Organizations that write things down have a larger advantage than they used to.
Let’s take two companies:
- Speakeasy Corp
- WriteItDownCorp
At Speakeasy, leaders share information verbally. They have spoken updates, status meetings, and get everone on the same page verbally.
At WriteItDownCorp, the company has a written culture. Everything is documented and organized. It’s not official until it’s written down in the wiki™.
There are tradeoffs to both types of companies. But I believe that over the next few years, written cultures will have higher leverage than spoken ones.
What is written culture
A written culture doesn’t mean that people don’t talk to each other. It means that there is a strong culture of writing within the company.
I’ve worked at a lot of companies. More than most people. And company culture varies significantly, mostly based on the biases of the founders and executive team.
Signs of a written culture
- You have a company handbook or departmental handbooks that are up to date. Usually this is because it’s used as the source of truth. (I’ve written about this in your process should be open source).
- You have a written company strategy and product strategy.
- Product plans are written down. Engineering plans are written down.
- Collaborating on a document is actually a high leverage activity, instead of a waste of time.
Why is a written culture high leverage?
Whatever your feelings about artificial intelligence (AI) (and I have complex and conflicting feelings about it myself), it is a technology that works better with good context. And AI is orders of magnitude more useful when you have written context.
If you believe that AI is a high-leverage technology, then writing is something that allows AI changes to happen.
Here are a few example prompts:
- “Look at our engineering standards, and my plan for this project. Highlight anything I might be missing or should be thinking more carefully about. Also read the security checklist and make sure my plan incorporates all of the points from the security checklist.”
- “Look at our product strategy, and my team’s roadmap, and highlight anything I should make sure is on strategy or note that it will need a carve-out. For items that aren’t on strategy, read the pitch for the project and give me the best reason to keep the project on the roadmap, and the best reason to delay or cancel it.”
- “I’d like to gradually automate Process X. Look at this documentation for the process, and convert it into a command line checklist. Each time we run the checklist, suggest something we might be able to automate. Update the process page to refer to the command line tool, and interview me to add some historical context for people so that if they run into problems they’ll understand how the rationale for this automation”
- “These three projects from last year were considered some of our most successful projects. Look at the execution plans for them and highlight anything they did differently than the other plans on the project list. Also highlight any processes from the engineering project template they might have skipped, in case there is some process we might be able to prune or modify.”
None of these should substitute for real, thoughtful work. And you can’t blindly accept anything the AI tells you. But they can surface things that you weren’t considering, and can help you do your work better.
For example, reviewing your team’s roadmap against the product strategy can highlight projects that you may need to make a good case for them remaining on your roadmap. Or help you cancel them early, because they’re off strategy. The decision is up to you, but the fact that it’s off strategy is easier to highlight if it’s all written down.
A written culture has benefits for humans too
- Writing forces people to think more clearly.
- Writing can be a more inclusive way of critique and decision-making.
- People also benefit from being able to look things up.
Technology progresses from text to 3d
When I’ve brought this up with other leaders, one reply I heard was that they didn’t think that a written culture would be important in a few years.
We have seen this type of progression before in the past. Many technologies start with text, then move to audio, then photos, then video, and then to 3D.
For example, blogging came before photo sharing, which came before video sharing. The reason for this is that each is a progressively more demanding technology.
You do see examples of AI today engaging natively with audio and photos. But it is so much more demanding that I expect text based communication to be more effective for a while yet.
Writing considered harmful?
One potential counter-argument to this might be that people are engaging in writing in a sort of AI slop way nowadays, and generating so much slop could result in poor context setting for companies.
Curating and managing the writing is becoming more expensive, so that could blunt some of the benefits of a written culture. That seems plausible to me.
How to move to a more written culture?
- Read my post on open sourcing your process. I especially think using a wiki as the source of truth is an effective lever.
- Reinforce it from the top.
- Typical change management: describe what you’re doing and why, explain, and model it.
- Chat me up if you’re interested.