Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

Business Writing

Let Your Employees Tell Stories To Each Other

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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).

Tell Stories in Business
Old Timer Explains The Expenses Claim Process
But when it comes to business communication, many companies seem to forget the need to tell stories. They feel that, because “this is business, it’s not personal”, a different structure needs to be used. Something more obviously grown up. More serious. With serious business words.

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?

Why Great Innovation Starts With Your Pencil

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Darwin draws evolution
Charles Darwin has an idea….
On Monday I was at the first Like Minds breakfast event of 2013. The speaker was Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg of The Innovation Architects. He has a book (co-authored with Paddy Miller) coming out in March, called Innovation As Usual. His talk, unsurprisingly, was about innovation. Specifically, innovation in large companies.

It was a short talk, not because there is little sign of innovation in large companies, but because that’s the way these breakfast meetings go. The talk is a stimulus for conversation among the attendees. The focus of Thomas’s talk was how companies can stimulate innovation through creating a framework in which it can prosper. A strategy of innovation. Innovation incubation, if you will.

What made the talk particularly enjoyable – and both more useful and memorable – was its interactive element. Thomas had us debating in groups what we thought prevented innovation in our businesses or businesses we worked with. Then we reported back. Discussing a concrete topic was also a great way to quickly get to know the other attendees. This pattern of sharing knowledge with, and eliciting knowledge from, the audience continued throughout the talk. This turned the whole experience from lecture to seminar and was all the more rewarding for it. This also fits perfectly, I think, with the ethos of the group that Andrew Ellis is trying to create at Like Minds.

The case studies of successful innovation were neatly juxtaposed by Thomas with example of missed opportunity gaps – wheels on suitcases, anyone?

But one topic that Thomas couldn’t cover in the time available was the process of innovation as practised at the individual level. In other words, how the spark of innovation moves from initial notion to something that can be acted upon.

The Unexpressed Idea Dies

I believe that a huge number of ideas – and particularly highly innovative ideas – are lost to companies every week because of a simple lack of pencils?

Now, I don’t mean that literally, of course. What I mean is this: ideas rarely get written down. And when they don’t get written down, they die. Sometimes slowly, like the fade at the end of an old silent film, and sometimes quickly, like a sudden breeze extinguishing a candle exposed at an open window.

For many of us, our only experience of seeing our ideas written down is when the facilitator at a brain-storming session scrawls our verbalised idea on a whiteboard or a sticky note. The idea then sits there – undercooked, lonely, and unloved on its yellow background – with little chance of developing further on its own.

There is a magic that happens when a thought moves from your head down your arm and onto the page. Seriously. At the most basic level the thought has taken form. But more than that, it suddenly becomes something that can be worked on.

Writers of books will talk of how the real work begins after the first draft is written. Putting your idea on the page is the first draft of your idea. Even as you write, there will be new thoughts triggered in the process and questions will surface that you hadn’t believed were relevant while the idea sat in your head. When you write something down, it generates questions almost as a by-product. You find you need to impose a structure on your thoughts that automatically forces you to make choices about importance. Which benefit should be at the top of the list? What word best describes the product or service that will evolve from the innovation you’re instigating?

One way to look at this is to see the idea in the head as a two-dimensional representation only. When it hits the page and you can start drawing arrows and mind maps (ironically named, perhaps) and little doodles and large exclamation points, the idea will start to assume depth and even a sense of time. In other words, your idea will begin to assume the dimensions more easily associated with a plan of action and a list of tasks to be completed and questions asked and answered.

Opposable Thumbs Help Grip Pencils

Innovation is an activity that is both essential for business growth and which is part of the very excitement of business. And it starts with the simple act of taking an idea and writing it down. How many great innovative ideas have been lost – or followed the wrong track to failure – for the want of paper and pencil or the lost art of writing things down?

Here are my five rules of early innovation incubation:

  1. Find a notebook with a flexible cover that can slip inside a pocket;
  2. Carry sharpened pencils (or, for the more safety-conscious, blunt pencils and a portable sharpener);
  3. Develop the habit of writing ideas down. (You may find that a necessary precursor to this is the need to overcome the fear of embarrassment when you whip out your notebook in public!);
  4. Review the ideas, thoughts, and captured quotations in your book weekly and transfer the best ones to another book – or, better yet, a large sheet of paper. Grab a sheet from a flip chart, for instance. Then you can annotate and colour and draw and attach sticky notes to the concept until it starts to resemble the crazed plans of an evil genius bent on world domination;
  5. Refine and polish the ideas by writing more about them. Write down the questions that come to mind and use these as the start of a plan. (For example, if you have a question such as “What is the best source for X ?”, change that to a list of tasks under the sub-heading “Find the best source for X”.)

I’ve talked deliberately about paper and pencils. As we become more and more dependent on tablets, smartphones, and ultra-portable laptops for our communications and consumption of information, the art of writing things down is increasingly seen as both arcane and somewhat archaic. But we lose the sense of the physical and the ability to ‘play’ with our ideas.

Looking at a large sheet of paper or a wall of sticky notes and suddenly realising that THIS element should go THERE is almost impossible to replicate in software on ever diminishing screen sizes.

The question then may be; is technological innovation actually hindering our ability to make our creative thinking take physical shape?

Stick It To Them

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The second book on my recent reading list is Made To Stick by Chip & Dan Heath.

I had read their book Switch earlier in the year and enjoyed it, so grabbing hold of their previous book made sense. To me, anyway.

Where Switch deals with what change is hard and what to do about overcoming the obstacles – both external and internal – in the way of change, Made To Stick looks at the apparently simple notion of why “some ideas take hold and others come unstuck”.

Of course, it’s not a simple notion and the Heath brothers take close to 300 pages to examine it.

Conveying ideas and getting them to make an impact – the longer the better, in most cases – is a vital component in the writer’s skill set. I approached this book, therefore, as a writer with a novel nearing completion as much as someone looking to launch a new business. The book rewards both approaches.

Like Switch, this book is written in a style that is engaging and easy to read. It is peppered, too, with great stories that are a treat to read and which easily convey the concepts discussed in a particular chapter.

The basic thesis of Made To Stick is carried in six chapters that follow the pleasing acronym of SUCCES(s). These break down ‘stickiness’ like this:

  • S for Simple: find the core message to be conveyed
  • U for Unexpected: grab and hold attention with surprise and interest
  • C for Concrete: make abstract ideas concrete with a real and telling example
  • C for Credible: help people believe through using authority or details they understand from experience
  • E for Emotional: make people care
  • S for Stories: people act on the back of inspirational stories

This just touches the surface of what the book covers. But if you want to know what makes an idea (including a business idea) stick or have a chance of longevity – and how to give your ideas the best chance to acquire such stickiness – this is a greatly rewarding read.

Many of the techniques described by Heath & Heath would be covered in a top rate creative writing course and I was fascinated to see the parallels between building a narrative (whether fiction or journalism) and developing a way to ensure that information is retained in the minds of an audience of potential customers or when we want to influence behaviour.

It should not be a surprise that the processes are so similar. After all, stories have long been used to carry history, myth, tenets of faith, and proscriptions of behaviour. The best stories – and their messages – endure in the same way that brand messages and propaganda and urban legends persist.

I would recommend reading both books pictured above (with the obligatory affiliate link to Amazon). The Heath Brothers also maintain a web site, which is well worth a visit. There are all kinds of download goodies available from their site, including great swathes of PDF versions of the material from their books.

Write And Expose Yourself

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Exposed backside cleavage

Writing is communication and there are two types of communication; successful and unsuccessful. Most of us feel we can communicate quite successfully when we speak about what we know or care about but feel much less confident when we’re tasked with writing the message we need to get across.

In my last post about content I mentioned passion. Passion can be a real source of trouble for many people in business. And not in the way you might be thinking. Here’s the thing; when you reveal your passion, you expose yourself. Now, if you promise to clear your mind of any unsuitable images, I promise to avoid any more double entendres.

Exposure is one of our great fears. This is why people hate standing up and giving presentations. This is why men hate dancing at parties and discos unless they have been well lubricated and can then blame the alcohol for the lack of coordination and early onset ‘Dad dancing’.

This fear of exposure probably goes all the way back to trying to stay out of view of the roving sabre-toothed tiger on the hillside above. Nowadays it comes down to a simple desire to avoid looking a fool or giving anyone else the opportunity to think badly of us or to make others think badly of us.

However, this is not a post about the psychology of self-esteem, so I’ll cut to the chase.

When it comes to writing, many people face a double fear of exposure. Over exposure, you could call it.

On top of the perfectly normal (in the sense of completely human) fear of revealing what they think and believe, there is the further fear of exposing their inability to write ‘properly’. (I put that last word in quotation marks because I want to emphasise that the word ‘properly’ has no place in any discussion about writing skills.)

Write As You Speak

Try this. Write down a description of the service your company delivers or the product it builds. Write this as if you were putting together a short paragraph or two for a brochure – perhaps one of those directories of participants at a trade show.

Done? OK, now – without looking at what you’ve written or consciously trying to remember any of it – record yourself talking about the product or service as if to a colleague or someone you know is interested in what you’re saying.

If you now compare the written piece with the audio piece I think you’ll find that your audio description conveyed more of your passion. Listen to the audio and then read aloud your written piece. The written piece was probably stilted and, let’s face it, pretty dull. No?

The reason for this is that, for most of us, as soon as we try to engage ‘writing mode’ we fall into the trap of thinking that there is a ‘proper’ way of writing. We forget the rule that we are communicating and simply want to show that we know the rules of ‘business writing’.

And yet when you talk about this stuff, you let the passion show and you don’t worry about ‘proper’ speaking. Of course you follow some rules of syntax and grammar – otherwise you would end up jabbering nonsensically. When it comes to writing, those are also the only rules you need to follow: make the sense clear. So much business writing seems to be about hiding rather than revealing the meaning of what’s being said.

Here’s a simple rule to follow the next time you want to write something at or for work. Write as you speak.

If you have another go at your ‘brochure’ piece with this in mind, you may be pleasantly surprised, not only by how it sounds when you read it back but also how much easier it was to write in the first place.

Content Is Not Copy

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Katni copper-plate charter.

Some copy about content

The purpose of content has changed. Not so long ago, content was a fancy word for copy and was something to be used in marketing collateral and sales pitches. On the web this was translated most usually as the company web site and a sales page. Internal communications or manuals or training guides were not considered content (if they were considered at all) and certainly not considered as part of an strategy for increasing customer retention.

The word ‘content’ now tends to be used in conjunction with the terms ‘marketing’ or ‘strategy’. Which may or may not make things clearer.

When content was regarded as copy, it was usually left to a copywriter (or the ubiquitous CEO’s nephew) to write it.

Things have changed

Sites that rely on copy these days are sad affairs.

Sites that rely on copy are simply asking you to buy.

Sites that rely on copy only are not really interested in you.

Sites that rely on content are making an effort to establish a relationship.

It’s the difference between customer acquisition and selling. And then between selling once and customer retention.

So, what is content?

Don’t let the word content put you off. Admittedly, it’s a pretty shabby word. Both threatening and bland at the same time. We need a new term. Until that happens, think of it this way:
Content is your passion on the page.

It’s your experience and knowledge and beliefs and ideas. On the page. There for people to read.

Scary, yes?

Yes, but…..

… to rehearse the hoary old chestnut, people buy from people.

People buy from people they trust. People who have shared their:

  • Passion
  • Experience
  • Knowledge
  • Beliefs
  • Ideas

Content, then, is you. Your business.

Content is (very) important

The Cluetrain Manifesto was published in 2000. It is a book rich in vital messages for business in the age of the internet (and the intranet, an aspect of information sharing often overlooked in books and articles about business communications). Here is a message from early in the book – from the book’s ‘elevator rap’:

You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures…. Or you can join the conversation.

People buy from people they can engage with in conversation. Over time.

What to do about it

Whatever the size of your business, this doesn’t need to be a huge content marketing exercise. For instance…..here’s what my wife experienced:

She tried blogging. It didn’t take. That’s ok: it’s not for everyone and if it’s not a fit, don’t force it. The passion won’t come through if what you write is a chore and you’re doing it because your content guy tells you you should. What suited my wife better was a LinkedIn group for those in her industry sector. Hers was the first group in the sector and soon she had gathered representatives of clients, potential customers, industry bodies, and even competitors. It is a lively forum and, whereas the blog could feel like she was speaking to herself and she had to dream up subjects to write about, the group sparks conversations and topics primarily through its range of expertise and interests. The engagement is almost instantaneous.

The result: The LinkedIn group has established her as an expert in her field. She is now invited to speak at meetings of potential clients and associated industries.

Buy a copy of Euan Semple’s book Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do (that’s an affiliate link). You can read my review of the book here.

While you read that book, think how best to use what Chris Brogan calls outposts. I’ll be writing posts over the coming weeks about making the best use of your passion and expertise across the social web.

Now write some content. Put down what you know about your business. Write as if you were explaining to someone you love what it is you love about your job or your company. (And if you want to really test yourself, now try writing the same thing as a sales letter and watch how your passion declines and you end up wondering why you go to work each day!)

And if you haven’t done so already, sign up for my newsletter (use the box in the sidebar) to get regular updates about content and writing for your business.

Business Writing Not Worth Dying For

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Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinspencer/

It’s commonly said – and very possibly true – that public speaking ranks above death in the list of many people’s fears.

From my experience working in and with businesses, I know there’s another – more hidden – fear. That fear is the fear of writing. This tends to receive less coverage than the fear of public speaking because the majority of people in most businesses are rarely expected to write much more than emails and the occasional report.

The Fear Of Writing In Business

There are two principle reasons why the people in your business may fear writing:

  1. They don’t believe they can write what normally passes for business writing
  2. They don’t want to write what normally passes for business writing

What is commonly thought of as ‘business writing’ is so different to how the people in your business talk or think that they feel that to write in this way takes training and special skills. At the same time, most people know instinctively that to write in such a manner would turn whatever passion they might have for the subject into deadly dull anti-communication.

The unadulterated fluff and self-puffery found on so many business Home, Our Services, and About Us web pages is exactly the sort of writing that many people in business have come to think of as business writing. Visit a slew of sites in the same market sector and you’ll be hard pressed to differentiate one business from another.

There Is Room For Passion

But if you were to walk into a particular business and ask someone there to tell you what the company does, the chances are that your experience would be radically different.

The disconnect between the passion and enthusiasm of a company’s people and their writing is astonishing. And troubling. And a significant contribution to a loss of business.

Fear Of Writing Means Poor Communication

This situation needs to change if the full potential of content channels – from reports and manuals to blogs and customer interactions – are to be exploited.

Writing possesses a peculiar magic. When you set aside your fear and begin to write down your thoughts, new ideas and new connections often come to mind. As more people within a company write about their jobs and their tasks and what they believe the company is doing well or could do better, a huge mass of useful information grows quickly.

Much of this can be used within the company as training and planning material. And much of it can be used externally on sites and marketing material to establish credibility and trust.

Where Does The Fear Come From?

Much of the blame for fear of writing – and the cost to business – can be traced to two causes:

  1. School, where we are taught to write essays as if we’re talking to people who died just before Queen Victoria ascended the throne
  2. Self-important keepers of the business knowledge, who prefer jargon and opacity to plain-speaking and clarity

One of the main functions of this site is to help people working in business overcome the fears and find the best ways to let their passion and expertise find expression in written form. It’s great to have staff who can produce useful and valuable content for use within and outside your company.