Why this skill exists
Meetings don’t fail in the room. They fail in the 48 hours afterward, when three people leave with three different versions of what was decided and nobody writes it down. The transcript has the truth — verbatim — but nobody rereads a 40-minute transcript.
The default Copilot meeting recap is a summary, and summaries paraphrase. Paraphrase is where decisions get softened (“we’ll probably go with vendor B” becomes “vendor B was selected”) and action items lose their owners. This skill forbids paraphrase at the points that matter: decisions are quoted, with speaker names. No owner stated means “Unassigned”, not a guess.
It also does the one thing no meeting tool does: it cross-checks the meeting against your own sent mail from the past two weeks, so the commitment you made by email last Tuesday doesn’t quietly die because it never came up on the call.
What it does, step by step
- Finds the meeting — named, or your most recently ended one — and gathers transcript, meeting chat, invite, and shared files. No transcript? It says so and works from what exists, rather than reconstructing dialogue.
- Extracts four lists — decisions (verbatim quotes), action items with owners and due dates (yours marked ▶), open questions, risks. “No decisions made” is an allowed answer.
- Cross-checks your commitments — searches your sent email and Teams posts for related promises and adds anything you’re on the hook for that the meeting missed.
- Drafts a 6-line follow-up — decisions, actions by owner, one line inviting corrections. No “great meeting!” filler.
- Waits. Nothing sends until you approve the draft and the recipient list.
Install (60 seconds)
- Download the SKILL.md above.
- In OneDrive, create the folder
/Documents/Cowork/skills/meeting-debrief/. - Drop SKILL.md inside. Cowork picks it up automatically at the start of your next conversation — you’ll see “Meeting Debrief” as a chip in the side panel.
- After your next meeting, say: “Debrief my last meeting.”
Make it yours (5 minutes, recommended)
- The follow-up format — if your team uses a standing template (“Decisions / Actions / Parking lot”), paste it over Step 4. The procedure is the value; the formatting is yours.
- The cross-check window — 14 days is our default. Long-cycle projects may want 30.
- The ▶ marker — some people change it to their initials so debriefs are searchable later. Fine.
- Recipients — if your debriefs should always go to a channel instead of attendees, change the delivery step to a Teams post. It still gets the approval gate.
Failure modes we’ve already handled
| What goes wrong | How the skill handles it |
|---|---|
| Decisions get paraphrased into something softer | Hard rule: decisions are verbatim quotes with speaker names |
| Cowork assigns owners to ownerless tasks | No owner stated → “Unassigned”; guessing is forbidden |
| Follow-up sends to the whole invite list including the exec who dialed in for 5 minutes | Recipient list shown for approval before send |
| Private side-chat ends up in the group follow-up | Hard rule excludes side-channel content from group messages |
| No transcript exists, so it invents one | Says so plainly; works only from chat and shared files |
The bigger idea
A meeting that produces a verbatim decision log and an owned action list is a different organizational object than a meeting that produces vibes. Run this skill for two weeks and you’ll notice the meetings themselves change — people state decisions more carefully when they know the exact words will be in the follow-up. That’s not a side effect. That’s the point.