The meeting went well. Three things were settled, two were left open, and everyone shook hands in agreement. Six weeks later the price is different, the second point is remembered differently on each side, and the person who said yes has moved to another department. Nobody lied. The agreement simply never existed anywhere except in two memories that have since diverged, which is the ordinary fate of anything that was only said.
Why the oral agreement evaporates, and it is not bad faith
Three mechanisms do most of the work, and none of them is dishonesty. The first is authority: the person across the table may be the right interlocutor without being the one who decides, and « yes » from them often means « I see no objection and I will carry this upwards ». The second is language: an agreement reached in a second language by both sides, or through an interpreter, contains more approximation than either party notices at the time, and the approximation only becomes visible when something has to be executed. The third is turnover: the individual who understood the arrangement is not necessarily the one who will apply it.
A WeChat thread does not solve any of this, and adds problems of its own. Messages can be deleted on the sender's side, voice notes cannot be searched or quoted, images of documents are not documents, and a group conversation has no author: a commitment made in a group of a dozen people belongs to nobody in particular. Above all, a thread has no structure — the agreement is distributed across forty messages, interleaved with logistics and greetings, and nobody can reconstruct it later without reading the whole thing. Use the thread for speed, which is what it is excellent at, and then write the record somewhere that can be filed.
What the record has to contain, and what stays out
- Decisions, not discussion. What was agreed, in the form it will be executed. The reasoning that led there belongs in your own notes, not in a document the other side has to accept.
- The figures each side stated, attributed. Not an average, not a rounded version: what they said and what you said, even where the two do not match yet.
- Open points, each with an owner and a date. A point with no name attached is a point nobody has. A point with no date is a point that comes back in the next meeting, unchanged.
- What was explicitly not agreed. The most valuable line in the whole document, and the one everybody omits. Writing « the tooling cost was raised and not settled » prevents a later conversation in which it was always included.
- Who was present, with their function. It records who heard what, and it is the only thing that helps when the project passes to someone else on either side.
- The next step, with a date and a named action. Not « we will stay in touch »: who sends what to whom, and when.
Two things stay out. Anything that would make someone look bad in front of a colleague who will read the document — a contradiction, a hesitation, a point where their own management was clearly not informed — serves no purpose and costs you the cooperation you need to get the record accepted. And anything you are not willing to be held to yourself: a minute is symmetrical, and the sentence you wrote loosely about your own delivery will be read back to you.
Language, form, and the hour it is sent
Send it the same day, or at the latest the following morning in the other side's time zone. The delay is not administrative courtesy: a record that arrives while the meeting is still fresh is corrected on the substance, and one that arrives a week later is corrected on the points that have since become inconvenient. Keep it to one screen where you can, numbered, one idea per line, with the open points visually separated from the settled ones.
On language, the useful discipline is to produce the Chinese version yourself rather than to ask for it, and to say which version prevails if the two differ. A translation made by the other side is a translation whose choices you cannot see, and the choices are where the margin lives. For a meeting record the stakes are modest and a bilingual document with your language named as the reference is enough; for a contract, the same question is a different exercise with its own rules. Write the English or French in sentences that survive translation — short, one subject each, no idiom — and the Chinese version will cost you very little.
- Write the record from your own notes the same day, before the memory smooths anything out.
- Number every point, and mark each one as settled or open. A reader who disagrees with one line can then answer « point three » instead of rewriting the document.
- Send it to the person you met, with their colleagues in copy only if they were in the room. Adding their management to the copy list turns a record into a manoeuvre.
- Ask for corrections rather than approval, and give a date: « tell me what I have got wrong before Friday » is easier to answer than « please confirm ».
- Follow up once, in the messaging app where they actually read things, pointing at the document rather than restating it.
- Attach the final version to the next commercial document — the order, the amendment, the specification — so that it stops being correspondence and becomes part of the file.
Writing it so it does not read as suspicion
The reason people skip this step is that it feels like saying « I do not trust you ». The fix is in the framing, and it is entirely conventional: the document exists because of your own limitations, not theirs. « So that my colleagues who were not in the room can follow », « to check that I understood correctly, since we were working in English », « for our own file ». Every one of those sentences puts the burden of possible error on you, which is both polite and usually true, and it makes the document easy to correct rather than something to resist.
Three habits do the opposite. Legal register in a document that is not a contract — « the parties acknowledge and agree » — turns a courtesy into a trap and will be answered by silence or by a lawyer. Copying in someone's hierarchy to apply pressure is read immediately for what it is, and costs more than the point was worth. And recording a concession in a way that makes the other person look as if they gave something away cheaply will be quietly corrected out of the final version, along with your credibility.
When no answer comes, read the silence carefully before acting on it. An unanswered record is not an agreement, but it is not nothing either: it is a document you sent, dated, which the other side did not correct, and that position strengthens over time. The practical sequence is to send a short follow-up in the channel they actually use, then to ask a single closed question that can be answered with one word — « is point four correct as written ? » — and finally, if you have to proceed, to write that you will act on the stated basis unless told otherwise, and to do so. What you should not do is treat silence as consent on the one point that really matters; that one gets a phone call, in their language if you can arrange it, and a new record afterwards.
Make the record a habit rather than a signal. If you write one after every meeting and every substantive call, from the first contact onwards, it is a working method and nobody reads anything into it. If you write your first one on the day a disagreement appears, it is an accusation, and it will be received as one.