On not writing things down

I previously wrote about how pilot projects become contronyms (opens in new tab) as soon as they’re written down. And in my last post, I described how non-optimal business strategy tends to persist (opens in new tab) in many conditions where it is profitable to be vague. These ideas are linked in another way that we’ll explore here.

Writing is hard

I often struggle to write big things down — I’ve talked about this before (opens in new tab) in the context of personal knowledge management. But I also tend to believe that most thinking begins with writing. How can we reconcile these ideas?

The operative word here is “most”, because at its core the writing isn’t actually the thinking. It’s rather that writing forces your thinking to deepen, which in turn sets off the core reinforcing feedback loop by which your writing improves. So both are cause and effect at once, and writing becomes more like a threshing floor for your ideas.

But writing also just seems asymmetrically hard relative to thinking! The ease with which wisps of really great ideas bubble up can make you feel like a terrible communicator, or maybe just bad at deciding what makes an idea good in the first place. It’s like when your incredible thought sounds stupid out loud; while that’s not quite the same — talk is cheap, as they say — the notion that supposedly great ideas go extinct upon medium shift is the transferrable insight. So even if you believe in the reflexive relationship between thinking and writing, there’s a certain rarified appeal to the view that writing is somehow more precise or more rigorous than merely thinking. Hence the “ideas guy”, and to a lesser extent the ivory tower.

Of course we can effectively critique this kind of logocentrist take along deconstructionist lines, but I’d like to suggest a different reason why writing is often so ineffective. To do so, we’ll have to sift through the contenders and resolve their underlying tensions.

Three ways writing is generally ineffective

The first reason why writing might be less effective than thinking is due to market-based reflexivity. Writing a technique down often negates the alpha it had previously allowed you to extract. Arbitrage disappears when everyone knows about it! It’s a bit like that Yogi Berra joke, or how your favourite hidden-gem restaurant or coffee shop or whatever relies on not being known to the masses. This is just the economic analogue of the pilot-project-as-contronym problem, where a pilot becomes a not-pilot once the name is attached. And that’s not so surprising, because it turns out that many things evaporate when crystallized, or even upon exposure to the broader cultural awareness, like prototypes and niches and inside jokes. There are even things that everyone knows but that you can’t admit to knowing (opens in new tab)! It’s not hard to think of things that don’t survive transcription.

The second reason comes from applying the Seeing Like a State legibility argument. For example, your last name is supposed to distinguish you from others, but its existence arguably makes you less of an individual in some sense, as you cease to be “the person who lives down the street and is pretty good at piano” and instead become “Daniel Spracklin”, or perhaps even just a maximally identifying yet technically pseudonymous entry in a database.

A third problem with writing is that, no matter the effort you expend to distill your thoughts, much of it comes out vague and unprincipled, and especially so in the strategy domain. This accelerates the “suboptimal amount of bad strategy” problem I wrote about last time, and my dissatisfaction stems from a question of reproducibility: if your strategy is so good, why isn’t everyone applying it and reaping the rewards? How could anyone fail competitively when adherence to the CEO-cum-NYT-seller-du-jour’s views on leadership styles costs $25? Well, maybe the value was never in the written word. As with tacit knowledge (opens in new tab), some things are harder to communicate than they are to know or to learn. And as Friedrich Hayek suggests in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, the kind of knowledge we care about here

… never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess

Hayek’s argument — that much of the real knowledge in life is quietly bound up in the minds of all the other people who also live down the street — isn’t merely that the central planner just needs to dig harder to unearth information. Rather, the knowledge is fundamentally impossible to communicate or to “enter into statistics” in the kind of data-driven¹ text that dominates strategy writing, or project charters, or what have you.

These challenges to the supremacy of writing are in constant tension. The existence of your arbitrage strategy doesn’t somehow prevent you from revealing it, it just makes disclosure dubious. The legibility argument doesn’t stop you either, but it promises a kind of systemic destruction directly resulting from your efforts to impose textual order. And Hayek’s argument is actually one of sheer impossibility. Clearly they cannot all be simultaneously correct across the entire problem space. But what unites them is their suggestion that the true purpose and meaning of your ideas isn’t fully captured in the way you write them down. The real content must live elsewhere.

The river beneath

Rather than reaching for the corporate strategy literature, which would tie up the loose ends I opened at the start, I’d prefer to turn to cinema, which won’t. But I like film here anyway, as it’s an art form that often puts the message underneath its sensory channels. This is how Deleuze conceptualizes (opens in new tab) the works of Syberberg, Straub–Huillet, and Duras. Calling attention to their proprement cinématographique disjunction between the visual and the audible, he says:

A voice speaks of something, someone is talking about something, at the same time as we are shown something else. That which one is speaking about is actually underneath what we see… La parole s’élève dans l’air… cela dont elle nous parlait s’enfonce sous la terre.

We can thus imagine the communication floating above the intent. Contra McLuhan, the medium is the message’s superstrate.

What would it look like for your strategy to lie beneath its own presentation layer? Start with the paucity of good strategy writing; most of the literature commits the obviously legible bits to paper and yet doesn’t — or can’t — share what makes the strategy really tick, because it would be impossible to give effect to the precise cultural boundary conditions that instantiated your problem space. We then see why strategy wrongness so often equilibrates at non-zero: the cost of transmitting the unwritable exceeds the value behind strategists’ textual chequebooks. It also explains why pilots function as contronyms: the labels we attach to our work are often orthogonal to the work’s meaning.

And the same disjunction cuts across the ways we operationalize strategy. The “no surprises at the governance table” phenomenon is a good example; this is when a decision-maker confronted with an underbaked or improperly socialized idea — and critically, one whose unwritten foundation hasn’t been disclosed — doesn’t take it well. The formal presentation floats above some prior consultation, or an off-the-record discussion, or something. To say precisely what it is would weaken it, or destroy it entirely. And yet my inability to say it is consequentially irrelevant, because the presentation demonstrably fails to land. So amid the uncommunicability of the problem, there must have been a there there.

What lies underneath is vast and unknowable. You can’t map its dimensions but I can tell you it exists in spite of that. That makes this post the shadow of a realer idea sinking underneath the earth.

Footnotes

1. An epithet that deserves its own post. ↩