Writing culture

Thinking is hard. Learning is hard. Communicating is hard. Coordinating is hard. Building institutional knowledge is hard. Writing won't make these things easy, but it will stop us from fooling ourselves into avoiding them because they are hard.

Writing is thinking: Writing forces us to create coherent narratives out of the jumble of facts and beliefs floating around in our heads. This process will reveal and resolve misconceptions and contradictions we didn't know we held, as well as lead to new questions and ideas.

Writing is learning: Writing leaves a paper trail to return to in the future. It is easy to convince ourselves in the future that we "knew" something all along, but leaving a paper trail prevents that. Paper trails show future readers where, how, and why our earlier thinking was mistaken. And we can only learn after we recognize our mistakes.

Writing is communicating: Text is an asynchronous, 1-to-N form of communication. All your present and future teammates get the exact same message.

Writing is coordination: One canonical document becomes a single source of truth. A single source of truth allows everyone to agree on who needs to do what, when, and why. We can then understand how our efforts will combine with our teammates' efforts to reach our goal.

Writing generates institutional knowledge: Organizations should never be too reliant on a single person. Writing turns one person's knowledge into our organization's knowledge, available to everyone.

Concise writing increases all of these benefits.

For the reasons above, we take the time to formally document all of Splits' important processes and big decisions. We use a Why / What / How framework for internal documents, because it is simple, clear, and puts the "why" first. (More on this philosophy soon.) Plenty of casual writing happens as well, in chat threads and rough notes, but we distill the essentials into more durable forms.

Recommended reading#

Texts that influenced our thinking:

• "Putting Ideas into Words," Paul Graham
• "Writing Is Thinking," Boz
• "Concise explanations accelerate progress," Steph Ango
• "How to think in writing," Henrik Karlsson