Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Tag: writing

  • The pivot fallacy

    The Reckoning

    It was  5:47pm on a Friday after a long week of work. Only the quarterly business review separated the team from a well-deserved weekend. Routine. But this one felt like a reckoning. The product team sat in uncomfortable silence as the VP of Product sketched bold new goals on the whiteboard. These weren’t the goals they’d been working toward. In fact, no one was entirely sure what had happened to the goals they had been working on.

    “This is what we need to do!” the VP declared, underlining the new vision with a flourish.

    After a long stretch of silence someone finally spoke up: “What about the initiatives we kicked off last quarter? Are they still a priority?”

    The VP frowned, already erasing a corner of the whiteboard. “We’ve pivoted since then. This direction is more aligned with our growth strategy.”

    The word “pivoted” hung in the air – again. Frustration simmered around the table. The engineers felt whiplash. The designers were demoralized. The product managers were overwhelmed. No one could deny the ambition in the VP’s vision, but they’d seen this play out before: a flurry of excitement, half-finished work, too many fragmented commitments and no measurable outcomes. Nobody could remember the last time they delivered something great they were truly proud of. 

    This time, though, one product manager decided to take a different approach.

    The Turning Point

    After the meeting, she stayed late at her desk, sifting through notes from the past few months. It wasn’t pretty. Goals had shifted. Timelines had slipped. Decisions were scattered across various messaging threads and impromptu hallway conversations.

    “If we keep running like this,” she thought, “we’re never going to get anywhere.”

    So, she did what no one else had done: she started documenting.

    She wrote a clear product plan—not just what the team was doing, but why it mattered. She outlined the objectives, the customer needs, and the measurable outcomes they aimed to deliver. She created a timeline, linked dependencies, and included a section for open questions.

    The next day, she shared it with the team.

    “This is what we’ve been working toward,” she said, “and this is how we’re tracking against it. If leadership wants us to pivot, we need to capture that too—but let’s make sure we’re not losing sight of our progress along the way.”

    The team was skeptical. Documentation felt like just another chore. But as the weeks passed, something remarkable happened.

    The Moment of Truth

    When leadership called another meeting to discuss new priorities, the product manager brought the document.

    “We hear where you’re coming from,” she said, “but here’s what we’re working on right now, and here’s how far along we are.”

    She walked them through the plan: the problem it solved, the expected impact, and the remaining steps. Leadership paused. The VP nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Let’s get this across the finish line first.”

    For the first time in months, the team felt clarity.

    The document became their compass, keeping everyone aligned and focused. When new ideas surfaced, they weren’t dismissed—they were documented, reviewed, and prioritized against the existing plan. Everyone understood not just what they were working on but why.

    Momentum built. The team started hitting milestones. And when they shipped the product, it wasn’t just functional—it was impactful, solving a real problem for customers.

    The Power of the Written Word

    Without written plans, leadership fills the void with ideas—often brilliant, but chaotic and ever-changing. Documentation doesn’t kill ambition – it harnesses it. It captures the need for explicit structure to create a more inclusive environment, where the new starter has the same access to information as the “old guard”. 

    A well-written product plan provides a foundation for creativity and execution. It turns a team from reactive to proactive, from scattered to strategic.

    It creates clarity in the chaos, showing leadership where progress is happening and enabling teams to balance focus with flexibility. It turns pivots into informed decisions instead of knee-jerk reactions.

    In the absence of a compass, people wander. But with a product plan in hand, teams don’t just execute better—they aim higher and get there faster.

  • Using brevity to write better

    Using brevity to write better

    For the past few years there has been a meme in the system about document-based cultures. I’m a big proponent of writing as a tool to sharpen thinking. At the same time, documents and writing are only a tool and not the goal in itself. All too often I find myself staring at a 15-pager with little structure and hard to identify key insights.

    The hard truth is: It is hard to hold the attention of an audience for 15 pages. But 15 pages is a good start. Take those and turn them into six pages. Six pages that provide enough context, lay out the challenge or opportunity that you are addressing, and what kind of change you want to drive and how. This requires making deliberate decisions on what is important and what isn’t. The goal is not to get as many points across as possible, but to land the few critical points safe and sound. Six pages seem to work well, but it if you can do it in four or three pages, go for it.

    Try to optimize not for brevity, but also for readability. Make sure that you use headings and sub-headings to help the reader with a structure. Use bulleted lists, and if the list has an order, use numbered lists. Write your sentences with simple words and avoid complex sentence structure. Form follows function. Do not optimize your sentence structures to fit a word count, but rather make them easy to read. If sentences sound complex, they are. Use features like “Read Aloud” to have your text read to you. Tools like Hemingway Editor also make your text more readable.

    Use the spell and grammar check to avoid unforced errors. Do not fiddle with line spacing, font size, spacing or page margins. The defaults work well for 99% of all documents. If you have data, go splurge on a chart.

    If there are gems that didn’t make it into the six pages, put them into the appendix. And make the appendix a separate document. Now you have a tight six-pager.

    Now turn the six-pager into a one-pager. Boil your message down to one page – still providing sufficient context, easy to read, well-structured, focusing on what change you want to drive and how. Again, do not fiddle with font-size etc. You don’t need it. By now you know your key messages and it rarely takes more than an hour to get the first draft of the one-pager.


    Now turn the one-pager into three bullets. They express the essence of what you want to advocate for. When you share your document, put those bullets into the email. Then link to the executive summary and your six-pager. While this takes time, it will improve your ideas. Ultimately, you want to get your reader to the point as fast as possible. Do not make your reader pay for all the good thinking and research that you have done.

  • Categories for journaling

    Over the past few years, long-hand journaling helped me reflect and think through many personal and professional topics. Ofir Sharony offers a nice framework to establish a journaling routine.

    “Start by shutting down all interruptions: disable Slack mentions and email notifications, place your phone out of sight, and enter your flow by wearing your noise-canceling headset. Once you feel focused, go over today’s calendar, skim through your to-do list, and reflect [on one or more of] on the following:

    1. Creations: What did you create today?

    2. Decisions: What were the top decisions you made today?

    3. Insights: What interesting ideas did you or others raise today?

    4. Challenges: What were the main challenges you faced today?

    5. Tomorrow: How do you make the most of tomorrow?”

    Leadership journal: become an inspiring leader | Medium

    It’s a nice structure and allows us to process what happened today to learn and improve for tomorrow. Little by little.

  • There is something in the air

    There is something in the air

    Ever since the whole web3 conversation gained momentum it feels like a renaissance of blogs is coming. I don’t know whether it is the explanation of web3 within the context of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, or the discussion of decentralization away from the big platforms, or something else. In his State of the Word, Matt mentioned that one of the most web3 things one can do is registering their own domain. He also recently asked people to write more. Others like former Blogger product manager Rick Klau picked up his blog again and Hunter Walk seems to be blogging more frequently these days. And OGs like rands, MG Siegler, Gruber and Kottke continue to blog like it has never gone out of style. It is just a gut feel, but like Vinyl picking up again, it feels like there is an underlying current of people rediscovering their love of blogs.

    Make no mistake, I don’t think that blogs (and its many derivatives like Tumblr) will challenge current or future social media. At the same time, the number of internet users is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than ten or 15 years ago. And a small portion of a large number tends to be a large number. And that is awesome. Maybe we are even in for better tools for reading and commenting on blogs – RSS for blogs seems to be in stasis ever since Google Reader shut down.

    I’m fascinated by looking at personal blogs from way back when. Florian, a friend of mine, started writing a blog back in 2005 when he moved to Ireland. He still posts a few times a year. That doesn’t seem much, but over the course of 17 years it adds up. Isaac started his blog in 2002, but unfortunately stopped writing in 2015. It is still wonderful to browse through his archive as moments in time. I even resurrected and went through my own old blog archive – I even found an old Blogger blog going way back to 2004. Nothing deep and earth shattering, but that’s not the point. Blogs document moments in time. Nothing more, nothing less.

    My point is: Blogging might get another moment, it might not. Both are fine. There is intrinsic value of blogging in terms of sharpening one’s thinking, sharing ideas and documenting moments for my future self. None of that requires an audience, engagement or virality. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? If I blog and no one reads it, does it matter? Who cares! By the time I hit publish, I’ve already gotten a positive return on investment. And as long as I use open source software that runs on my own domain, that’s a pretty future proof investment.

  • Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Writing is hard and writing a summary is no exception. If you are working on proposals, general research or strategies, at some point you have to summarize your idea. As Pascal once said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” A summary takes time to get right.

    The investment does pay off as it makes your work easier to digest, improves structure and highlights your very best insights. It’s not uncommon that only the summary gets read. That’s actually a good thing. But it raises the stakes to get the summary right and you still need to put in the work – your summary will only be as good as the underlying work. But there are a few tips and tricks that helped me in the past.

    The basics

    What is an executive summary

    The summary is where good strategy projects start and end. It synthesizes the results including the recommendation or the implications of the work. Taken from the Wikipedia

    An executive summary […] summarizes a longer report […] in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all. […] It is intended as an aid to decision-making and has been described as the most important part of a business plan.

    Wikipedia – Executive Summary

    Three functions of a summary

    The summary can serve you in three ways. Most obviously, it summarizes your work into its most concise and compelling way. But there are two more applications:

    It can help you manage a project. Writing a hypothesis at the start of a project in the form of a summary helps you identify the main components that you need to understand to make a recommendation. Those can then become workstreams. Keeping your summary updated throughout a project helps you maintain focus and course correct where necessary. By the way, Amazon’s method of starting projects with the press release is this theory in action.

    Last, but not least, the summary is a rough outline for the narrative of the rest of your work. As such it provides you with an initial structure and the underlying logic. Having the summary first, will save you a lot of time later when you need to get the narrative right.

    When to use one

    So when is the best time to write the summary? Always! Start with the summary even if you don’t know all the details. This is your hypothesis or “one day answer”, i.e. what your instinct tells you after the first day of research. It will also tell you what you need to find out. Maintain your summary throughout the project and adapt it to new insights. Fine tune the summary at the end of your project to get it right. Over the course of this process the summary will change a lot as you learn, but it will make sure that you stay on course.

    As with everything, it takes practice and is uncomfortable at the start. And reading your first draft at the end of a project always is a mix of pride, because you got a few things right from the start, and utter cringe, because of how naïve you were. That is OK and part of the learning process.

    Below are a few concepts that helped me in the past.

    Structure, structure, structure

    Rocks and pebbles

    A lack of structure only confuses your reader. So, how to create a good one? A visualization might help. Imagine a roaring river and your job is to get your reader from one side to the other without getting their feet wet. To do this, you have to identify the rocks in the river that you can step on. Each is supported by a number of pebbles that give it stability. The rocks are your main points. The pebbles are supporting facts. Good summaries work with four to six rocks, each supported by three to five pebbles. Those numbers work well in my experience. You might need less, rarely more.

    Situation, complication, so what

    The tricky bit is now to know what kind of rocks you need. As any good story has an introduction, a middle part and an end, a good summary includes a description of the situation, the complication and a recommendation. The situation is a matter-of-fact description of the status quo. It should be uncontentious and give the reader sufficient context. The complication illustrates why we are looking into a situation. It tells the reader what the problem is. Last, but not least there should be conclusion or recommendation as in “What should we do about it?”.

    Break your writer’s block with Hulk speak

    Getting your structure right is hard. Often we get side tracked by finding the right words or shortening long sentences while we still haven’t cracked the overall structure. What helped me in the past is to revert to Hulk Speak:

    WRITING IS HARD
    YOU THINK TOO MUCH!
    WE HAVE A SOLUTION
    THE HULK SUMMARY!
    CHANNEL INNER HULK VOICE!
    BULLET LIST!
    FEW WORDS
    SAY IT. EFFECTIVE!
    NOW, SMASH CAR!

    Smash your writer’s block with The Hulk Summary

    Try it out and force yourself to less than five words per statement. It’s amazing how much it drives clarity. It forces you to use simple words and choose them carefully – you don’t get that many.

    Be brief

    Don’t be comprehensive

    It is tempting to give into the urge to show your sweat and write down all the good insights that you found out over the course of your research. Don’t. Just because you did a lot of research, doesn’t mean that your reader has to pay for it. Rather select the few relevant things that your reader should know. What is it that really matters. Very often that requires a healthy distance to your text. A good night of sleep and some fresh eyes in the morning can help cutting some of the unnecessary bits from your summary. And sometimes it is necessary to start new, ignoring your existing work and just tell the story again. Yes, you can reuse some of the old bits, but first we need to write down your cornerstones.

    Kill your darlings

    Use as little words as possible and as many as necessary. Over the course of a project your summary will breathe. It will expand as you learn more and it will contract as you make hard decisions and kill your darlings.

    This is one of the hardest parts. As you go through the motions of your project and update your summary on a regular basis, it will inevitably grow in length. At some point you have to be brave and cut. It will hurt, you won’t like it, but it is necessary. Don’t make your reader pay for all the good research you have done. Make the hard decisions about which pieces are critical and which are optional. Delete the optional ones. Set yourself arbitrary word count goals and cut, cut, cut. If you don’t want to do it, have somebody else read over the summary and cut the things they don’t think are necessary. In most cases you will disagree, but there is a good chance your editor is right.

    I recommend listening to them, follow their advice and implement their feedback even if you don’t like it. Then let it sit for a day or two and re-read the new version. Often you will realize that the new summary actually works, is more compact and just needs to be slightly tweaked.

    Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

  • How to get more out of OneNote

    OneNote is one of those underappreciated apps within Office 365. To be honest, I’ve only used it for the last two years despite my wife having praised it for her work as a teacher for a long time. But it really has grown on me and I enjoy taking notes, working on outlines and reviewing documents with OneNote. Its integration with Teams makes it a no-brainer to share notes among a project team.

    I recently saw an unanswered tweet asking for help about OneNote and thought this might be an opportunity to share some of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate about OneNote over the last two years.

    Two caveats up front:

    1. I use the Windows app. Therefore all shortcuts and features are Windows. But I’m pretty sure most is supported on the Mac/ web version. Happy to update if there is interest.
    2. I use the OneNote for Windows 10 app, not OneNote 2016 that most people seem to be familiar with. I greatly prefer the former given how snappy it is and how the interface feels more modern.

    With that out of the way, let’s begin exploring some of the aspects in which OneNote can make your life easier:

    Using keyboard shortcuts

    As with every app it pays off to invest time to learn keyboard shortcuts. OneNote is no exception and reciprocates with great keyboard support. Below are a few of shortcuts that are non-obvious that I find most helpful:

    • CTRL+1: Create a little checkbox next to the paragraph to mark as a todo. Pressing CTRL+1 again will check that box.
    • CTRL+2: Mark a paragraph with a star for future reference. Helpful to highlight important statements when taking notes to go back to later.
    • Ctrl + G: Switch Notebook – Once you start using OneNote with multiple teams you will work with lots of notebooks. This shortcut will help you keep your flow even if you have to switch notebooks.
    • Ctrl+Shift+G: Switch sections within a notebook. The little sister of Ctrl+G.
    • Ctrl+E: Search. Always great when you are lost to just use search to find what you’ve been looking for.
    • Ctrl+M: Create new window. Especially when you work with lots of display real estate, it helps to be able to have multiple notes open simultaneously.
    • Alt+Shift+Up/Down: Move a paragraph up or down within a text. Might sound obscure but I use it quite frequently when jotting down ideas and playing with the right structure.
    • Alt+Shift+Left/Right: Indent/ un-indent a paragraph. OneNote is a great outliner and those last two shortcuts are the centerpieces.
    • Ctrl+ . and Ctrl+/: Create a bullet or numbered list.

    Microsoft has an overview of all shortcuts. If you have five minutes, I recommend browsing through them and see what catches your fancy.

    Structuring your documents

    OneNote has great features to structure your documents. Bullet list are rock solid and I’ve never had a problem with them breaking (I’m looking at you, Word or Outlook). Using Alt+Shift+Left/Right makes it easy to in- and decrease indentation.

    Bonus feature: Once you have a good structure with indentation, you can use Alt+Shift+ +/- to expand and collapse structures. When you are working with larger notes this feature can help to hide some of the complexity (speak “messiness”). Keeps the brain sane.

    Last but not least, OneNote also has something that it calls “tags”. You can add little checkboxes, stars and whatever else you want next to a paragraph. This is a great feature if you want to highlight action items or key statements when taking notes. You can easily assign them on the fly using Ctrl+1 or Ctrl+2 or … you get it. You can even define your own custom tags for OneNote.

    Removing distractions

    Pressing F11 will get you into full screen mode. No more distractions, just a large canvas to write/ paint on. You will lose all icons for text formatting, but since you know your keyboard shortcuts, that won’t matter to you.

    In case it does, just press the “Show/ Hide Navigation” button on the left and you will just get some more horizontal space.

    Creating hyperlinks

    OneNote allow to link notebooks, sections and single notes. Just right click on any of them and select “Copy link to section/ page/ …”. Inserting that link in your documents works like in most editors that support hyperlinks: Ctrl+K is your friend.

    Unfortunately, OneNote lost the ability to create a table of contents that allows you to link within a note. But most notes are short enough anyway and using the expand/ collapse paragraphs feature should help compensate for it.

    Finding your stuff

    Yes, at times it gets confusing between notebooks, sections and notes. Search is your friend. While I haven’t seen that OneNote supports proper hashtags with linking, it typically works quite well to just insert hastags and use them in the search (Ctrl+E).

    The other tip to find your notes is to use “Show recent notes”. Across all your most recently used notebooks it will show you a chronological list of most recent notes (duh). This feature has saved by bottom quite a few times when I created notes that I couldn’t find anymore.

    That’s it. There are a lot more great features such as inserting meeting details and attendants from your calendar, using the pen to scribble things or if you’re really into it I recommend following the OneNote twitter account for more tips, but let’s keep it short. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but hopefully will help somebody get their work done in a more delightful way.

  • Writing well, often

    Writing well, often

    I very much believe in the power of good writing. As such I admire the good work of companies like Mailchimp and Slack to promote good writing that is more approachable. Hence I was delighted when Anna Pickard started publishing some of Slack’s content style guide and writing principles. They follow Mailchimp’s great work, who published their voice and tone style guide already last year.

    At work me and my team started writing a monthly newsletter. It started out as a mailing just for the broader team to help us understand what everybody else is working on. However, people enjoyed reading it and started sharing. Now we have a group of family and friends throughout the organisation that loves reading this newsletter every month. Although it might seem insignificant, it is one of the highlights of my job. It is a chance to connect with people, find out what they are working on and spread the good news. The newsletter is very different from other corporate emails, as we aim to write it in very accessible language (thank you Mailchimp and Slack for setting such good examples). We spend a good amount of time to get it right, and people appreciate it.

    When I saw Anna speak earlier this year at Webstock, it clicked with me, why it was so hard and how we can make our job easier: Each month we were trying to figure out how to write a good newsletter from scratch, based on our experience. And even worse, we all did it individually. As a result, writing the newsletter took a lot of time and effort to make it sound right with good content and a consistent voice. We needed to reflect on what people love about the newsletter, why they read it despite their own email overload and write it down. This helps February-Michael be as good as January-Michael, and James write with the same passion as Elizabeth and vice versa.

    Below are the guidelines we came up with. In fact, the whole thing became a manifesto that was fun and empowering to write in itself. It borrows heavily on Anna’s talk and if we’ve done a good job, hopefully somebody will borrow heavily from us. Maybe it provides inspiration for somebody to start sharing more of their own story through a blog or a newsletter. Believe me, it is fun and better things will happen the more open you are.

    Newsletter Manifesto

    We help our readers understand why our team is here, what we do and how we are working. We aim to fuel curiosity, build trust and increase engagement. We serve two main groups:

    1. Members of our team: They work globally distributed on a broad range of topics. We want them to feel both informed and heard, wherever they are.
    2. Friends of our team: They often know only specific aspects of our work, but are curious to find out more. We are excited to show them the rest of us as well and keep them informed about our progress.

    We know that to make our team a success, we need to be inclusive – very inclusive. We make it easy and enticing to join our journey. This means: Our voice is human. It’s familiar, friendly, and straightforward. We explain how things work and why they are important. We don’t cut corners, we cut fluff. We translate complex subjects and rationales by translating them into practical examples. We value the time and attention that people invest in us. We get to the point. We don’t copy & paste press releases as they serve broader audiences. We know our audience. We educate people without patronizing or confusing them. Our voice is: Fun but not silly. Confident but not cocky. Smart but not stodgy. Helpful but not overbearing. Expert but not bossy. Sometimes weird but never inappropriate. Our tone is informal, but not sloppy. We are fun to read because we are easy to understand and have interesting topics. We avoid jargon, slang and abbreviations as they are likely to ostracize or confuse our audience. We emojize, but not everything needs an emoji. We are literate and use full sentences. We spell words and capitalize correctly. We read, re-read and re-re-read one final time before we hit send just to make sure that no typos have crept in. We never resort to text speak and we don’t LOL. We don’t try to be cool, but understand that being uncooly cool is so much more inclusive than being totally on fleek. We are ourselves. That is, we are human. We are a strong team full of good people who are brilliant at what they do. We put them into the center of our communication. We value our talent and what they do for our team. We show them in photos that are real and relatable. Our newsletter celebrates them every month. Our people are the secret sauce that makes our content more engaging and relatable. We have a sense of humor. We are funny when it’s appropriate and when it comes naturally. But we don’t go out of our way to make a joke – forced humor can be worse than none at all. If unsure, we keep a straight face. We are unapologetically kind and refrain from snarky comments. We apply the sunshine test to everything that we do – if the newsletter ends up in unintended hands, we are happy for the additional audience, not embarrassed.  We are proud of our culture and want to share it. We communicate to amplify the good reputation that we enjoy inside and outside of our company. Every single one of us is the team.

    Photo credit: Poster Boy NYC via Source / CC BY

  • On writing – Where Creativity, Fear and Action go on a road trip

    On writing – Where Creativity, Fear and Action go on a road trip

    Any creative endeavour is an adventure. It takes us from here to somewhere new, hopefully somewhere exciting. That sounds simple and exciting in itself, but the devil is in the detail and once we embark on our adventure, we notice that things turn out to be trickier than previously imagined.

    Let’s take writing as an example.  Everyone knows the situation: we’ve got a wonderful idea, something to say and we want to share that idea. So we sit down and start with a blank sheet or screen. We write our first words, realise that they don’t really work so we start over again, start differently, it still doesn’t work. We get frustrated, doubt creeps in. Maybe we aimed too high and the idea was not as good as we thought it was. We really want to put ourselves out there, but worry that we are not good enough. We start checking our email, then Facebook, then Twitter, post the picture of our lunch on Instagram, then go back to email. At some point we declare defeat and leave the idea altogether.

    That’s how many writing efforts end – the adventure stops before it even really begins. And that’s sad, because the world likes adventures and needs more of them. Let’s find out why it is so challenging by borrowing from two concepts:

    1. Using the road trip analogy that Elizabeth Gilbert used in her TED talk about success, failure and the drive to keep creating.
    2. Visualising our inner dialogue as different personalities that interact with each other. They all mean well, but they all value different things. They are our fellow passengers, the forces at play in our road trip. Yes, this is blatantly stolen from Inside Out, or before that Herman’s Head.

    Once we understand who’s with us and why they are coming along, it is possible to appreciate them for what they are and how they want to help us succeed. There are three passengers in our car:

    #1 – Inspiration

    Inspiration is the star of the show, the headliner that gets a lot of glory and credit. Everybody loves her and she comes in alternative flavours like creativity and genius. Inspiration is the first spark of the process, the match that lights the fire of revelation. She suggested the road trip and called shotgun. She sits there with the map and snacks in her hand, navigating us to the best spots.

    However, Inspiration is kind of a pushover. While she lights up bright for a short moment, she burns out quickly if her flame doesn’t catch on quickly. She forgets at times that she needs two important side kicks to come through and deliver on her promises. Which brings us to the second, probably most underappreciated passenger:

    #2 – Fear

    Fear is the grump, the cynic that shouts “that’s not a good idea”, “are you kidding me, leave that to other people” and “that’s never going to work”. Fear often disguises himself in the more approachable form of procrastination. Ironically, while writing this post, I starting browsing through the old program of Webstock, looked up how to write better, what Elizabeth Gilbert says about fear, browsed Twitter, Twitter on Webstock and the recent tech news. All very important and definitely urgent topics that need my undivided attention. At some point I finally got the joke and got back to writing.

    Fear sits in the back, constantly mumbling and asking why we’re not there yet but Fear is there for a reason. Fear means well, but is horrible at articulating his constructive feedback in a way that is actually constructive. Fear wants to make sure that we have enough gas in the tank, that the tires don’t fall off in the middle of the freeway and that everybody has slept enough. While Inspiration brings snacks and a mix tape, Fear makes sure that we don’t die. He asks us to be our best and protects us from burning ourselves with Inspiration’s match. Fear is the reason why we edit our work. He tries to protect us. Sadly, he chooses very unfortunate means to communicate. As such we should meet Fear with compassion and accept him for what he is. Sometimes he goes as far as screaming at us to step on the brake and cancel the road trip altogether, especially before embarking on the first stretch. That’s why we need a third character on this journey:

    #3 – Action

    Action is the doer of the group. Action is the one who takes over the steering wheel in the middle of the night when everybody is tired. But she needs encouragement. She needs faith in her ability to deliver, a belief that once she comes into play, things will turn around and the fun will start. Action puts wood behind Inspiration’s flame and turns it into a fire.

    Even better, she is self-perpetuating. Once she gets going, Fear pipes down, Inspiration starts firing on more cylinders and things move forward. Action cures Fear and encourages Inspiration. However, every once in a while, Action should check in with Inspiration to connect with the bigger picture of why we are on the road trip. Otherwise we might miss important sights on the way. Even Fear should feel heard to know the worst case scenarios. But don’t ever let Fear take over, don’t even let him play with the radio or adjust the air conditioning.

    Make no mistakes. There will be setbacks. We will take the wrong exit, get into a traffic jam or run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. As with any road trip, those bad experiences will be great stories to tell later, they are just not very much fun in the moment. We have to push through them.

    Diversity makes for a better team

    If we get the sudden idea to embark on a spontaneous road trip, it is important to understand who is sitting in the car and why they came on the trip: Inspiration gets us going, Fear wants us to be the best we can be and Action moves us forward and keeps Fear in check. All three are critical for a great road trip that is exciting, safe and happening.

    As in any diverse team, the relationship within the group is complicated. There are fights over who is driving. But diversity is good, because all three want us to succeed. Embrace them for what they are and appreciate what they contribute, but don’t let anyone take over fully.

    This applies to blog posts as much as to that tricky email where we ask for a favour, the cover letter for the job that we really want to land, the love letter you’re sending on Valentine’s Day. We’ve all been there. The trick is to get into Action as soon as possible and connect it to Inspiration. This might be the one time, when advertising is right: just do it! Start writing and keep at it. Have a little faith in your ability to come up with something good, maybe even great. Who doesn’t like a great adventure?

    Photo credit: Stuck in Customs via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

  • Writing good copy

    Writing good copy

    I write a monthly newsletter at work. Our team is distributed across three continents and too many timezones. From time to time things slip through the cracks and you hear the inevitable "I wish I had known that earlier".  The newsletter tries to close the space between the cracks and helps people know what’s going on. It is also a welcome place to highlight the great work that people contribute to the team.

    I very much enjoy writing it. It’s a highlight of my month, because I can channel the best person I want to be: fun, enthusiastic, empathetic, helpful, … My objective is to write in the tone that I would like to have a good conversation in. As a German, I’m a non-native speaker in Australia and tend to overthink and over-structure my sentences when I speak. I choose words deliberately and it’s common to hear me talk in numbered lists. The newsletter is an opportunity for me to freshen it up. And it works: people enjoy reading the newsletter, they forward it – even our CEO reads it. Not bad for a 30 people team in a company of 40,000.

    My big secret is that I copy the newsletter. Not the content, that would be obscure. But I try to channel my inner Slack. They have such a wonderful tone all their copy, be it tweets, quirky messages when you open their app or even release notes for software updates. Anna Pickard is Editorial Director at Slack helped create that tone:

    It is sometimes funny, sometimes serious, sometimes just plain and informative, but throughout, it should feel like nothing more than a person, talking to another person. Human to human […] making sure we’re treating people with respect, empathy and courtesy all the way through. […]We want people to like using Slack, and to want to share the experience. 

    Slack’s Editorial Soul: Anna Pickard on Writing the Brand Experience

    And the best thing: they got their inspiration from Mailchimp, who have been kind enough to publish a Style Guide for Content. I’ve only dipped my toe into it for now, but it looks like a wonderfully written guide on how to write well, especially the section on Voice and Tone. Mailchimp rules and I love them for doing this.

    Once you manage to have good topics and write them up well, you have a winning formula to make a lot of people’s lives easier and happier.

    Photo credit: Martin uit Utrecht / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

  • Bad writing is a meeting factory

    From Guilded, a Seattle web design & engineering firm, comes a nugget around why good writing is so important:

    Bad writing is a meeting factory. Being able to articulate a thought in writing means your team gets to take advantage of asynchronous communication. Whereas meetings are synchronous— requiring all parties to be present and engaged for the duration of the communication event—written communication is asynchronous, meaning the recipient can address your request or idea on their own time.

    Source: Software is 10% Code