Does Anyone Read What You Write?

Written communication in business is pretty poor, for the most part. People put countless hours into writing stuff (emails, procedures, reports, presentations)

And it may or may not surprise you to hear that most of that stuff never gets read.

For example, very few people bother to look at the reports your company ‘s systems produce. 

In my very first CIO role, I found that the number of reports printed each day (this was the early 2000s) didn’t make sense to me. 

There was an average of 1 report for every 5 or so employees (and the vast majority of the workforce were in operational roles situated on mine sites).

So I ran a little experiment. With the agreement of the executive team, we stopped producing the vast majority of those reports. 

I worked with the CFO to identify which reports were critical, and quarantined them so the business could still run – but we stopped producing everything else.

Our strategy was that, if people came to us and asked what happened to their reports, we could easily add them back to the list.

In the end, we recommissioned just over 10% of the reports we’d stopped producing. Imagine how much cost was going into producing these things that no one looked at?!

Now, think about all the words that are written and dispatched broadly throughout your business, and with your external stakeholders

Emails that make Nelson Mandela’s autobiography seem like a light Saturday afternoon read…

Investment proposals that try to cover up the lack of a robust business case with a barrage of technical details and unintelligible sentences…

Procedures that are so complex that you’d need an IQ of 130 just to understand them, let alone implement them

We are simply exposed to too much information every day to think that we have any chance of reading and absorbing it

You know this… you’re living the dream! But what role are you playing in perpetuating this information overload?

Here’s the thing… if you start with the premise that most people don’t read what you write, it will liberate you to write less!

Begin by learning how to write succinctly… 

My writing style was exactly as you might expect from any English lit major… expressive, balanced, articulate… full of imagery and allegory.

And it was complete SHIT!

The joy I took from writing a beautifully constructed sentence eventually waned, as I realized how few people were reading what I wrote…

My first reaction was, “ppfh! Pearls before swine. How arrogant is that?!

Then, I worked out that the object of the exercise is not to produce beautiful writing, but to communicate in a way that people can easily understand.

I had to learn to sacrifice some of the complexity in order to achieve greater comprehension.

I learned to write in a succinct and clear way, and that massively increased the odds of someone reading what I’d written.

I started to read the Economist every week… this is the last bastion of business and political that retains a semblance of independence, and it is written in a dry, concise fashion with a touch of subtle humour.

I’m still learning how to improve my writing but, in the meantime, I’m confident that many more people are able to read and understand the things I write.