I've been copying the same minutes format for six years. Am I doing it wrong?

When I started this job the outgoing person showed me a set of old minutes. They were dense and seemed extra formal. He said "just do it like this." I've been doing it that way ever since. Nobody has ever complained. But I sometimes wonder if we're actually doing it right or just consistently doing it the same wrong way.

That instinct you have? Trust it.

The person who created the minutes format you inherited was most likely a lawyer, or someone trained by one. Their minutes are technically legal. They are also frequently long, formal, and nearly unreadable: dense paragraphs of passive voice that document everything and illuminate nothing. They look serious. They feel important. They would make a compliance officer nod slowly in approval.

They are also, in many cases, genuinely terrible minutes. Six pages of dense prose doesn't serve a board member trying to find a specific motion, and it doesn't serve a new ED two years from now trying to understand why a decision was made.

There's often a version of this person still on your board right now — the one who sees everything through a compliance lens and views recording or AI tools as somewhere between unnecessary and dangerous. They're not wrong that compliance matters. They've just lost sight of the actual rule: minutes are a record of what was decided, not what was said. Once you're anchored to that, formal and useful stop being in tension.

So here's your self-audit. Are motions captured verbatim: the exact words, who moved, who seconded, the vote count? Are abstentions and recusals noted? Is quorum documented at the start? Are decisions by consensus recorded as actual decisions, not just "discussion took place"?

If you can answer yes to all of those, your inherited format may be basically sound even if it's more formal than it needs to be. If any of those made you uncertain, that's worth fixing before someone else finds it for you.

Six years of consistency is not wasted. It just needs a fresh set of eyes. And for what it's worth: the fact that you're asking this question puts you ahead of most people in your position. The ones who should worry are the ones who never wonder.