It seems to be getting harder and harder to persuade anyone to read anything longer than a “tweet”. Does it matter? I think it does, and so I’ve been developing ways to encourage people to respond to what I have written for them. It’s all about giving documents a “social life”.
One method is to seize an opportunity for a conversation. Some years ago I was doing some consulting work for a senior manager who had recently acquired a new management team. He asked me to interview each member of the team to surface their concerns and ideas. I then wrote a report and gave it to him, but noticed later that he hadn’t read it. Fortunately I found a chance, during a long motorway drive in his BMW, to read it out loud to him. Within hours he had acted on some of the ideas – e.g. arranging a gathering for his staff to get to know him and each other.
More recently, I have come to insist on face-to-face meetings to discuss drafts. True, some people still have the nerve to turn up and say “Sorry, I haven’t read this”, but more often than not they do look at it and a stimulating conversation develops.
What I am drawing attention to is something about our role as writers: if we just write and hope people will take notice, we may be disappointed. But if we insist that people engage with what we have written, we have a chance of having an influence.
This does all mean of course that we need to be willing to take on board people’s comments, which may not be comfortable and usually means extra work. But in my experience, writing is a great way to develop thinking jointly. It becomes an “iterative” process, in the sense that it goes through several revisions, bringing in more voices and ideas at each stage.
A propos the social life of documents, I was recently talking to a friend about what happens to public inquiry reports, such as the Francis report on the Mid Staffordshire hospitals in the UK. In such cases, the inquiry team usually makes sensible recommendations but inevitably implementation is left to others. I wonder if enough thought is given to the social life of the report? And for that matter, does anybody take into account the effect of the inquiry on staff in the organisation that is under the magnifying glass (which could be seen as another aspect of the social life of documents)?
The phrase itself first came to me a decade ago, prompted partly by the book “The social life of information” by Brown & Duguid. It had struck me that, without noticing it, many of us walk around with the sender-receiver model in our heads. Yet it is worth noting that this theory of communication was developed in the mid-20th century in the context of new technologies like telegraph and radio. It is wholly inadequate for describing human communication, with its divergent interpretations, ambiguities, politics and emotions.
So it really is worth restating the obvious – that a piece of writing will only have any influence if it is read and thought about or discussed by human beings – i.e. if it gets a social life.
One method is to seize an opportunity for a conversation. Some years ago I was doing some consulting work for a senior manager who had recently acquired a new management team. He asked me to interview each member of the team to surface their concerns and ideas. I then wrote a report and gave it to him, but noticed later that he hadn’t read it. Fortunately I found a chance, during a long motorway drive in his BMW, to read it out loud to him. Within hours he had acted on some of the ideas – e.g. arranging a gathering for his staff to get to know him and each other.
More recently, I have come to insist on face-to-face meetings to discuss drafts. True, some people still have the nerve to turn up and say “Sorry, I haven’t read this”, but more often than not they do look at it and a stimulating conversation develops.
What I am drawing attention to is something about our role as writers: if we just write and hope people will take notice, we may be disappointed. But if we insist that people engage with what we have written, we have a chance of having an influence.
This does all mean of course that we need to be willing to take on board people’s comments, which may not be comfortable and usually means extra work. But in my experience, writing is a great way to develop thinking jointly. It becomes an “iterative” process, in the sense that it goes through several revisions, bringing in more voices and ideas at each stage.
A propos the social life of documents, I was recently talking to a friend about what happens to public inquiry reports, such as the Francis report on the Mid Staffordshire hospitals in the UK. In such cases, the inquiry team usually makes sensible recommendations but inevitably implementation is left to others. I wonder if enough thought is given to the social life of the report? And for that matter, does anybody take into account the effect of the inquiry on staff in the organisation that is under the magnifying glass (which could be seen as another aspect of the social life of documents)?
The phrase itself first came to me a decade ago, prompted partly by the book “The social life of information” by Brown & Duguid. It had struck me that, without noticing it, many of us walk around with the sender-receiver model in our heads. Yet it is worth noting that this theory of communication was developed in the mid-20th century in the context of new technologies like telegraph and radio. It is wholly inadequate for describing human communication, with its divergent interpretations, ambiguities, politics and emotions.
So it really is worth restating the obvious – that a piece of writing will only have any influence if it is read and thought about or discussed by human beings – i.e. if it gets a social life.