On Writing Cultures and Talking Cultures in Business
I take extensive notes on my readings to aid retention and share with my teams. In 2020, I decided to start publishing notes on my readings. These are less book/article reviews, and more reports or summaries of critical, interesting and insightful points in the cannon of business literature.
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In business, there are writing cultures and talking cultures.
I’ve worked in both and see the merits and shortcomings of the two approaches. As a writer by trade and training, I prefer management cultures that put writing at the center of decision-making, because I’ve seen it lead to stronger and more consistent outcomes.
But I see that writing cultures have a PR problem, too. In high-growth startups like the one I work at, we’re always stretching, always overloaded, always trying to punch above our weight. There’s a tendency to prefer activity — any activity, no matter how erratic — to thinking. Who has time to spend thinking instead of doing? That’s what the sluggish, lumbering behemoths do. Does Amazon really require a six-page memo for every meeting? No way! Companies like that the ones we’re disrupting!
The case for writing as thinking
Steven Sinofsky (MSFT, a16z) makes a compelling case that creating a culture of writing actually increases agility in his tweetstorm turned blogpost “Writing is Thinking.”
Sinofsky’s argument unfolds as follows: he starts by showing two representative examples of the same message, one written (by Jeff Bezos) and one in the standard business PPT treatment. Click into these and give them a quick read to understand the difference:
Much is lost in the PPT version. Decks are shallow, often hastily thrown together to reflect and sell in the creator’s point of view. And yet they’ve become the referred information communication medium of today’s decision makers. What they accomplish in brevity, they lack in exploration of the depths of alternatives to decision-making. They focus on tactics, takeaways, they are designed to sell and they don’t contain logic or rationale.
In not writing this down, the details are lost forever. Teammates more than one degree removed from the creator won’t understand the reasoning and context; worse yet, they’ll fill in the details themselves.
There’s an understandable reason more leaders don’t write at work: it’s harder. Writing out longform prose is time consuming, tedious and you have to think through the smallest details. Finding time in a busy executive schedule to transform a blank page into a strategy memo can feel impossible. Can’t we accomplish the same thing in a hald hour meeting? But writing truly is thinking on the page. It forces leaders to put down the problem on paper, and to chart the logical course to a certain decision. You have to come face to face with the challenge, what you tried, why you chose the decision you did, and what the consequences of that might be, what the tradeoffs clearly laid out.
Importantly, you sometimes end up in a different place than you intended. You sit down to write thinking you know the solution to your problem, that you’ve explored every alternative, but in attempting to rationalize it you reveal a different conclusion. That is thinking, and it leads to better outcomes.
Arguments against writing are that it ossifies decisions that should be flexible to change. Sinofsky’s counter argument is that agility comes from planning, and without planning activity is just brownian motion (ie. erratic and unproductive). A culture of writing allows you to plan and move fast in the right direction, rather than quickly moving in many unfocused directions.
Writing as an investment in your team
I agree all of Sinofsky’s summarized points above, and I couldn’t have made those points better myself. But I’ll take things a step further: I think of writing as an investment in your team and your organization.
In his book High Output Management, Intel’s Andy Grove describes much of the work of management as exchanging knowledge — acquiring it for better decision-making and communicating it out to empower the teams you manage and to influence the decisions of others.
Writing out decisions creates a shared base of knowledge in an organization. And revealing the rationale and logic that underpins your decisions as a leader is often more important to growing your teams than stating the decision and moving on. Not only does this cut down on the amount of institutional knowledge you rely on in an organization (essential if you hope to scale), it helps your team get out of thinking about what and moves them toward thinking about why. It teaches more junior team members (who are paying attention) not just what to think, but how to think.
By not taking time to think through your critical decisions and to commit those decisions to paper, you will accrue the managerial equivalent of technical debt. You won’t grow your people into independent decision-makers. And importantly, they won’t understand your priority stack. When priorities or values come into conflict on a project, which one matters the most? How do you resolve that conflict? Often this stack is clear in the mind of the manager, but not for those reporting to her, leading to wrong decisions by her subordinates or the hesitance to make any decision at all.
The status quo helps you move faster today but it will get you in the long run. You, as a manager, are only one human who can’t scale, and these decisions will eventually weigh you down and drain your team of agility.
Not every decision or process needs to be written out. Sometimes you have to make fast decisions from the gut without complete information. But if that is all you’re doing, you are missing the opportunity to be more strategic, to think, to write.
Much is lost in the PPT version. Decks are shallow, often hastily thrown together to reflect and sell in the creator’s point of view. And yet they’ve become the referred information communication medium of today’s decision makers. What they accomplish in brevity, they lack in exploration of the depths of alternatives to decision-making. They focus on tactics, takeaways, they are designed to sell and they don’t contain logic or rationale.
In not writing this down, the details are lost forever. Teammates more than one degree removed from the creator won’t understand the reasoning and context; worse yet, they’ll fill in the details themselves.
There’s an understandable reason more leaders don’t write at work: it’s harder. Writing out longform prose is time consuming, tedious and you have to think through the smallest details. Finding time in a busy executive schedule to transform a blank page into a strategy memo can feel impossible. Can’t we accomplish the same thing in a hald hour meeting? But writing truly is thinking on the page. It forces leaders to put down the problem on paper, and to chart the logical course to a certain decision. You have to come face to face with the challenge, what you tried, why you chose the decision you did, and what the consequences of that might be, what the tradeoffs clearly laid out.
Importantly, you sometimes end up in a different place than you intended. You sit down to write thinking you know the solution to your problem, that you’ve explored every alternative, but in attempting to rationalize it you reveal a different conclusion. That is thinking, and it leads to better outcomes.
Arguments against writing are that it ossifies decisions that should be flexible to change. Sinofsky’s counter argument is that agility comes from planning, and without planning activity is just brownian motion (ie. erratic and unproductive). A culture of writing allows you to plan and move fast in the right direction, rather than quickly moving in many unfocused directions.
Writing as an investment in your team
I agree all of Sinofsky’s summarized points above, and I couldn’t have made those points better myself. But I’ll take things a step further: I think of writing as an investment in your team and your organization.
In his book High Output Management, Intel’s Andy Grove describes much of the work of management as exchanging knowledge — acquiring it for better decision-making and communicating it out to empower the teams you manage and to influence the decisions of others.
Writing out decisions creates a shared base of knowledge in an organization. And revealing the rationale and logic that underpins your decisions as a leader is often more important to growing your teams than stating the decision and moving on. Not only does this cut down on the amount of institutional knowledge you rely on in an organization (essential if you hope to scale), it helps your team get out of thinking about what and moves them toward thinking about why. It teaches more junior team members (who are paying attention) not just what to think, but how to think.
By not taking time to think through your critical decisions and to commit those decisions to paper, you will accrue the managerial equivalent of technical debt. You won’t grow your people into independent decision-makers. And importantly, they won’t understand your priority stack. When priorities or values come into conflict on a project, which one matters the most? How do you resolve that conflict? Often this stack is clear in the mind of the manager, but not for those reporting to her, leading to wrong decisions by her subordinates or the hesitance to make any decision at all.
The status quo helps you move faster today but it will get you in the long run. You, as a manager, are only one human who can’t scale, and these decisions will eventually weigh you down and drain your team of agility.
Not every decision or process needs to be written out. Sometimes you have to make fast decisions from the gut without complete information. But if that is all you’re doing, you are missing the opportunity to be more strategic, to think, to write.