Writing is thinking

I know this has been written about in many places, but I first came across it in full in this Medium post by Steven Sinofsky. I’ll be pulling quotes from there, but the whole thing is well worth reading yourself in full.

To state my bias up front, it's an idea that appeals to me at face value. I like writing and do find it brings a level of clarity to ideas and thoughts. So, this is a bit of a meta-experiment - by writing about it, I want to explore my own thoughts and decide; do I just like the sound of this idea, or is it actually useful? And if it is, why don't we do it more often?

To begin at the end, while I do find it enjoyable, I also find writing hard to do well (as anyone who’s read an email I’ve bashed out quickly will attest to…) and definitely time consuming. That’s the obvious answer to why we don’t always do it. Sinofsky doesn’t shy away from this point either.

Writing is hard

Writing is super hard. It takes more time to write than it does to talk. It also takes more time to write a page of text than a single slide.

This is obvious but interesting comparison to explore. In case you didn’t read the article, I’ll add the comparison made here:

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It’s clear how much detail is missing from the 'slide'. If I only shared the slide, two things happen:

1. The original details are lost, forever.
2. People will make up the missing details themselves.

Think of this as a team trying to join in a lesson. Think about trying to share this lesson multiple times. Think about a new team member who only has this slide.

I get why he used ‘slides’ as the example. While 'Death by Powerpoint' isn’t really a thing at Kilterset, I suspect we may make up for it by death by Slack message, Google Meet, or desk walk-up - with similarly lossy results.

Now imagine that slide was about a your product and gets turned into some features. At the extreme, you could spend six months building a something that address a tangental anecdote, and misses the real point.

So what is it about the written example that makes it worth spending time on?

Context

Taking the time to write allows you to provide context. This matters for everything we do. From our strategy to an individual product feature we're building somewhere. The key to achieving any goal as a team is having a shared understanding, so everyone can go in the same direction. This needs the details, the context, kept intact and widely shared.

In practice, I think this requires the upfront investment in writing about the ‘raw materials’ that go into your work. They need refining into a clear articulation of what needs to happen but it should include a thorough exploration of the thinking that lead you there, so people can weigh up the same information and arrive at the same conclusion. That’s real understanding, and it prevents things going off the rails later.

From the minute execution begins on a product (or decision or GTM or…) the divergence from the plan begins. If the plan is a deck or a speech, divergence is instant and rapid. With a detailed plan because people making all the “micro-decisions” day in and day out have the context for the plan—the framework, rationale, logic behind the decision—the organization is far more likely to make consistent tradeoffs.

In a product development context the “micro-decisions” accumulate as the team makes implementation choices about what to build and how to meet the shared goal. Understanding that goal, plus the why behind it, matter immensely.

Collaboration

[…] you can’t have plans, especially shared plans, without writing.

The 'why' behind our work typically emerges from the input of a number of people from our teams, our customers, and their customers.

The act of writing forces a team of experts to share the details of goals—not just the what, but the why, what else was considered, the history, context.

Writing something together is obviously collaborative. Writing yourself feels like a very solo pursuit, but when you think about it, it’s almost always done to (eventually) share - whether starting something new, providing a response or building on top of someone else's words, that’s a collaborative pursuit as well.

It’s definitely much more asynchronous than other forms of collaboration. That might be what makes it so useful, especially for working through complex problems.

Writing is more inclusive. It is easier to contribute, doesn’t reward bullies and bullshitters, and allows for contemplation.

I don’t think it’s worth glossing over the way asynchronous collaboration like this can allow more people to contribute more fully to discussions and decisions. As well as things like English skills, seniority and all the other hidden biases we don’t think influence us, writing (compared especially to meetings) levels the playing field a lot for distributed teams, which is all of our project teams, as well as Team Kilterset itself.

It also strikes me that reading the well considered thoughts of someone else is a very easy environment in which to stop, think and understand.

Contemplation

Providing context and fuelling meaningful collaboration are good outcomes, but you won’t get either without first refining the information you’ve gathered and thoughts that you have into meaningful (to yourself and your audience) knowledge to be considered.

The act of writing, forces the author to think through all the details and steps required to share the lesson. It avoids what happens in business all the time which is “I just know” or “experience” and brings along the team and other job functions on thinking.

I find this to be incredibly true. How often have you had an idea rattling around in your head that seems totally plausible (e.g. every “It’s like ChatGPT for…” idea you’ve had this week) but then you sit down to write it out and all you have is two sentences that don’t make sense and a flashing cursor… No? Just me? Ok…

[…] the process of writing and sharing thoughts is clarifying AND collaborating itself

Writing is the forcing function to clarify your thoughts and find out if they’re valuable, to sift through them to see which contradict, which are unfinished and which are just plain wrong. It’s this hard work that turns ideas, snippets of conversation, notes from meetings and everywhere else from ‘data’ into ‘insight’ that’s worth sharing.

Now what?

I’ve been thinking and talking to people about this idea for a while. It resonated with many, with responses like: "I have always used writing to distil, test and refine my thoughts on something. […] Let’s get started." and "Writing is, as far as I can tell, one of our greatest technologies. Thoughts that undergo non-fixed length curation. You get unlimited time to scrupulously interrogate your thoughts. Even writing this I had to pause to try work out what I'm thinking. When it really clicks, that writing is that powerful, I don’t know why we don’t do it more."

I shared a version of this post a few months ago internally, noting that I had at least convinced myself and hoped others would join me. Since then we’ve had many, many people sharing, typically though blogs (we use Confluence for this) in an incredibly positive way. It’s providing clearer communications, a focal point for considered discussions and I've seen it lead to better decisions.

In my next post, I’ll expand on why we needed to (and did) use writing like this to share more stories, helping to share our culture throughout the distributed team and lay a scaffolding of good decisions for people to reference.

In the meantime, I’d encourage you to think about what’s on your mind that could benefit from some written contemplation? If you’re not sure how to start, I recommend reading this excellent post that was inspired by the one I’ve been referencing.

I look forward to reading.

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