To understand the need for a culture of writing in your organization, consider the man who longed to win the lottery.
This man lived his life in the most righteous way. He worked hard, cared for his family and neighbors, and avoided the vices that seemed to bring down so many of his acquaintances. One day he decided he wanted to be rich, so he prayed to win the lottery.
Week after week passed without this man winning the lottery. Each week brought greater and greater misery. He cried out, after weeks, “Oh, God! Why won’t you help me win the lottery? What do I have to do to win?”
Finally a voice boomed from the heavens. “Meet me halfway,” the voice said. “Buy a ticket.”
Likewise, to meet the challenges of our times, businesses need to make the effort.
Everyone. Not just the “writers” in the organization. Not just the PR staff and social media mavens, the communications pros and researchers, but everyone. The CEO. The HR team. The sales squad. The support staff, too. Everyone.
You see, we are in the midst of a great Writing Revolution. These days, everyone is a writer.
Many people write out of necessity, for jobs, school, and civic life. Many write to give voice to their passions, in politics, philosophy, social life, the arts, and more. Ideally, to write is to be heard. An old expression in government goes: “He who writes the memo sets the agenda.”
To thrive, businesses need to embrace the revolution.
Businesses can boost productivity and creativity by making their organization a writing community. Taught the right way, writing sparks immense powers of clarity and creativity.
Making It Happen
What’s required?
First, all the organization’s professionals need to master at least basic skills of writing. Given everything you write—sentences and paragraphs, sections and chapters, memos and proposals and reports—a narrative structure. Master grammar. Adopt these as the standards for all communication within the organization.
Second, managers need to use these standards to direct their departments or teams. All too often, organizations send their professionals to training seminars, where they learn new skills—and then, immediately, revert to old ways of doing things.
That’s why, after my seminars, I help managers set up systems to get their people to apply the skills we learn in our Elements of Writing seminars. If you learn a skill and don’t use it, do you really have that skill? No. Skills only count when you use them.
Managers need to enforce those standards. Email offers the perfect “enforcement” mechanism. Any time a manager gets an email that does not follow basic standards, she should return it with the message: “I’m sorry. I cannot read this email. Please follow our department’s writing standards and resend.”
In short order, everyone in the company will write better.
Third, the company’s professionals need to understand the connection between efficiency and creativity. If you write well, you write efficiently. You use fewer words to make more and better points—which demands less time on the part of readers. And when people do not get stuck reading unclear or confusing documents, they can think more creatively.
“Communication always sucks,” the management guru Tom Peters once said. “It’s very simple: It’s the human condition. … To make communication even halfway decent, even half the time, you’ve got to work like hell at it, all the time.”
It’s possible when you use a system that’s simple and intuitive. But to master communications, all of us—in business, government, nonprofits, schools—need to make that commitment to write well.
The Flywheel Strategy
The foremost expert on business strategy, Jim Collins, has developed the concept of the “flywheel” to understand how organizations develop strong capacities that adapt to changing circumstances and get better over time.
A flywheel is a heavy wheel that rotates to give a machine or vehicle greater and greater momentum and stability. By gaining speed as it turns, the flywheel produces an irresistible momentum and also greater stability. With this power and control, the flywheel can overcome periodic slowdowns and interruptions when delivering power to a machine. Here’s how Jim Collins explains the process in his wonderful new monograph, Turning the Flywheel:
In creating a good-to-great transformation, there’s no single defining action, no grand program, no single killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, it feels like turning a giant, heavy flywheel. Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward. You keep pushing, and with persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You don’t stop. You keep pushing. The flywheel moves a bit faster. Two turns… then four … then eight… the flywheel builds momentum… sixteen… thirty-two… moving faster… a thousand… ten thousand … a hundred thousand. Then at some point—breakthrough! The flywheel flies forward with an almost unstoppable momentum.
At first, it’s hard and requires an all-in commitment. But slowly, turn by turn, the flywheel gains power, momentum, and stability. It doesn’t move automatically, but it seems that way.
So what would the flywheel process look like in producing a writing culture at your company? Take a look at this depiction of the flywheel—the “virtuous cycle” in which one gain contributes to the next gain, the next gain, and the next gain.
We begin at the top with a simple commitment to improve the core writing skills of everyone in the organization. That’s a challenge, but doable with a hard enough push. That first push needs to be not only hard but also smart. We need to follow the Three S’s—Stories to Skills to Speed—to ensure that everyone succeeds.
Once the first big push is underway, it’s time to create a sense of team membership in the departments or sections. Managers have to make sure everyone follows though and gets the feedback and incentives they need to keep the momentum going. In my experience, this is the hardest part of the process.
The next push involves systems. Writing well has to become a habit. For that to happen, the elements of this habit need to be built into the structure of the workday, applying better writing techniques and standards to evaluations and rewards, and the processes for product development, service delivery, and everything else the company does.
The next push shows the benefits of all this work. The company communicates better with its own professionals, customers and clients, business prospects, the public, and more. This push requires deliberate action; remember, nothing is automatic. But it’s easier than the previous pushes.
Finally, all these benefits feed into an improvement in reputation as a company that “shoots straight and innovates.” People inside and outside the company see the incredible benefits of better writing and communication. Not only do people waste less time—their own time and others’ time—but they see a clear path to innovation and improvement.
Once you move through all of these stages, you start over. You might adjust your understanding of “core” skills as you repeat the five-step cycle. At the same time, you master more advanced skills. Step by step, you undergo another round of growth and improvement.
The Ultimate Bottom Line
This is the ultimate benefit of writing well. You not only save time and communicate better, but you improve everything in the company. You not only produce better reports, proposals, RFPs, web copy, and so on. You also create a greater sense of unity and purpose.
In the end, all great companies require great communication. Writing skills make all communication better. When you communicate better, you share better. You collaborate better. You solve problems better. You identify opportunities better.