Scale through writing

One of the hardest challenges in scaling any sort of large human endeavor is effective communication.

The complexity of our team’s interactions grows exponentially with the number of teammates, in a perverse application of the network effect. As soon as we are lucky enough to grow our team beyond a handful of people, misunderstandings and conflict invariably appear. Most problems in the workplace can be boiled down to interpersonal problems and the only way out of them, or at least around them, is effective communication.

To make matters worse, the modern team demands that people work together with colleagues on different schedules, in different buildings, time zones, and even countries and cultures. As your organization grows, it drifts into meeting madness and—if you are lucky—its communication patterns turn asynchronous. Left unchecked, these patterns end up taking all sorts of shapes: the management consulting habit of turning everything into an informational slide deck, protracted email chains sent to questionable listservs, laissez-faire internal wikis that become the Wild Wild West.

Once you declare meeting bankruptcy and decide you don’t want to let the communication jungle continue to grow unbridled, the work begins by having everyone involved pause and actively acknowledge the shape of the beast: human, asynchronous, written communication is hard.

A great degree of human communication is non-verbal, be it body language, intonation, or even just the use of silence. Whatever the exact split, we’ve all felt their absence.

Our favorite music is made up of words, song, and dance; writing to colleagues means counting on words alone, without the lyrical abilities of our favorite artist (or their songwriter).

With that in mind, everyone needs to put extraordinary care in their writing. As a group, you should foster a culture of appreciation for great writing by celebrating and encouraging it, as well as providing resources for everyone to hone their writing skills. This all takes effort, but it’s effort that pays off: great writing compels great thinking, and mindful communication prevents haste and waste.

Writing well is hard to master and hard to keep up: effective prose takes skill, time, and effort. Buying the team the time to focus on writing slowly breeds a culture that values the written word: demand memos ahead of meetings, have leadership publish written addresses, run periodic public updates from every department.

And while we get everyone to mind their writing, it is key to deploy the right technical tools to store and share everyone’s output, and to establish best practices around using them. Given how much energy goes into every piece, try to focus on persistent venues, such as intranet documents or internal wikis, over ephemeral means such as email or chat. You will also get more mileage out of your words if you share them with entire groups of people (say, a company-wide memo) instead of individuals (a private chat message or an email to an individual who will indubitably archive your words in days, if not hours or minutes).

Prioritizing thoughtful, public, and persistent outlets over reactive, private, and ephemeral ones will get every writer more mileage and cement the written word culture across the team.