Why writing matters in complex organizations
A few months into joining Carta's product org, I've been thinking about the relationship between good writing and good decisions.
Writing well is a superpower in any role. It's particularly important for product managers, who need to examine messy realities, distill that mess into something clear and understandable, and rally others to act based on those insights.
Here, I wanted to share a few thoughts on:
Some of the things government gets right about writing
The challenges that 'deck cultures' face as they grapple with increasing complexity
Some practical tips for PMs who want to write more effectively
What does government get right about writing?
Not everything from my time in government applies to a place like Carta, or the product work we do. Few typically associate the government with moving quickly, being customer-centric, or building great products.
But the structures that support decision-making at the highest levels of government (e.g. the National Security Council) are designed to do two things well: 1) surface and synthesize massive amounts of information and 2) serve as the rails for making consequential decisions quickly and with the right inputs.
Writing is essential to doing both of those things well. Writing is how information flows. There’s a culture of pre-reads to inform conversations, detailed note-taking, and broad written share-outs of decisions. In many ways, it's the only way to operate well when you're dealing with complexity at a global scale.
Why doesn't deck culture scale?
I was talking to a friend who was early at a company that ultimately went public. He told me how the deck and meeting culture that worked at 300 employees started breaking once they reached thousands of employees. They ultimately needed to change their approach.
Some of this may sound familiar to anyone who has worked at a big organization: it’s impossible to have everyone in the room for each conversation. Endless meetings don’t seem to drive consensus or clarity. “Immature oral presentations” mean that important information isn’t communicated or absorbed.
When information isn't written down and shared widely, you end up with diverging perceptions of what is true. Like the Allegory of the Cave, teams see the shadows cast by ambiguous presentations and ad-hoc conversations, and end up believing a projection of reality.
If decks lead to lost context, good writing is near-lossless compression of ideas.
Writing is far more scalable. It can instantly be shared and consumed throughout an organization. It leaves a record, an audit trail of how problems were approached and how decisions were made.
When teams adopt a culture of writing (and sharing that writing), it allows organizations to draw out disagreement, engage with complexity, and iterate towards a shared understanding of truth.
Writing better
Creating a writing culture requires a commitment to great writing. Great writing—like great anything—is not something you'll learn from reading a blog post, so I won't try.
Instead, I'm going to share some tactical advice, focused on how anyone can better structure memos that drive organizations to make better decisions.
Start with your key point
Make your key point immediately. This is often at odds with a desire to provide all the context before sharing a perspective or advocating a decision.
Here’s an example from Zbigniew Brzezinski's memo to Carter preparing for the Camp David peace talks. Look at how much weight that opening paragraph carries.
For the talks at Camp David to succeed, you will have to control the proceedings from the outset and thereafter pursue a deliberate political strategy designed to bring about significant changes in both the Egyptian and Israeli substantive positions.
It lays out the goal, puts the challenges in context, and tees the President up to understand the actions in the context of the broader challenges.
This approach forces you to crystallize your thinking. If you can't state your main point succinctly, you can’t expect others to understand it. Starting with your conclusion or your outcome also helps readers put subsequent information in context.
When teeing up a decision, focus only on the tradeoffs that matter
The core part of almost every decision memo is a concise summary of the key considerations. This seems obvious, but in reality is not easy.
Here’s a declassified memo to President Clinton (from then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger) regarding Kosovo. He lays out the approach, and then identifies some of the key political and military risks.
Note that Berger didn’t boil the ocean. There are thousands of risks. But there are only a handful the president needs to care about: 1) damage to the Russia relationship, 2) massive expenditure of political capital (tradeoffs), and 3) the potential for a long-term military commitment.
By the time dozens of people had redlined this memo, it only outlined the risks that matter.
Write plainly, and keep it short
These two principles are distinct but closely related. What does it mean to write plainly?
Omit needless words
Use the active voice
Avoid death by a thousand adjectives
Use the simplest word that is also the correct one
As for keeping it short? Your job is to convince people, and people are easily distracted. So make it easy. Sentences should only be as long as they need to be. Don’t seek out complexity, eliminate it.
As Winston Churchill wrote in a memo to his cabinet:
"…the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking".
Get rid of anything superfluous
Give your reader all the information they need, and nothing they don’t. Every sentence should say something new. Your goal should be near-absolute information density for the intended audience.
Take this memo to the Director of the NEC about selling fighter jets to Korea. It won’t win any awards for compelling or flowery language. It’s only 2 pages. But there are no wasted sentences:
Many who work on this issue have spent their lives thinking about US-Korea relations. Some of those people only work on military sales to Korea. Those people could write a book about this topic.
However, the point of this memo was to make sure Gene Sperling was ready to talk to the President about Korean aircraft sales. That was probably a 3-minute conversation. The President will then have a 30-second discussion with the South Korean president. But that conversation will influence a multi-billion dollar sale and thousands of jobs.
The memo was context aware, and densely packed with only the information needed to influence the outcome.
Embrace the tension between truth and storytelling
Great writing in a professional context is rarely dry. You might be inclined to think “I’m writing for serious people in a serious place, I should make my writing serious..”
But serious doesn’t mean boring. Telling a compelling story isn’t incompatible with surfacing the truth. The truth should be compelling.
Take the then-CEO of Nokia’s ‘Burning Platform’ memo. You could read a 350-page report on Nokia, but it wouldn’t give you a better sense of what ails Nokia than these three pages:
Another business memo worth reading is Brad Garlinghouse’s memo outlining some of the problems he saw at Yahoo.
These memos from senior leaders knew that in order to accomplish their goals—to break through an institutional morass—they needed to wake people up. They needed to tell a story that motivated and inspired change.
Backchannel your work and embrace ‘conflict’
This isn’t about the writing itself, but rather how you disseminate your ideas through an organization.
The point of writing in a professional context is usually to inform a decision and drive towards an outcome. The way you write matters, but the way that writing is consumed matters too. A failure mode I’ve observed (particularly from people early in their career) is that they keep their writing in a silo and avoid input or edits “until it’s done”.
An early draft shared tactically is often much more effective than a final product shared widely. Bring people along in your thinking. Let them in as you lay out your thought process, refine your ideas, and secure buy-in.
In the course of getting input, you’ll come across people who mark things up, edit it aggressively, and make points you disagree with. Don’t take this personally, but lean into it. This is a healthy part of getting to consensus.