Fortunately, the distribution of Outlook to all of our laptops has been followed by an incredible increase in professional handling of interpersonal communication with respect to meetings. Therefore, we can now declare an end to “The Middle Ages of Communication” in which the following allergy enhancing strategies were employed to bother us all:

Invitations to meetings
• Send a mail to meet at a particular date and time instead of an invitation. (Which mail in the best of cases would at least contain that information.)
• Send an invitation without checking whether I am available at that time according to my electronic calendar.
• In Germany it is customary to go and have a(n of course planned) lunch with your colleagues. Only the shy maintained their own agenda with just plain ‘busy blockers’ for lunch, so that nobody would invite them for that social occasion. A repeating appointment put on ‘tentative’ would just be cluttering the agenda, of course.
• Not maintaining one’s own Outlook calendar so that when someone sent out an invite for a free space the response came: “Sorry, I am blocked at that time”.
• Or even worse, an e-mail instead of an Outlook-proposal “Sorry, I am blocked at that time, would the next day work?”
• Or even topping that: “Sorry, I am blocked at that time, could we do it later?” The absence of any substantive response kept you from inviting that person again, ever.
• To think about even sending a response to an invite was outrageous, of course, people would decide on the day itself which of their invitations was the most pressing.
• During our holidays, we did not yet have an automatic cancellation of our invitations during that timeframe, so that a group wass waiting for a person who just happened to have taken off that day.
• Out Of Office was not shared with colleagues, either through either access to the agenda or by sending out an invite to them (non-blocking, no response required of course)
• A way of pretending you are busy was blocking your agenda – and for good measure put in an Out Of Office-message – when you were working from another site of the same company. Access to e-mail generally was not guaranteed there, of course.
• When adding a participant to a large meeting, not just forwarded the meeting to the new participant but also distributing the update to all existing ones.
• Not proposing an agenda for the meeting at sll.
• Or going overboard: not only proposing a list of topics to discuss for the meeting but also updating all participants on the whole discussion about putting the agenda together.

System enhancements
• When organizing a recurring meeting with multiple participants sometimes Outlook took over the creation of obnoxious errors: I once had a colleague who updated the time of a meeting once, but Outlook took care of it to repeat the same message to all 85 participants four times. (No, not a lame excuse, verified error.)
• While we are at system errors: Skype had the habit of not adding a Skype link to an invite for addressees if the invitor happens to be offline himself, for instance if he had just changed his position after coming from a meeting room. To facilitate greater confusion, the Skype invite did show up in the invitor’s own agenda.
• When making a mistake like above, no colleague informed us about it.

Meeting minutes
• No meeting minutes were kept at all, to facilitate confusion later on about what was agreed upon. A secretary to minute the Board meeting, of course, is way too expensive.
• Meeting minutes that were unclear and not identifying among ‘Information shared’, ‘Decisions taken’ and ‘Actions agreed’.
• Action items were not understandable out of context
• No confirmation that the meeting minutes had been agreed would be exchanged (“That is how you might have written it down, but that is not what I said three months ago”)
• No storage methodology for the meeting minutes was available. Nowadays it could be in mails, a folder, Sharepoint or anything else, as long as participants can find it back.
• Meeting minutes consisted of only the slides shown, which was very helpful to document the discussion they triggered.

Behavior in meetings
• My absolute favorite: “We will do this ASAP (As Soon As Possible”). For those of you not in the know, ASAP is a public holiday on the first Sunday in September. Every year I organize a barbeque in my (non-existent) rooftop garden for those who have used that word that year in my presence.
• “We will do it later”. Apparently the task was not taken seriously enough to plan it with a date. The worldwide implemented remedy is to ask the question “When?”
• “We will have to re-visit this”. Even more abstruse (=unclear) language to say the same as “We will do it later”. Same remedy has been implemented.
• “I need more information”. Apparently the authors of these words were just trying to get away from the task since they did not even specify what information they needed to do it.
• “I do not know the answer” or “I can not”. The questioner was not taken seriously but just ‘brushed off’. Here the remedy of “Please specify what you would need to provide the answer or do it” has now been universally implemented.
• Some colleagues liked to hear themselves talk. Their counterparts apparently had insignificant contributions and did not matter. Usually this pattern was evidenced by people preventing questions by increasing their pitch and volume to ‘outvoice’ their ‘subjects’. Unfortunately, Outlook does not have a solution for that yet.
• Finally, items were analyzed “in order of urgency”: First the actions were agreed, then the decisions to justify the actions, and finally the information was shared to justify the decisions. Of course, this very productive way of working is to be continued.

In short, thanks to technological progress we now have also improved how we interact with one another. One step has been made on the road to universal happiness.