references/action_item_discipline.md
5.6 KB查看排版效果| 1 | # Action-Item Discipline — why meetings without owned actions are theater |
| 2 | |
| 3 | The third discipline of the `meetings` skill: the meeting's output is not the discussion, the |
| 4 | slides, or even the decision — it is the set of committed next actions that exist afterwards. A |
| 5 | meeting that ends without owned, dated actions consumed its budget and produced a feeling. This |
| 6 | file documents the canon behind `action_item_extractor.py` and its two flags, **ORPHAN** (no |
| 7 | owner) and **NO-DUE** (no date). |
| 8 | |
| 9 | ## The next-action rule (why vague intentions don't survive) |
| 10 | |
| 11 | David Allen's *Getting Things Done* (Penguin, 2001) built its entire system on one observation: |
| 12 | outcomes don't get done, **next actions** do. "Handle the pricing situation" is a project; |
| 13 | "Maria sends the pricing one-pager by Friday" is an action. Allen's test — *what's the very next |
| 14 | physical, visible activity, and who takes it?* — is exactly the shape the extractor demands: a |
| 15 | verb, an owner, a date. Anything in the notes that fails the test ("we should think about X", |
| 16 | "the team agreed X matters") is deliberately not extracted, because promoting sentiment to a |
| 17 | checklist launders vagueness into false progress. |
| 18 | |
| 19 | ## One owner, not a committee |
| 20 | |
| 21 | Every extracted item gets exactly one owner or an **ORPHAN** flag. This is the "Driver" / |
| 22 | "Accountable" insight of the DACI and RACI decision frameworks (documented in the Atlassian Team |
| 23 | Playbook's DACI play): when a task has two owners it has zero, because each can reasonably assume |
| 24 | the other has it. The extractor never auto-assigns an orphan — assignment is a human commitment, |
| 25 | and a name typed by a script is not a commitment. The flag's job is to force the assignment |
| 26 | conversation while the room (or thread) still remembers agreeing to the work. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | ## A date, or it drifts |
| 29 | |
| 30 | George Doran's original SMART memo ("There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and |
| 31 | Objectives," *Management Review*, 1981) made **time-bound** one of the five criteria for a reason: |
| 32 | an undated commitment cannot be late, so it never becomes urgent, so it loses every scheduling |
| 33 | contest against work that can. The extractor captures "by/due/before <date>" phrasings and flags |
| 34 | the rest **NO-DUE**. The fix costs five seconds at recap time ("Alex — by when?") and is the |
| 35 | highest-leverage edit anyone makes to meeting notes. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | ## Implementation intentions (the psychology of "who + when") |
| 38 | |
| 39 | The owner + date rule is not managerial superstition; it has a mechanism. Peter Gollwitzer's |
| 40 | implementation-intentions research shows that goals formulated as *if-then* plans — specifying |
| 41 | when, where, and how the action happens — are acted on at substantially higher rates than |
| 42 | equally-motivated abstract goals, across dozens of studies (Peter M. Gollwitzer, "Implementation |
| 43 | Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans," *American Psychologist*, 1999; meta-analysis: |
| 44 | Gollwitzer & Sheeran, *Advances in Experimental Social Psychology*, 2006). An action item with an |
| 45 | owner and a date is an implementation intention; one without is a wish. Likewise, Locke and |
| 46 | Latham's goal-setting research — the most replicated result in organizational psychology — shows |
| 47 | specific, difficult goals reliably outperform "do your best" vagueness (Edwin A. Locke & Gary P. |
| 48 | Latham, "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation," |
| 49 | *American Psychologist*, 2002). |
| 50 | |
| 51 | ## Follow-through is the dropped phase |
| 52 | |
| 53 | Steven Rogelberg's meeting research finds the post-meeting phase is where most meeting value |
| 54 | leaks: actions go unrecorded, unowned, or unrevisited, and recurring meetings quietly re-discuss |
| 55 | last week's conclusions (*The Surprising Science of Meetings*, Oxford University Press, 2019). |
| 56 | His prescriptions map one-to-one onto this skill's mechanics: end with a recap of commitments |
| 57 | (the agenda builder's mandatory closing slot), record owner + deadline for each (the extractor's |
| 58 | output shape), and open the next meeting against the last list (the emitted markdown checklist is |
| 59 | built to be pasted into the next agenda's pre-read). |
| 60 | |
| 61 | ## Why extraction is deterministic |
| 62 | |
| 63 | The extractor uses fixed patterns — checkboxes, `ACTION:`/`TODO:` prefixes, "@name will …", |
| 64 | "Name will … by date" — rather than judgment. Two reasons. First, auditability: anyone can look at |
| 65 | a line of notes and know whether it will extract, so the discipline is teachable ("write it as |
| 66 | `ACTION: @sam … by Friday` and it will never be lost"). Second, honesty: a fuzzy extractor that |
| 67 | infers actions from vibes recreates the original problem — commitments nobody actually made. If |
| 68 | the notes contain no extractable actions, the correct output is the uncomfortable summary line |
| 69 | saying so, not an invented checklist. |
| 70 | |
| 71 | ## Sources |
| 72 | |
| 73 | 1. David Allen, *Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity*, Penguin, 2001 |
| 74 | (next-action discipline; the verb-owner test). |
| 75 | 2. Steven G. Rogelberg, *The Surprising Science of Meetings*, Oxford University Press, 2019 |
| 76 | (follow-through as the dropped phase; end-with-recap prescription). |
| 77 | 3. Atlassian Team Playbook, "DACI: Decision-making framework" (single Driver/Accountable; |
| 78 | two owners = zero owners). |
| 79 | 4. George T. Doran, "There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives," |
| 80 | *Management Review*, 1981 (time-bound as a first-class criterion). |
| 81 | 5. Peter M. Gollwitzer, "Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans," *American |
| 82 | Psychologist*, 1999 (and Gollwitzer & Sheeran 2006 meta-analysis) — who/when/where plans get |
| 83 | acted on; wishes don't. |
| 84 | 6. Edwin A. Locke & Gary P. Latham, "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and |
| 85 | Task Motivation," *American Psychologist*, 2002 (specific goals beat vague ones). |
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