Transcription
In this video, I will share with you the note-taking technique that I used during my time in consulting at McKinsey. I used this technique to capture notes for literally hundreds of client interviews and other high-stakes interactions. And I do hope it will be helpful for you as well.
So welcome to another coffee break here on my channel, where I try to help you to become successful in your career. And let's first reflect on how most people take notes and what's the problem with that. So typically, people take their scrap pad, take their notebook, maybe their iPad or even their laptop, sit in a meeting, listen to what the other people have to say, and then write notes bullet by bullet, point by point. And if you do this for an extended meeting of one hour, two hours, even longer, as sometimes can happen, especially in these consulting interactions, you might end up with pages and pages of notes. And very often what might happen is that then after such a meeting, you are going back to the team room. If you're working in consulting or maybe if you're working in industry, your team lead might approach you, might ask you, so what were the key takeaways? What did you take away? What did you get from that meeting? And then, and this happened to myself quite a lot as well, you were somewhat puzzled, went through your notes page by page and tried to find the most important points from there, right? And that's of course not a good impression. You look rather unstructured and then also for yourself, if afterwards you need to debrief the meeting, you need to process the information. There are lots of things you need to go through to even find the things that are of interest to you.
And in this context, I want to introduce you to a note-taking template that I developed throughout the years to make my life easier in consulting. And I hope it will do the very same thing for you, whether you're working in consulting or not. You will be able to download this very template for free. It is linked below in the video description. This template should work for you regardless whether you're taking notes with pen and paper or tablet or also if you're taking notes in a written format on your laptop.
So let's start. First of all, of course, you want to capture the date of the meeting. When did it happen? Especially if you're still working with a traditional notebook, you want to be able to flip through your handwritten notes and see when were they taken. When was the meeting taking place? This is quite important for sure. So professional services, you want to give the meeting a name, a name. So if you later go through the notes, you clearly understand what type of meeting that was. So maybe you call it the project kickoff. You mentioned a very specific team that you conducted the kickoff for and so on. Then you want to capture all the participants. So what were the people that were in the room with you either on site or also in a digital meeting? This is often then also needed if you're writing after what's written meeting minutes.
Next, in addition to these rather basic elements, let me share a little hack with you that I developed during my time at McKinsey. The problem, the challenge, the struggle that I very often face is that especially throughout the first days, the first one, two, three, four weeks of a project, often you have lots of meetings, often four, five, six, seven meetings every single day. And in each of these meetings, you meet new people. So after a day, you might have met a dozen new people. And then it's very challenging, at least for me to at the end of the day, even still remember which person was which name to get the faces, to the names, identify who said what and so on. Though very often what would help me in these situations is to just actually draw a table, draw a scribble of the table, and then make notes based on the table, which person was sitting where at the table. And specifically what I did is I was writing the initials of each person, how they were seated around the table, because then what typically worked right way for me is that I still was able to remember at least the visual picture of how the meeting took place, and the picture of the table where people were sitting. And by that, then I was able to understand who these participants were, how each person was named, right? And then also who said what, if then in the script, I'm referencing a specific person, what that person contributed to the meeting.
You then divide the remainder of the page in three thirds. The first third is a section that you can call general insights. So this is the section that you use for the more traditional style of note taking, where something is being mentioned that sparks interest, you want to capture that you want to write that down, you can do that in this section. Here just make sure to really focus on things that really matter. It's easy to just write pages and pages of notes. But you want to focus on the things where you know that this will have a meaning, where this will have an implication for your later work. And this is then indeed what you want to write down here. Here I noticed often that even the most senior partners, they leave a two hour meeting, just with maybe three points, three bullets taken down of things that really matter to them. This is often far more powerful than having pages and pages of notes, and then just losing yourself in them and don't even knowing anymore what this was all about. That's the first third.
The second third you can use for a section that we call something like key outcomes. So what are actually the results that really matter for you? And to get this right, it's important to ask yourself, what are actually the things that you want to get out of this meeting? So in consulting and professional services, often there is a purpose if you conduct a specific meeting. Maybe you're working on a transformation program, you're working on a transformation of a specific sector, of a specific team, of a specific area of the company. And now you're looking for ideas on what exactly could be done, maybe to reduce costs, to improve efficiency and so on. These are actually the most important things you want to get out. And so whenever such an idea is getting mentioned in such a meeting, this is then what you're writing down in this key outcomes section. What this enables you to do is that if someone after the meeting, for instance, you walk to your team room, you talk to your project lead, and this project lead is asking you, well, what came out of the meeting? What did you learn? You can then directly look at this section and in a very structured organized way, you can directly mention the top two, three, four, five, six ideas, initiative ideas that you learned, that you took away from that meeting. This is very, very powerful, very structured if you're able to do that. And then often also makes the debrief far easier for you. This is what you use the second third of the page for.
The third third of the page, then divide in two parts, the left part and the right part. And these are the parts where you're writing down to-dos. So what are the specific things that people agreed to do in this meeting? And then the one half of this third, the left one, you want to use for to-dos that you have. So what are the very specific things you now need to do? What are the things that you committed to do? Maybe also to the client in the meeting, you want to write them down there. So this is easy for you to catch up afterwards that you don't just forget this, that this is not getting lost in pages and pages of notes. But then in the same spirit, you also want to write down what the to-dos are that your client or the person you talk to agreed to do, right? So here point by point, you very precisely write down what you agreed on as a to-do. And then this is when enables you to do one very powerful thing. And this is that at the end of the meeting, you can say, okay, allow me to recap. So this is what I will do next. And these are the things that you agreed to now do. Did I get that right? Is this indeed what your understanding was as well? Yes, this is what the understanding was. And then this is also like a very specific tangible action item that you want to take away. And this will of course as well help you to the later, right? The debrief and so on that you can then leverage for your work.
So quite simple, but very effective template. You can find this as a free download link in the video description. Such a template of course will be more helpful for you for in-person interactions. We are using physical note writing, pen and paper based note writing, as it's commonly done in, for instance, professional services. If it's a digital meeting with the advance of digital note takers, this might be less relevant. But still this is then a structure that you still want to think in. So what are the key outcomes? What are the to-dos and what are some other information that you want to take down?
Let me know what you think in the comments. What are other note-taking templates that work for you? Super interested to learn from you as well. If you took any value away from this video, please destroy the like button. Subscribe to stay up to date on all my content. Big thanks to all the channel members. I'm Heinrich, looking forward to meet you soon in the next video.