Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times
I have continued to do my monthly write-ups for the Like Minds Business Breakfasts (although I have been lax in posting links to them here – sorry).
At the end of March, Ajaz Ahmed of AKQA came to the ME Hotel to talk about entrepreneurship and disruption – and his recent book, Velocity.
The talk was well attended. Read my Ajaz Ahmed report on the Like Minds site.
Many of the emails I receive demand a lot of effort from me before I work out what I am being told or being asked to do. I’m reasonably confident that this is not because I’m stupid.
If the recipient of your email has to engage in struggle before starting on any actual task, chances are that the task is going to suffer. Put the effort in up front. At your end.
Get to the point quickly and make sure the point is the one you wanted to make.
I won’t go on. Instead, here’s a perfect Dilbert cartoon that highlights the issue.
Last September I wrote a review of Euan Semple’s wonderful “Organizations Don’t Tweet”. Six months on, I’m still referring to the book and finding insights that continue to delight and inspire.
Euan and I both worked for organizations that might be considered a by-word for literacy. The BBC and Reuters (now Thomson Reuters) are, after all, in the communications business. And yet, for all the front end communication goodness – in the shape of news bulletins or reports from the battlefield or even the latest stock prices from the trading room floor – in my experience at least, the back end (how apt) of the business encouraged illiteracy across great swathes of the organization.
I don’t mean we were discouraged from reading. There was, indeed, probably way too much information available for reading on a daily basis. On the whole, though, much of this excess information was of little relevance. And, if it was relevant, it tended to be written in a style and format that stood between the reader and the key information.
(A disclaimer, of sorts: I last worked at Reuters some years ago. It is a company I held in high regard, despite the issues of its internal writing standards. In its latest incarnation it may very well be a paragon of the literate organization.)
But reading is only one half of literacy. Writing was always seen as best left for the experts. This appears to be the norm for organizations – especially large organizations. As Euan says in the book at the foot of page 40,
We have professionalized communication and taken it away from the ordinary manager or member of staff.
If anything had to be written for work, there were templates and document titles to use. God forbid that you might create something new. Or useful. And watch the language. In addition, the templates tended to be specific to individual departments, so any chance of breaking down internal silos and sharing knowledge more widely was slim.
In the chapters ‘Literacy Re-discovered’ and ‘Mass Illiteracy’, Euan describes the potential inherent in social media to change that norm. However, when he asserts that writing on the web has the potential to persist and that what “you said last week and last year will still be visible online and you will have to take this into account”, I feel he describes a problem rather than a solution.
This fear of committing to a digital permanence is every bit as scary as the traditional fear of the page. Couple this with the passionless and downright deadly dull business writing that most staff are forced to read on a daily basis and it is no surprise that most employees run screaming from the thought of writing more of the same. When your model is so poor, it is hard to see how to overcome it or head off in new directions.
I agree with Euan that the new social tools can make writing more immediately effective and will go some way to making redundant the old metaphor of the document but I think there is a stage prior to this that businesses need to make happen. It is perhaps a bit of a chicken and egg situation: employees are wary of writing because of the perceptions surrounding writing in the business but can only discover the true benefits of writing by doing it.
Any business that wishes to embrace fully the benefits of better communication – better business, in other words – can either wait for a new generation comfortable with widespread use of the social tools to come into the workplace or it needs to dismantle the obstacles that it places in the way of its employees writing.
Which option will your company choose?
In January, I wrote a piece on the back of a talk by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg at a Like Minds Breakfast event. The guys at Like Minds enjoyed it and asked me to blog the subsequent events they’re holding monthly at the ME Hotel in London.
February saw Influence At Work UK Director Steve Martin deliver the talk – and stay behind for a video interview with me afterwards.
My report of the Steve Martin event is now up on the Like Minds site.
If you like the idea of the talks, the next one – scheduled for March 26th – will be given by Ajaz Ahmed, Chairman AKQA. You can find details and book for the event here.
There is one element of punctuation that throws even the most experienced writer into wobbles of indecision: the colon. So much so, in fact, that its usage has declined significantly. It’s place has been taken by ‘the dash’ in writing of all sorts. As for its second cousin the semi-colon, it barely registers other than as a sort of upmarket comma.
Punctuation is the oil that makes the engine of grammar run smoothly. Use the wrong oil – or no oil at all – and your engine grinds to a halt in a spluttering mess of broken parts and misconceptions. In other words, your words may, at worst, appear to be gibberish and, at best, may be misunderstood.
Some punctuation can be left to individual tastes, such as the Oxford comma. (I may discuss this little beauty in another post because it is used less and less often these days and I am a passionate believer that it could quite easily save us from destruction and the onset of a new Dark Age.)
We’re not blessed with a huge range of punctuation marks but each has a specific function and a major part of that function is to enhance the meaning of what we are trying to say. When I abuse or misuse a punctuation mark, I am simply undermining the power of my own words.
So what part does the colon play in supporting the power of words? The strength of the colon is as a signal. When you see a colon, you know that what follows explains or builds on what has just been said. Look at the following sentences.
I’ve never been happier. I love you.
I’ve never been happier: I love you.
In the first example, it is hard to know exactly how the statements are connected. We may guess but can never be sure. Do I love you because I’m happy? Do I love you because you’re sitting beside me and I’ve just watched Scotland finally win an important football match after many years? The second example, however, leaves us in no doubt. I am happy because I love you.
When we reach a colon at the end of a statement, it should come as a relief: it is a promise that the writer will provide us with some information – free of charge – that reinforces what we have just read. This liberates us from the struggle inherent in ambiguity.
The colon can also be used to introduce a list, of course, but that seems to me to be merely an extension of its first and primary use. After all, the components of a list are simply elaborations of the subject of the list.
And what of the semi-colon?
Where the colon acts as a sort of question and answer session all on its own, the semi-colon provides two sides of the same story. The semi-colon gives us a rounded view of a situation or thought. Here is a perfect example from James Joyce in the short story ‘Eveline’ from Dubliners: (see that colon?)
The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses.
Yes, the two statements could have been separated by a full stop. But the use of the semi-colon invites us to engage with the image as a single entity. The footsteps and the man passing are inextricably linked in the mind of the woman listening. The semi-colon invites us into the moment.
Like the colon, the semi-colon also plays a role in lists. You can use it to separate items in a long list (especially when some list items already include commas) or where the list is compressed into a single sentence. Here’s an example:
James Joyce is famous for four books: Dubliners, a set of short stories set in late 19th century Dublin; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel about the childhood and youth of an Irish writer; Ulysses, a novel about one day in the life of a Dublin man; and Finnegans Wake, a long novel about the history of mankind written in a unique form of English.
There’s another little secret about using colons and semi-colons: they make your writing look smarter. If you stick with commas and full stops, nobody will mind too much. Your prose may feel a little leaden and the rhythm may get a little stodgy but nobody’s going to mock. Slip in a colon or two – judiciously, of course – and an occasional semi-colon and your audience will immediately think of you as someone who knows how to write. And that may be the difference between being taken seriously and being ignored.
To end, here is the wonderful Victor Borge discussing his idea for spoken punctuation. Well, it was Victor Borge discussing phonetic punctuation but something called Questar Entertainment has deemed a video of Victor Borge educating us on phonetic punctuation to infringe copyright. I hope Questar Entertainment get a lot of pleasure out of keeping it to themselves. I have removed the link to the video. Please feel free to search high and low for Victor Borge and uncover many wonderfully funny moments.
Most of us can tell stories. It’s our normal mode of relating what we did at the week-end or last night or when teasing someone about the office party. Or why we arrived home a few hours later than promised. These different stories may contain varying levels of truth and exaggeration, of course, but they tend to share a structure that the audience of the tale understands (even when not being entirely sympathetic).
If you’ve ever followed the instructions to programme the DVD recorder or build a flat-pack shelving system, read a typical ‘look at us’ brochure or website, or glazed over while digesting a vacuous press release or white paper, you will have experienced fully the benefits of grown up and serious writing first hand.
And that’s what they inflict on their customers.
In a lot of companies, the state of internal communications can be just as bad, if not worse. Not only do we need to find ways to use stories to connect to customers, I think it is equally important to tell stories within business.
Stories connect people and I believe it is a rare person who does not have a natural ability to do it. It is the corporate fear of openness and honesty that demands we lose the emotion and the fun when we discuss business.
In Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath talk about Xerox engineers gathered for a game of cribbage. One of the repair engineers discusses – over time – a peculiar fault uncovered after a recent ‘improvement’ in the electronics. The story gets told, the other engineers take it on board – and they remember it for when they might face a similar situation. This story was not – and could not – be replicated in a procedure manual. At least, not in a way that would have made it so memorable. (Read my review of Made To Stick.)
Therein lies the problem: many companies not only discourage (actively or passively) the storytelling approach to conveying information but they also have no processes in place to capture stories should they come to accept their importance.
Would the stories dry up if employees thought they were being captured? That’s a risk that stems primarily from the fact that many people are locked into thinking that business writing is an artificial construct that only skilful practitioners can master. Encourage people to find and use their own voice and free themselves from the belief that there is a special way to write that is so different to the way they speak and much of that paralysing fear will disappear.
It is up to companies to implement tools that allow the writing of stories in ways that retain their spontaneity and flexible structure. Social tools such as blogs and forums are perfect for such a thing. These can remain on an intranet for all good and proper business and security reasons but at least a repository of expertise and company knowledge will have a place to reside.
Pipe dream or necessity? How do you see the future of stories in your business?