Writing a great document
The first order of the day is to clarify the big claim of this post’s title. What makes a document great? Is it design, subject matter, style or language? It’s a tough question to answer, and it could be all of the above or none of the above, or each of them to a certain degree?
It seems that as usual, the good consulting answer “it depends” applies. It truly does depend, but regardless of the above, two dimension are always key.
The dimensions we will explore
For the sake of the discussion we will consider a written document, which in our world of visual communication might seem archaic, but ultimately, the written word is important, and powerful, if expressed correctly. There will always come a time in our lives, business or private, when we will have to sit down and write a document.
In my view, the two main dimensions are:
Write to be understood: We should be mindful that we express ourselves in the right way, but most importantly that we have been understood in the way that we meant our message to be understood
Time is quality: We should take the time to write a document with thought and in a concise and precise manner. Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher famously wrote: “I am sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have the time to write you a short one”.
Writing to be understood
Sounds simple, no? Try again.
I will lead into this section by sharing a personal experience of mine. The setting of the moment was at the time when I was a member of the management team of a major corporation in FMCG. The occasion itself was the presentation of a business update to our regional management. At the time I was heading the marketing function, I was relatively new to the job, in my early thirties, the youngest person in the room, a shiny degree from a prestigious British university, mastering the English language to a very high level, and I was gunning for my next promotion, because what was there to stop me, right? I brought out all of my flash and panache to the meeting.
My section of the presentation was “pimped” visually (nothing beats a “morph” transition in Powerpoint, right?), I used all of the precise English words, not the usual corporate, broken English, because there are correct ways of saying things in marketing, we are the word mastery function after all.
What could go wrong? I was about to dazzle everyone in the room and walk out with my new job in hand.
Or not?
Turns out not. Crash and burn.
I was rewarded with feedback saying my presentation was not clear and I used a lot of archaic language. Archaic!!
The day after, my tail tucked between my legs, a rain cloud over me I walked into my boss’ office to discuss the events of the day before and to try to deal with my disappointment.
Here are the lessons I learned:
Make your language simple: Assume “400-word” vocabulary, not everyone in the room has the same level of English. Things in the market don’t “exponentially increase”, they “go up fast”, there are no “temporary dips of share”, “share goes down”
Understand your audience: what are the people you are addressing really after? A self-made equation to show the relationship between media pressure and market share development isn’t what everyone is after, a picture of an effective key visual would have conveyed the message
Straight, simple feedback. I swallowed down my ego and my “big language skills from my British education where we really learnt the English language” and started doing simple, to the point materials. I tried it in a next occasion, with a lot of personal pain, and was rewarded with feedback that I was a very clear communicator and got my point across so that everyone could understand it.
Take the time for quality
This is nothing new. We have all read it somewhere, heard it, experienced it, but somehow we have to stop ourselves and slow down to apply it. We need time to collect our thoughts and think logically. System 1 and System 2 thinking as explored in Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”.
Our lives today require of us fast decision making, everything and everyone wants a fast turnaround time with instantaneous gratification and so we are pushed to go fast. But are we really going fast, and more importantly when we are writing a great document where we need others to understand us?
A question to you: How many times have you sent an e-mail “on the run”, or “on the fly” and have had to follow it up with a few e-mails to clarify what you actually meant?
There are two elements that I have started applying and that have helped me to become a better communicator and a better document writer, and I base my success simply on the number of “come back e-mails and messages” which have asked me to clarify what I meant:
Take the time. Indeed nothing will happen if you don’t reply immediately. Letting information cook in your mind will allow you to consider it from many angles, think about impacts and consequences, or activities that need to happen before you carry out what you want
MECE. This is one I learnt from “The McKinsey Way” by Ethan M. Rasiel, a book I personally loved. MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive, Cumulatively Exhaustive. Let’s briefly dive into it:
Mutually Exclusive: Applying that principle means that the different points you make don’t overlap between themselves, which brings a lot of clarity to what you are saying or writing
Cumulatively Exhaustive: The points that you make cover all of the subject matter that needs to be treated
In fine
Applying the four points above will hopefully help you draft great documents, communicate better, be understood the way you would like to be understood. When you haven’t applied them well, “there will be signs!”. For example perhaps I shouldn’t have written “In fine” as the title of this last section, but “To close”
Good luck!