The droning advice to keep writing simple sometimes hides reality. Over-simplifying makes work more complicated. But reading better always helps.
“Keep it simple” was a motto of Joe Shea, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. One of many challenges his engineers faced concerned the last part of the journey back from the moon. How would the astronauts measure the fuel remaining for steering their capsule just before re-entering the earth’s atmosphere? They had to guide the capsule at the right angle. Steer wrong, or run out of fuel, and they’d skip off the atmosphere like a pebble, or plunge to earth like a meteor.
But in zero gravity, the normal ways of measuring fuel don’t work. Engineers tried measuring it in fancy ways, with Geiger counters. But the counters kept failing. Shea suggested just adding a reserve fuel tank. When the main tank was nearly exhausted, you’d realize, and could switch to reserve with enough fuel left to manoeuvre.
Are you waiting for the catch? There wasn’t one. The two fuel tanks made a great, simple, solution. But getting to that solution? Not so simple.
Shea got much of his information in writing. His engineers would prepare a looseleaf notebook for him every Thursday, and over the coming days, he’d read and annotate it with questions. Come Monday, he’d pass it back, the pages would be divided up, and the teams would use his input. In this way, information was transmitted clearly, avoiding many meetings. Now we’d call it asynchronous communication. Then, he probably called it work.
As you’d expect, Shea kept it focused. He said:
“I want only those things that you want me to read and that you want some kind of answer on. Just don't tell me things are going along great, but if you want some decision, do it through your weekly activities report.” — Joe Shea, quoted in Apollo, by Catherine Bly Cox and Charles Murray
Does that sound like managers you’ve had, who only want 3-bullet summaries of complex problems? Better keep listening. Shea dove deep into the issues.
…for engineers tired of working for bosses who had forgotten their engineering, working with Shea was refreshing. It didn't make any difference what your specialty was. Shea's maxim was that if you understood it, you could make him understand it —and once he did, you never had to explain it again. The only problem was keeping up.
The spacecraft program was huge, covering thousands of engineers over several locations. Each Thursday, over 100 pages filled the notebook, and Shea would read them and comment. Not long comments, necessarily, but perceptive ones, and the dialog between himself and the project officers stayed useful.
Imagine how much less productive the program would have been if Shea had refused to read much, like some managers today.
Myth: any problem or solution can be transmitted in 50 words or less¹
Corporate culture is not like the days of Apollo. Now many managers don’t want to read much at all. Partly this comes from a frustration with the bureaucratic, fluffy language of the past. It’s good to write precisely, without wasting time. But also, the current desire for ultra-short messages goes with relying on slides to communicate important information.
Over time, communications guides have gone from recommending seven bullets per slide, to six bullets with no more than six words each, to just three bullets. (Remember that slides are read as often as they’re presented, so those three bullets might be all you’re relying on to make a decision.)
Emails are no better — the same 30-50 words we’re “allowed” on a slide are also apparently the best length for an email to drive action. Logic (and Claude Shannon) tells us that we cannot reduce a message below a certain number of symbols before it starts losing information. Hard problems often need better coverage.
When audiences at work don’t read properly, or they refuse to accept any information that’s not baby-spooned from mini-jars, they can make our work much, much harder.
How 3 bullets can waste 2 days that 1 good paragraph could save
Product leader John Cutler shows a horribly familiar scenario in “The Simplicity Fetish”:
… you're on with your manager for your biweekly thirty-minute 1:1. Time flies, and every minute counts when meetings are this short. They have an important meeting with their manager tomorrow morning and need to deliver a simplified version of the pitch you've been working on. A lot has changed in the last two weeks, and you're struggling to get her up to speed. Manager: “I need you to simplify this…three bullets max!” You: “I know. I'm trying to make sure we're aligned, and then we can summarize. There's a good amount of nuance to understand, so you're ready. The team had four one-hour meetings, and we uncovered some good alternatives. I can crank out the bullets afterward.” Manager: “I understand. We just need to find a way to boil this all down. We'll have three to five minutes to cover this if that.” Your manager presents something the next day that fails to capture the plan. It's not her fault—everyone is overloaded. Five minutes after her meeting, your Slack DMs are lighting up from the direct reports of your manager's peer group trying to make sense of the plan. You spend the next three days doing damage control and realigning people.
That time spent realigning — compare it to the time that could have been spent on better communication: perhaps another half-hour with the manager; then just fifteen minutes more of the senior leadership’s time. Think of the cost of the delay, too. What’s blocked while aligning people for three days?
Why don’t (us) managers read more?
It’s not laziness. Most managers and other colleagues I’ve known were not lazy. They’ve worked quite hard, and if they felt their efforts were being wasted, became frustrated.
Which makes it unlikely that pure busyness is the root problem either. As we’ve seen, skipping reading can make for confusion and much wasted time. No busy person wants that, surely?
Part of the problem is low expectations. If most of the things we read at work don’t seem to help us much, and if meetings feel easier, perhaps we don’t expect enough from the things we read.
A lot of the deluge of information we receive is:
Relevant messages that are over-simplified, that we know will need verbal discussions to understand the points being made.
Relevant messages that are written in an unfocused way that requires effort to understand. (Due to the lack of focus, they may not have clear points to express.)
Messages that aren’t so immediately relevant, or at least don’t matter when we read them.
We can’t possibly read all these with full attention. And even when we do, they don’t all help us. So we don’t make the effort to read more than a few bullets.
In turn then, the writers of emails and reports know that their efforts won’t be read well, so they put less effort into writing. Or, knowing that “people don’t read” they try hard to compress a complex message into a too-small space.
Then to communicate adequately, they end up having to talk the message through in meetings, with the text as just a crutch. That’s hard if they are reporting the work of others, as in Cutler’s example above. Either way, the text they write is not fully effective, so readers don’t pay it too much attention. The cycle continues.
To break the cycle will take careful work from any team (and their leaders) who want to do better. Work to build habits to write well and to read that writing. Other posts on Do The Words cover the writing part. But as the cycle can’t be broken without a desire to read better, let’s touch on that here.
An argument for reading more than three bullets
The argument goes like this: hard things are worthwhile doing; they often need clever solutions, and clever solutions require a bit of patience and attention. Step by step:
1. Hard things are worth doing
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”
So spoke President Kennedy in 1962. At the time, people wondered if it was worth it. Why choose the hard thing, and not the easiest one that pays the most?
Imagine that statement in a corporate setting now. Would the mighty Saturn rocket survive a trip through a financial controller’s spreadsheet?
In corporate life, we’re in love with the idea of simplicity. So much so, that we secretly believe that hard problems shouldn’t exist, or that they’re not worthwhile. But we are dead wrong.
As managers, we face hard problems every day. How to balance team resources and motivate people. Or how to set priorities (itself a key source of motivation). We might avoid such problems for a while; many managers do. But we can’t pretend that there isn’t value in solving them!
Dr Cat Hicks, researching what makes software developers productive, wrote:
And remember, these are human-scale problems. We are not doing moonshots: getting the weight of 400 elephants off the ground, lining two spacecraft up together while they’re whizzing at thousands of miles an hour, or figuring out how to bring people back to earth through the half-as-hot-as-the-sun heat of re-entry. We are solving people problems, and that just takes a bit of patience and ingenuity.
2. Hard problems sometimes need clever solutions
Often, you have to choose between a good result or a simple solution. You can build a simple experience (see Jobs-era Apple products). That often takes ingenious and complex design behind the scenes. Or you can choose to go for a simple solution by nature. Often, that pushes the complexity onto the person experiencing the design (Shea’s fuel tanks were an exception — a simple solution with a simple experience). Imagine that you’re managing two groups who can’t get on. Simple solution: swap half the members of each group around, so you then have two mixed groups. Is that a good solution? Likely not, not on its own at least. Complex problems need more thought.
3. Clever solutions need a bit of writing — and reading
We are not talking binders full of pages, but to communicate a complex challenge, and to work together on its solution, does take a bit of text.
Journalist Ros Atkins creates concise “explainer” videos on global news topics. More than most people, he values simple, clear writing. But in his book The Art of Explanation, he says that brevity isn’t a goal in itself:
In our pursuit of simplicity and our hunt for ‘obstacles to understanding’, there’s a risk we aim for the wrong target. This isn’t about brevity. This isn’t about ‘short’ being good and ‘long’ being bad; or detail being bad and less detail being good. As we’ll see, our pursuit of simplicity is about clarity of language and the removal of distractions and unnecessary information. This may mean brevity, but it may not.
Later, in his chapter on Essential Detail, he writes:
Detail is good. This might seem to contradict our desire for simplicity, but it doesn’t. … Detail gives us the facts – the most distilled form of information we have. This is what we’re looking to pass on. It’s the purpose of us explaining anything.
As readers, let’s stay reading long enough for those essential details. We don’t need to be Joe Sheas, but we can be slightly more patient versions of ourselves.
As writers, we have a job too to make our message worth the reading.
¹ “50 words or less”?
“Less” here emphasizes the quantity of text and not the individual words. As Pocket Fowler’s English Usage puts it (quoted on Dailywritingtips.com):
Supermarket checkouts are correct when the signs they display read 5 items or less (which refers to a total amount), and are misguidedly pedantic when they read 5 items or fewer (which emphasizes individuality, surely not the intention).
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