Unpredictable Patterns #39: Write it down
Writing is thinking, mirroring, challenging, capturing and creating the future of organizations - are you writing it down?
Dear reader,
A few days spent working and wandering in the mountains. There is something about wandering that really allows you to disconnect - I imagine heaven as an endless series of mountain treks with stops in small cabins with friends and family, hunkering down during storms, with stovepipe ovens and the smell of the smoldering fire in the middle of the night, and then a new day, a dip in a small lake and coffee and towards the next days trek - through impossible landscapes on a small planet in an unknowable universe. Here an image from the latest walk from yesterday, a small break at the Oxen lake, with a mountain magnificently disinterested in human time and events overlooking the lake!
This week we will explore writing more in detail, and look at some forms of writing that are surprisingly scarce, even though it seems obvious they have a lot of value!
Writing it down
This might sound like very meta, but bear with me. I have been noodling on the importance of writing things down, and it seems to me that it is one of the most underestimated and undervalued methods of developing anything. There are several reasons for this, all well researched and established, and yet I find that we write surprisingly little (and when we do write we write in a way that almost seems to imply that we want to apologize for putting something in text). So, then, here is an unapologetic defense for writing in a number of different contexts where it is curiously weak today.
Writing is thinking
Writing is thinking, and a pen or keyboard is, as researchers Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic put it, a thinking machine. They review the research on writing and note small, but astonishing things that give us keys to think better - one of them is that most people do not think of language as consisting of words before they learn to read and write — think about that! Words are a discovery you make when you learn to write - and words are your key to really exploring the underlying conceptual structures of our shared culture!
And it is in writing you start to explore that giant structure, word by word, sentence by sentence.
But more than that - the text becomes a mirror that you can hold up to yourself to see what it really is you are thinking. As the American author Joan Didion put it: ”I don't know what I think until I write it down.”
The text shows us what we think - but it does not end there: it also allows us to change what we think. It is as if we reveal our own code when we write, and it is through writing that we gain the opportunity to also re-program ourselves.
And it is not just about intellect, it is equally about what we feel - and that might be even more important, and again - requires a certain writing style. The temptation when writing something is to want to seem logical and rational, but writing is equally equipped to capture emotions and internal turmoil, and doing so, again, allows us to change it.
And if we combine cognitive and emotional writing we get even further.
It turns out that if we focus on both the cognitive and emotional parts of trauma when journalling, for example, we can learn from even very stressful events and find meaning in them.
This is interesting, because we rarely - if ever - use emotional writing in our professional writing. Overall work is curiously void of feelings - and the idea of the professional is the idea of someone that does not allow emotion to cloud their judgment — ignoring that emotion may be the key to greater cognitive capacity completely.
Imagine a memo written about a challenge in a company that also included the emotional dimensions and took them into account, looking closely at how a political or policy situation was likely to make people who work with a company feel and why others feel a certain way about the company - that would be an interesting piece of writing!
To use our recurring test case - how does the so-called tech lash make people feel? Inside the organizations? Outside? What is the relationship between internal activism and the way that the tech-lash makes people feel about working for a tech company? Is it inconceivable that we have seen a surge of employee activism as a response to the way that people feel they have to defend, emotionally, their decision to work at a company that daily features in the press in negative terms?
Are leaders of these companies responding to that emotional complexity or are they focusing on the symptoms? Are they writing their own analysis down?
So, writing is thinking, and allows rethinking and if we write our feelings and not just our thoughts we can understand the world in ways that slowly reveal the conceptual architecture that carries our culture.
The need for campfire writing
The modern organization is often inundated with enormous amounts of information - yet, surprisingly often, people will suggest that they do not feel in the loop or that they want even more information. One possible explanation to this phenomenon is that we cannot understand the world with information, we need narrative to hang our information on.
We live in organizations with a wealth of information and poverty of narrative, to paraphrase Herbert Simon’s famous paper on information wealth and attention poverty.
Narrative is a fancy way of describing stories, and the key here is using writing to tell stories. Organizations are governed by stories, and when I say that we write to think, the thing we write is often stories of different kinds.
We could write several notes on just stories, but let us here just note a few of the key things that we have learnt about stories in the last couple of decades:
Stories are excellent compression algorithms - they can take a lot of information and arrange it in a way that implies a world view, a shared model of the operating environment of an organization. That is why we believe in conspiracy theories - we calibrated compression over accuracy, and choose the stories that explain everything!
We calculate probability not as the probability of atomistic propositions, but as the continuation of a story. When we are asked if X is probable, we calculate that probability by imagining X as the next chapter in a story - not as a disconnected proposition that flows freely. One of the great traps of the modern western mind is the propositional fallacy - the thought that the world can be understood as propositions. This world - the world of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus - does not exist. The world is a story of stories, and not in a loosey goosey way - we evolved to understand our world in stories and are largely unable to understand it well in other ways. A corollary to this is that narrative rationality always beats propositional rationality.
There are deep patterns in stories that recur - these patterns guide us when we script our understanding of the world. These plots are the building blocks of our world - and they are dozens not millions - but they differ across cultures more than we think. These deep patterns are unchanging, and remind us more of biological speciation and evolution than anything else - they evolve slowly and are open to taxonomic exploration, but re-constructing or subverting them is really, really hard. A corollary to this is that if you are stuck in a plot your choices are restricted by what we can call the ”plot option space” - and if you do not see that you are wasting your time.
Now, these are just a few things that we have learned, but our goal here is not to explore narrative as such, but the writing down of narrative. The practice of writing down the story, the practice of chronicling it, is essential.
The idea of the chronicle - from the Greek ta khronika - is an ancient idea, and it essentially consists of capturing the events as they occurred and as they are occurring. A chronicler lives through the story that they are capturing and putting into words - but that should not fools us into believing that the chronicler is documenting the story without shaping it. The chronicler builds the story and so has a large role in shaping the longer narrative arc as it evolves - and that is a core part of leadership.
Historian Carlo Ginzburg has even suggested that we can trace storytelling and narrative back to the hunter deciphering the tracks of the animals they hunt and then telling the story of the hunt and the campfire - narrative is about deciphering the signs and signals around us and sharing them to build a commonality among every member of a group.
Organizations need campfires.
So it is surprising to see that so few managers regularly are the chroniclers of their teams. Especially those managers that have distributed teams over different time zones and places. The chronicle is a way to own the work and future of a team, a way to build a shared reality. But it also is a way to build an immune system of sorts against the stories other teams might tell about your team - and we should be open here, and remember the emotional part of writing: office politics is real, and in large organizations you either are telling a story or having one told of you.
But much more importantly: chronicling your team and your work clarifies what is sometimes called, in military circles, commander’s intent. This idea is the key to distributed decision making: in a situation where the team is distributed, things happen fast and decisions have to be made without escalation - then commander’s intent is crucial: it allows everyone to picture what the commander would have done, or said, or decided.
Chronicling the team’s work and at the same time sharing thoughts on purpose and direction allows a manager to create that commander’s intent. It is through writing that you can build that understanding and a team that has a sense of commander’s intent is a team that knows what to do and can do it much faster than if all decisions have to revert back to the manager or leader.
In a sense, leadership in modern organizations is in the writing.
The logbook and the plan - why you are doing reporting wrong
Another area where we underestimating continuous writing is in project management. In almost all the books and courses on project management the lion’s share is taken up by planning projects and most project tools are weighted towards charting todos and work packages and gantt charts and…
All of this is work that goes into building the project, but very little thought is given to the question of execution. And here - as in other cases - the modern project is one that unfolds in writing.
We scoff at reporting, but reporting is much more than we make it out to be. Unfortunately most organizations do reporting wrong. This is especially true in the pernicious use of what is sometimes called ”snippets” - bullets that are supposed to give the reader a sense of what happened, but which rarely explain what the reported events actually mean. This is writing consciously stripped of its narrative - and so essentially disjointed propositions floating outside of any context.
Reporting should be akin to a captain’s log - a description of how the journey is going, events that have occurred and what they mean, what we have learned from them and how we are adapting. A half page narrative report can do wonders for an organizations understanding of itself, and for a team’s cohesion and collaboration. Yet we shy away from it - and we say that there is too much reporting.
This also means that we ignore another important fact - reporting is reflecting. When we write down what happened and really walk through it honestly, we can call out improvements and learnings in a clear way. This requires that we are comfortable with admitting failures and learnings, and real reporting, with reflection, cannot happen in an organization that lacks fundamental psychological safety - but that is hardly an argument against reflective reporting!
Reflective reporting should also lead to next actions, next moves. And that is how a project unfolds - or should unfold - in writing, reflective and narrative, in a log book. Any project we want to make progress on should be the purpose of a diary, where we collect observations and ideas and problems to see if long term patterns evolve.
And this is another aspect if reflective reporting or running a captain’s log for ourselves at work: it is a discovery mechanism. You can track the decisions you make, and the consequences they have and you can check if there are patterns in successes as well as failures.
Another example of this is to consider reporting a kind of field notes - what is happening, and what are you observing — using writing to hone your skills at observation is another important part of reporting. What are you seeing? What is really happening? Project management is better understood as field work, in many ways, where the project unfolds in contact with reality.
Writing is a way to discover those patterns that you can only see at the height of 100 000 words.
We should report like Darwin kept his diaries, and perhaps even go back to our reports and rewrite them like he did, copying the notes to find even more structure in them. This notion - that we can write, say, in long hand and then type up is almost universally dismissed as a waste of time. That is not right: rewriting is a powerful method in its own right, and copying notes can be a great way of reflecting.
We discuss the purpose of reporting far too rarely.
The age of the performative diary
This leads us to the personal journal or diary. Journalling is difficult, and valuable, and sometimes awkward. I have kept a journal for a long time and there are patterns in it that irritate me, and things that I think a lot about and seem to be stuck in. But I see them now, and so I can change them. My journal is not just an attempt to document my life, but it is an attempt to change it, to change myself.
It is also a way to perhaps come to terms with what I cannot change, or discover the follies that all of us end up stuck in.
Reading other’s diaries is instructive as well — great women and men were haunted by the same demons that haunt us - and we can learn a lot from biographies and diaries about life’s often complex patterns and shifts. From the dramatic and gripping to the far more mundane, diaries allow us to read the person as they both wanted and revealed themselves to be.
Diaries are fascinating because they can be read and written in very different styles. The perhaps most seldom encountered style is the scrupulously honest dairy, where you find people stepping up to the mirror of the text to really make an account of themselves: this is the diary as a confession. There are few examples, and even if we think some diaries are more confessional than others there is always the risk that we are just encountering someone very skilled in the second style: the performative. Here the diary is a performance, a way to look good or horrible - depending on what one prefers - to the world after one is gone.
Today, the two forms are increasingly blended - we have turned the confession into performance through the rise of reality shows and brutally self-exploratory literature, but if we look not to the result, but to the writing, we find an interesting challenge: have you ever written something completely honest?
Sitting down, writing yourself as you think you really are, without any thought of anyone else reading it?
If you have not, you are probably very normal - and that hesitancy may reflect our deep understanding of text as something shared. Whatever is written down may be read, and so there are boundaries to what we write down - or we write it in code. A surprising amount of diaries are written in some kind of code, and often that code is the device we use to allow us to write honestly. That is fascinating - this drive to write honestly, is it a drive to change ourselves? Somewhere maybe we realize that we can only change ourselves if we meet ourselves naked in the text?
The Internet has changed a lot of this - and social networks are performative diaries where we carefully construct ourselves under the gaze of our ”friends”. We journal ourselves differently on Twitter, TikTok and LinkedIn - but all of these are versions of performative diaries. In a sense they also create a weird fatigue of seeing ourselves reflected in the text, with comments and all. Social mirroring is a better term than social media, in many ways - also because it connects to the recursive effect of behaving as the mirrored (cf mirror neurons) - and how that changes discourse and debate.
We sometimes speak of zoom fatigue - the weariness that comes from seeing our own faces, a sort of narcissus effect where we look into mirrors all day long - but the same mirroring effect has been sneaking up on us in social media, and its is intriguing to see how our drive to write ourselves down leads us back to these performative diaries again, and again - even as we sometimes grow weary of the person looking back at us from updates and tweets, selfies and blogs. But we also use this diary to change ourselves, with the help of others - social media commentary, universally reviled, can be harnessed by those mourning or in a difficult place to find their way back to a better state - and yet we rarely recognize that; the question should not be one that is for or against social media, but one that explores its social functions and uses to better understand ourselves. In this way the mode of writing becomes a mirror for our society.
(And, yes, the newsletter is also a performative form of writing - just as all letters are.)
Future biographers may find a treasure in comparing social media with private diaries and exploring the gap between the two - and as we start to explore our own age that gap will be one of the great sources of insights into the psyche of the Internet age, just as the use of mirrors have always revealed a lot about any culture.
So what?
Takeaways here are perhaps obvious, but let’s recap.
First, writing is thinking and re-writing is rethinking. If we are a knowledge society and knowledge workers, our first and most important tool is writing. We should be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking writing to be just cognitive writing and also take into account emotions - our own and others - as we write ourselves towards understanding the world we are in and the work we do.
Second, leadership now includes chronicling. A leader tells the story of the team, organization and its journey - and by doing so, regularly, also shares what we can call commander’s intent - building a shared reality for an organization. With a wealth of information modern leaders need to own the narrative to help people make sense of the world and tasks they are facing. The forms this can take are many - a weekly reflection or note is one - and emotions are encouraged.
Third, planning is often overvalued at the expense of logging. Keeping project log books is an important part of executing - the illusion that doing is somehow divorced from writing and reporting is just that: an illusion. But we report badly - we do not log in the tradition of ships captain or a researcher, we report in snippets decoupled from any reflection or narrative. If we want to do good work, reflective reporting and logging is a valuable tool.
Fourth, we live in an age of performative diaries, and these are tremendously powerful tools for both good and bad. Diaries allow us to reprogram ourselves, and a society that is engaged in a collective, broad performative writing of itself is one that is also re-programmable. But that is not something that just happens - we are all writing ourselves into the diaries of social media, so we can all contribute to this change in different ways. Social media is often blamed for destroying political discourse, but that is nonsense - it is all in the way we write and are written. Citizenship is a way of writing.
Finally, a word on something that may seem like a distraction, but is not: the exposure of writing. When we write things down they become discoverable and can be used in evidence. This is a real challenge - since it suggests that as little as possible should be written down. This in turn seems to mean that the legal incentives are directly lined up against writing, and hence against thinking. This is a growing problem. But here, as in all case, the reality is that the devil is in the details of the writing. Thoughtful analysis and commentary and learning and narrative should not be a problem - and even if caution seems to recommend less writing, experience advices more thinking, and in this case I think the reality is that the organization that writes the deepest is the one that wins.
The knowledge society encourages the survival of the fastest learner, and learning is dependent on the thinking and reflection we do in text. They who write control the universe, to nod to this week’s movie premiers…
Thank you for reading, as always, and let other’s know if you think they could be interested. I would also like to recommend Florian Maganza’s excellent newsletter The Practical Polymath - Florian is a former colleague with a thoughtful and often surprising take at a dizzying breadth of issues!
Nicklas
Unpredictable Patterns #39: Write it down
I get to thinking about the 'EA Spouse' blog post where the story of a wife to a software engineer upended the entire gaming industry. Had that post not been written in the form of a story, and an engaging one at that, it would probably never have had that result. I worked for EA then, and remember vividly the HR reps that went around the office, nervously asking everyone if they were OK. A powerful story did that.