Writing Life
For me, writing was once something I simply did as part of my job. It was really only after I went back to university in my 40s that I realised that I wanted to spend more time reflecting on how people use writing in their work... and on the quality of our conversations.
I. Age of innocence When did my development as a writer begin? I remember at school noticing I had an aptitude for language and maths. I intended to study English and Philosophy at university but I spent too much time smoking illicit substances at night and sleeping it off next day, so I missed the 'A'-level grades I needed. I ended up studying economics, which was a mixed blessing. As a subject, it annoyed me, but at least it helped me get my first job as a research assistant at a venerable institute in London called Political and Economic Planning in 1975. A year later, my boss took me with him to Berlin (West Berlin at the time) to work at the International Institute of Management. My first full-length report (on how the unemployed were counted in the UK) stimulated my international colleagues to do similar papers on unemployment statistics in Germany, France and Sweden. During the next few years, I felt a stronger and stronger itch to escape from the loneliness and lifelessness of deskwork. By now I was working with sociologists at the Free University Berlin and I disliked the ‘Soziologendeutsch’ (sociologists' German) I heard around me. I quit the academic life and, for a complete contrast, took up an apprenticeship in archaeological digging in Berlin. It didn't take long before I began to miss intellectual stimulation. So after just a few months, I quit my job again and looked for something else to do. I dreamed of working in journalism or film, and when I submitted a short piece to the magazine New Society about an incident involving the Berlin police, it was accepted, leading to a series of short reports from the divided city. Eventually, after seven years in Berlin, I felt ready to return to an English-speaking environment. Arriving back in London in 1983, I had to search for half year before I eventually landed a job with the consumer magazine Which?. My first report for Which? was on the rather sombre subject of lead in the environment, and I well remember the glowing feeling I experienced when the report editor stopping me in front of the building and referred to my ‘smashing’ typescript. I can also still see the word ‘jargon’ scrawled by the chief editor in the margin of a later typescript. The magazine quite rightly insisted on plain English. I eventually left Which?, not because I didn’t like writing, but because I found the burden of researching half a dozen different topics simultaneously too onerous. Worse still, I had been given the topic of 'regulation of privatised industries' to research but couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. My boss wouldn’t let me shed it, so I started to keep an eye on the jobs section of the Guardian. II. The Firm One day in 1987, I happened to spot a vacancy advertised in the Guardian newspaper for an Editor with the management consulting firm McKinsey in London. Until then, I had never felt attracted by business, but I knew from an elder brother that McKinsey was full of bright people doing fascinating research into how companies work. He also told me that the power of the McKinsey editors came from a magic tool called the Pyramid Principle, which enabled them to cajole consultants into structuring their reports and presentations logically. I also sensed that this job might be an opportunity to leap into an unknown world where my writing and editing skills would be appreciated. It was a harder than expected landing. When I arrived in McKinsey’s London office, lurking behind the grand façade of a former gentlemen’s club in St James’s Street SW1, I soon realised I was going to be very much on my own. I was the sole editor for an office with more than 100 consultants, and the partner who was nominally responsible for me emphasised that I needed to ‘market’ my services, a concept that was foreign to me at the time. As my editing work began in earnest, I was pretty alarmed by the complexity and volume of the consultants’ reports. Their language seemed full of Americanisms and jargon, like ‘value added’, ‘chief executive’, and words like ‘leverage’ and ‘impact’ used as verbs. A client project was called an ‘engagement’ and a graph or illustration in a report was an 'exhibit'. Acronyms like USP and FMCG were everywhere. I also learned that the firm's mission was to ‘serve the client’, and that the same client was usually the 'chief executive' or top management of large organisations (whom I never met in the flesh). And yet there were many good aspects to working for the Firm (as it really was known internally), not least of which was the amazing training. Within days of starting, I was sent off to the USA to spend time with two experienced McKinsey editors over there – impressive women who demonstrated that their job was about much more than editing reports. Shortly after that, McKinsey decided to provide all its editors worldwide with training in coaching skills. The training was thrilling for me – it taught me the importance of asking good coaching questions, listening in a non-judgmental way, and helping people work out their own answers. Despite the tough and earnest environment, at least I felt that my leanings towards language and logic were being used. Eventually, however, the desire to escape again grew too strong to resist, and I took what felt like a bold step of going freelance. It was now 1990. Out in the real world, I quickly gained enough clients to make a living, partly thanks to the network of McKinsey alumni around the globe. I found myself writing marketing material for various consulting firms, editing reports and running workshops on structure in writing for a range of organisations (my favourite was the BBC). Years went by like this, but I can’t say I felt in my element. At least I could earn a living and I met many interesting people. I also found time to read around the subject of communication and discover that there was a whole body of literature on 'writing research'. III. Encounters with complexity and emergence In 198, by a lucky stroke, I met an unusual and, to me, inspiring person, Patricia Shaw. We were both involved with an executive coaching firm in London at the time – me as a writer, she as one of the senior consultants. This was an encounter that I came to think of as changing the direction of my life. When Patricia and I were working together on some texts, I noticed she would pick me up on certain words or phrases that seemed quite normal to me at the time. One was ‘impart’. Another was ‘the truth’. Only gradually did I come to understand that Patricia was coming from a different way of thinking about meaning, learning and change. She often mentioned ‘complexity thinking’, which didn’t attract me much at first. But, one day, she told me that she was involved in setting up a new masters degree in organisational change. This was not a subject that excited me much at the time but Patricia asked me if I would to help write the prospectus and, as I read the draft, I felt a growing desire to be part of the 'learning community' mentioned in the text. Thus, in 2000, I began the masters (which later morphed into a doctorate) with Ralph Stacey at the University of Hertfordshire. One of the first things I learned was the value of writing a ‘reflective narrative’. At first, I had little idea of what this might look like, but I was pleased to discover that we were encouraged to explore our own experience at work. My supervisor (Patricia, as it happened) and my supervision group helped to nudge me into reflecting more deeply on the influences on my thinking and the assumptions I was making. By the time I graduated in 2003, I had developed a completely new perspective on the subject of writing in organisational life. I came to realise, first, that writing is a relatively recent introduction in terms of human evolution, which has had a profound influence on how we think and communicate. Second, I came to view writing as part of a wider, never-ending conversational process. Third, I abandoned the taken-for-granted idea of meaning being contained in a text and came to see that learning or new thinking emerge from the complex processes of human relating, which include talking and writing and also listening and reading. The title of my thesis was “The part played by writing in the organisational conversation”. IV. Discovering 'narrative nonfiction' as a form of writing By 2003, with my thesis completed, I was eager to give up the ‘prostitute writing’ I had been doing since I left McKinsey and to stop running workshops on structure in writing. I had lost all my appetite for these activities. One summer’s evening that year, my phone rang and it was an old friend, Jane Maher, wanting to talk about a programme of work at Macmillan Cancer Support that was worrying her. I was surprised to notice that she was interested in my experience of reflective narrative writing. I hadn’t expected anyone in the real world beyond my doctoral programme to have a use for it. For the next seven years, Jane, another independent consultant called Elizabeth Lank, and I worked together to capture the story of the Macmillan GP community and other interesting aspects of the charity’s work. We came to describe what we were doing as ‘making the invisible visible’, so that more people would understand the work and be willing to continue funding it. I noticed that Macmillan managers were describing me as an ‘expert in narrative writing’ and I came to take on this identity. By 2010 we had more than 30, mostly lengthy, narrative accounts. We decided to set about writing a book, which was published in our joint names in 2011 ("Communities of Influence"). V. What does this all mean? What I have noticed is that few people spend much time thinking about how we use writing in our work. In my view, many people misuse writing in organisational life. Plans, agendas, reports and form-filling get between people. And what gets neglected in the process is the extraordinary potential of writing as a tool for developing thinking, exploring experience, stimulating conversation and collaboration, and capturing stories and histories. |