paper), on which the minutes are delivered, do not facilitate collaborative follow up as conveniently as if they were implemented in easy-to-update, interactive media.

• Processing printed input from multiple stakeholders is much slower and more error-prone than doing it in living, interactive media.

• Out-of-context words, sequestered on flipcharts at face-to-face meetings, are largely lost to collaborative meaning making out of what has happened.

How to cultivate living reports?

The organisational contexts, in which living reports are used call for a different set of steps to produce them. Here, we take the example of the meetings at CommunityIntelligence, as starting point. Our team is aiming to develop collaboration methods that can scale well when the company will grow.

The meeting starts, typically, by using a few minute silent time to bring us fully present and centered. We check in with one another, by sharing our reflection on an essential question that we have chosen to focus on.

We have a shared intention to continually improve our individual and collective practices, knowledge and intelligence. Staying on the edge of our own capability development is our commitment to society and our clients. That's the context, in which the quest for better meeting reports was born. What we've been discovering can be summarized in 5 steps:

1. We need to become aware of our knowledge ecology and how strongly its quality influences our results. Having a dynamic knowledge repository is a minimum requirement for healthy knowledge ecologies.

2. Meeting design should include times for collaborative harvesting of salient points, with the help of a technographer.

3. Have a technographer and a knowledge gardener form a team to organize the record into interactive, richly hyperlinked and tagged documents in various media. The documents should be organized so that they connect chunks of content with the most likely places and processes, in which they can be relevant.

4. The living report should be structured so that members can rapidly access any part of it and easily bring it into new conversation and action, as needed. It is in their further reflection and use that the report comes alive, turns from words on a computer screens into catalyst for energy and action.

5. The structure and features of the group's knowledge ecology that hosts the living reports should be cultivated not by the efforts of a knowledge gardener alone. To realize the full benefit of the knowledge ecology to the group, the issues of its co-evolution with the group's needs and aspirations need to remain an ongoing target of our shared reflections.

Next developmental action

• Develop a "living report" template that automates some of the set-up tasks of creating one

• Coach team members on how to edit/cluster/organise meeting notes into chunks of actionable meaning

Further Resources

Nurturing Systemic Wisdom through Knowledge Ecology, by George Pór, in The Systems Thinker, October 2000.

Art of Harvesting

The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

Summarizing Information, by Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer (Editor)

A Pattern Language for Living Communication

Technography