Thoughts of writing from a "Mashup of Law + Social Innovation + Design"

It was really exciting to read Nicole Skibola's blog post on her thoughts about our work on writing, in particular as it seems as her experience as a trained attorney and human rights practitioner, now involved in social innovation and design.

Here are some of her thoughts on writing:

"Reading this simple concept [about the reflecting mechanism of writing] was such a breath of fresh air to me as a professional rigorously trained in the written word, where deconstructing arguments, concepts and ideas are the heart of a legal training and practice. I have noted in my time as a management consultant the frustration I encounter with powerpoint decks. Yes, everyone likes a graphic interpretation or a flow chart, but far too often, we fail to develop ideas and strategic thought as we would if such concepts were encapsulated in the written word. (...)

In my current career transition, I spend a lot of time thinking of my value add as a trained attorney, admitted to the New York and the California bars. Law is indeed a trade, and unfortunately lawyers develop tunnel vision believing they are only capable of practicing law. What I have realized in the past few months is my incredible ability to play with the logic of a problem or an argument – to unroll each sub-issue, to glue them back together, zoom out and see the system, zoom in and attack the micro-issues that are throwing off the whole system’s equilibrium. I didn’t learn how to do this by thinking like a designer (though I do value the different approach to problems that designers offer). I took it by thinking first, outlining second and finally articulating a strong, extremely structured argument in writing.

Writing has become my life source in many ways – its how I deal with happiness and sadness, how I experiment with who I am and who I want to be professionally, and how I have thrived in all of my work places.  (...)"

Talking through the Cuban Missile Crisis

One of advantages of writing is that it can give people - writers and readers - the time needed to reflect, to formulate thoughts carefully, to ensure thoroughness and nuance. Studies of written communication (including our own work) have show this. Very interestingly, this idea is corroborated by scholars who have studied the other fundamental modality of communication, oral exchanges. Thus, David Gibson's recent Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2012) examines the deliberations of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council during the height of the crisis in October 1962.

Gibson's careful analysis shows the twists and turns of the decision-making process in which all the alternatives considered had strong downsides. He also shows how the "conversational machinery" is not conducive to systematic comparison of alternatives. This is because of the expectation that interactants say something relevant to the last point made, and because of the conventions of turn-taking. As Gibson concludes in a Nature article about his book, "talk is useful for decision-making, but its conventions do not ensure that sustained attention is given to all the things that could go wrong."

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a high-stakes, high-time pressure situation in which the oral communication modality shows its limits. Given the urgency of the situation, the written modality would not have been more adapted. However, in less urgent conditions, the machinery of writing, its mechanisms - for ex., the objectification of one's thoughts and thought process, the process of reflection - may be more conducive to systematic comparisons and even to more rational decision-making.

The Lost Art of Letter-Writing

Two days ago Charlotte Higgins wrote a very interesting post on The Guardian's Culture Blog on the Lost Art of Letter-Writting which started with a question: As books on handwriting, letter-writing and paper are published, are ready to fall back in love with slow communication?

Noticing 3 books published this fall ( Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink; Ian Sansom'sPaper; and John O'Connell's For the Love of Letters) on 3 related topics: handwriting, letter and paper, she suggested that more than a drifting away of writing, this could suggest a revival of it. I would agree  on the revival of writing as a modality, although I'm less certain about the handwriting aspect of it. After reading Higgins' post, I thought of 3 very dear friends and thought of writing to them... and I ended up sending a long email to one. I hope to write to the two others soon. I know that if I were to write them a letter, they might never receive it... Yet, I enjoyed the email correspondence that I have with them and instead of boxes where I used to keep letters, I have folders in which I keep email correspondences. Yet, I might give it a try and send them letters this weekend.

I found particularly interesting though the slow pace associated to letter writing and the potential for reflection and creativity. I love this beautiful excerpt mentioned by Higgins, a quote from a great piece by Catherine Field in the New York Times:

A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

Beyond the specific genre discussed by Catherine Field and the role of the materiality of writing in allowing a dialogue, I would like to emphasize the creative act of writing as a modality. 

A Treasure of Written Texts

Let's think for a moment about some of the societal and political implications about orality and literacy, about having a society based on oral or on written communication. As literacy scholars have pointed out, orality came first, historically. However, the invention of writing gave a boost to empires who needed to manage the vastness of their posessions, and writing-based cultures came to think of themselves as stronger, even as 'superior' to orality-based cultures.

As it often happens though, the story gets more complicated. Orality comes to be associated with an idealized past, with a time when humanity was more innocent, closer to nature and genuine feelings, and less corrupt. Just as writing-based cultures imposed themselves, all around the world, over orality-based ones, the historical primacy of orality was elevated to superiority. Plato was the first prominent proponent of this kind of thinking, and these ideas have thrived over the centuries.

One instantiation of this type of thinking is in the studies of organizational communication, where oral exchanges are seen as far richer and more nuanced, in a word, superior to written texts. Largely, our book is an effort to show that writing is not superior or inferior to orality; in organizational contexts, it simply is a communication modality that affords the accomplishment of important tasks: creating an organizational memory, sharing and developing knowledge, expressing emotions, building communities among people who rarely if ever meet physically. So much for the supposed superiority of orality.

Lest one thinks these debates around orality and literacy are somewhat removed from present-day concerns, one can turn to Jean-Michel Djian's recently published book Les Manuscrits de Tombouctou. Djian is a professor at University Paris VIII. His book is a call to save the treasure of manuscripts kept in this city situated in the north of Mali, which was a major center of scholarship between the 14th and 17th centuries (in the 15th century over 25000 students were studying there) and is currently under siege from islamic groups.

Djian's provocative hypothesis is that this treasure of manuscripts, which sheds a very different light on Africa's intellectual life before the European conquests, has been forgotten for a very long time (til the 1980's) because the French colonists and the griots, (storytellers and singers, the repositories of oral culture) had a common interest in promoting and portraying the local culture as oral (less sophisticated for the colons, less threatening for the oral griots). For Djian, collecting, indexing, and studying the Tombouctou manuscripts is a duty for humanity who can thus re-discover its rich traditions and high level of knowledge in astronomy, mathematics, ethics, poetry, law, commerce, pharmacology. At the same time, the story Djian documents also represents an episode in the never finished battle between orality and literacy, between the power of the spoken word and that of the written sign.

When Women Started to Read

I've come across a wonderful, most fascinating book: The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack. The author (a fellow at Oxford) traces the extraordinarily slow and difficult process through which women gained access to the written word and to the powers it confers (the power to think independently, the power to express oneself). The opposition to women's literacy has been universal, and has been violent; consequently, until recent times, Jack can document very rare instances of women readers and writers.
The author in whose company I would put Jack is no other than Hélène Cixous, the French writer, philosopher and feminist who, in 1975, published a famous essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, in which she extolled women to write in their specifically womanly way, voicing their womanly voice. In other words, she asked women to use the power of the written word to express their minds, their bodies, their selves. To take power from and through the written word, and to make it theirs.
Of course, before they could write, women had to be able to read. And it is through writing Jack's work about women's long road to literacy that one realizes what an extraordinary accomplishment women's writing is.
To your pens, gals!

Copy, Paste: a limitation to innovation or the way to innovate?

In our book, Anca and I note that copying and pasting are features of today's media for writing, in particular word processors, that limit our creativity and ability to think. Indeed, as one person working in an ad agency remarked, people tend to be less analytical and less creative, because most of the time they just copy /cut and paste, reproducing similar ideas, or chunk of ideas, instead of questioning things and "starting from scratch". Hence, documents and presentations were only re-composition of previous ideas. While I told her that one could always ignore the feature, she replied with a strong technological determinism, that people had the features, so they [had to] use it.

Today, I was writing an article on innovation entitled  Copy, Paste, and Innovate and of course, the title caught my attention. How copy and paste could lead to innovation?

 Here is how the article started:
"One of the most common operations performed on a computer is copy and paste. We copy a section of a webpage and paste it into a document. We take it for granted. We grab an idea from one place and put it to use in another. So why not use this method for your next product or service innovation?"

So is copy and paste, the way to go for innovation?

Copy and paste in the article did not mean "reproduction" but translation. Indeed what mattered was not so much the reproduction than the de-contextualization and re-contextualization in another field, what some scholars called boundary spanning or others technology brokering. Hence, the author of the article concludes: "When looking for ideas for improvements or innovations don’t just look at other organizations in your field. Look in entirely different arenas – the arts, entertainment, military, medicine, education, the natural world and so on".

Cut and paste in this article is not about writing or communication in general. It is an analogy inviting people to translate ideas from one field to another, or in other words, inviting people to try to to address different audiences. By imagining and addressing different audiences with different contexts, practices and problems, one might come up with an innovative solution.

I will argue that in fact, as highlighted in our book, taking the time of writing, which involves starting from scratch, is key in allowing you to think of problems differently and to even be inspired by other fields. And, of course, copy and paste is a great feature and we all find it so convenient. Yet, it should not become a way of thinking.

Le Monde on the link between writing and innovation

The most prominent French journal, Le Monde, published an article about the link between writing and innovation, based on our book.
You can read the article here: http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2012/10/01/prendre-le-temps-d-ecrire-pour-mieux-innover_1768147_3234.html

The article was written by Julie Battilana, associate professor at Harvard Business School. Thank you Julie! You may want to check out Julie's extremely interesting research here: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=382192

Interview for The GreenHouse @?WhatIf! Innovation

Adrienne Wong from ?WhatIf!  Innovation (New York) interviewed Anne-Laure this week for the ?WhatIf! Green House and they talked about The Power of Writing.

Anca was interviewed on The Power of Writing

In July Anca was interviewed by Janet Skeslien Charles on the book and writing in general. You can read the interview at http://www.jskesliencharles.com/2012/08/the-power-of-writing/

An interview with the novelist Janet Skeslien Charles

Bio: Originally from Montana, Janet Skeslien Charles divides her time between France and the United States. Moonlight in Odessa was inspired by the two years she spent as a Soros Fellow in Odessa, Ukraine, and is her debut novel. It has been translated into a dozen languages.

Anca: Janet has been my friend for several years now. We met in Paris when we were both members of the same writing group. In the meantime she has published her first novel, the accomplished and successful Moonlight in Odessa. She has also written and published many short stories. Janet has been kind enough to be interviewed for The Power of Writing in Organizations, and to be a guest lecturer in my MBA course on Written Analysis and Communication. Naturally, I wanted her to talk more about her writing habits and her projects. 

Why do you write?

Anaïs Nin said that ‘We write to taste life twice.’ That is my favorite quote, probably because it sums up how I feel about writing. I write to figure things out, to try to understand them. I’ve written personal essays about a loved one getting a DUI and another about a family member battling both cancer and family apathy. Writing helps me to understand. When I was writing about a miserable email-order bride trapped in a terrible marriage, I was thinking of my sister, who was going through a divorce and the strength it took for her to get away. I dissected and analyze situations and put them back together in my writing.

Can you tell us a little about your writing practices?

Most of what I have written hasn’t seen the light of day. I try to write four days per week and go to the French National Library for the quiet. Usually, first thing in the morning, I write a little about my worries or problems and then shift to the projects I am currently working on. I try to write at least 500 words, or two pages. After lunch, I do research or edit until my eyes start to cross. I go to a lot of movies and also listen to people talk, paying attention to cadence and word choice. I am always thinking about my characters.

How do you manage to express your characters' often complex and nuanced emotions?

Thank you for your kind words! I try to put myself in the position of my characters and try to articulate how I would feel in that same situation.

Do you write differently on various devices (paper, computer, smartphone)?

I love notebooks and pens. Sometimes I type the words directly into the computer, but it is rare. I like smart phones for Twitter or short emails, but that is about it. I do enjoy reading books and Word files on my e-reader.

You have been leading creative writing workshops for over a decade. What have you learned from teaching these workshops? 

When I started my first workshop, I expected to share my knowledge but instead received many unexpected gifts. The writers were so passionate about reading and writing that after each session, we left the class feeling energized and ready for another week of writing. Sharing our stories, our challenges, our small victories, gave us the courage and the energy to continue writing.

During the day, we dealt with tough professors, passive-aggressive coworkers, and the pushing and shoving that is just a part of city life, even in the City of Light. In the workshop, witnessing the writers’ generosity of spirit was a balm. The writers ranged from total beginners to prize-winning authors. Each week, the beginners gave feedback to the more sophisticated writers, while they gave gentle encouragement to the novices. They also gave excellent advice.

One writer, Bob Levy, said something that forever changed my sentence structure: “End with the most powerful image or word.”

Most of my sentences started strong and petered out. Bob’s advice made me re-evaluate every sentence, paragraph, and chapter in my novel. (I am pleased that Bob now teaches his own workshop at WICE here in Paris.)

In preparing my classes, I became a stronger reader because I had to analyze an author’s writing in order to present it. This made me articulate and evaluate my thoughts on technique, voice, and structure.

Discussing the published short stories, poetry, and essays gave us all a deeper understanding of the work as we shared our different points of view. What a gift to discuss a story and hear many possible interpretations. With writers from France, the U.S., Russia, Australia, England, and Germany, who were IT specialists, journalists, nannies, students, retirees, and academics just to name a few professions and countries, we had lively debates. What began as a writing workshop became a community of friends, evenings of energy, and lessons for both the students and the instructor.

What advice would you give someone who is thinking about becoming a writer?

Just start and don’t give up. I know many people who have been meaning to write a book for decades and keep putting it off. You have to enjoy the process of writing and let that pleasure be your reward because there are no guarantees in publishing. I wrote my second book, spent over a decade on it, but it will probably never be published. It just didn’t come together and went back into the drawer. Now I’m working on something else. And that’s okay.

Who are the authors who inspire you?

Authors who are generous with other writers like Laurel Zuckerman and Jake Lamar here in Paris. Laurel is so kind and generous to other writers, always willing to talk about their work and upcoming events on her blog. Jake has endorsed several novels of writers here in Paris and he has given several authors advice and encouragement.

What do you write at the moment?

I’m working on a story set in World War II and doing quite a bit of research. I don’t know if it will work as a novel, but I am enjoying learning more about the period and creating characters.

What is next?

I am thrilled to be attending Festival America in September as well as a few other French literary festivals this fall. It is always a challenge to speak about my book in French, but so far reviewers and audiences have been very kind. http://www.festival-america.org/

The Shifting Nature of Texts

From our "guest blogger", Catherine Poisson (author of Sartre et Beauvoir: du je au nous / Sartre and Beauvoir: From the I to the We):

Reading Anne-Laure Fayard’s last blog entry, I learned the term “addressing mechanism” which, if I understand it correctly, could be translated in my environment (French studies) as the reader(s) of a text. Yet the very term “mechanism” is in fact particularly apt in translating the network of addressees in the work and correspondence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

During their entirely life Sartre and Beauvoir established what they named a federative world that is a world common to both, yet a world in which they retained their very own existence and personality. A world, to say it rapidly, in which you can experience the other, be the other, establish a “we” while not losing the “I”. A lot can be said about the pitfalls of such a project but, to come back to the subject of writing and sharing, it might be interesting to take a look at a particular time in Sartre and Beauvoir’s life during the war.

Sartre has been drafted, Beauvoir is in Paris within their circle of friends. Both of them at the time are writing novels, which rely heavily on their personal life. They write to one another almost daily and also sustain correspondence with other friends or lovers. Moreover, they both write their own diary, which they exchange for mutual reading. In other words, one can find the narration of a particular event or the evolution of a thought in various forms depending on the time it was written and whom it was addressed to. What is most interesting is the fact that one cannot decide that the letter is systematically superior to the philosophical entry or the fictional account or vice versa. At one point in this network of reiterations (mechanism), something happens and the reader comes across the perfection of a thought.

It is tempting to think that it is precisely because the text is not quite what it seems to be that it manages to achieve more - to say more/go further - than others. The entry diary is not an intimate exercise as Sartre and Beauvoir shared them. Their personal letters circulate within friends and lovers, and one might think that Sartre, at least, knew at that point they would be made public later in his life. Can we speculate on the fact that the shifting nature of a text is what might allow for its richness but that there are no recipes for success in communication?

Reflective writing to lead change

I've just read a very interesting note by Elizabeth Powell, Writing to Reflect: Mindful leadership in the face of change on reflective writing and how it can help managers in leading change efforts. More deeply, what this note points to is the reflective power of writing, or writing as a process to reflect (what we define as the reflecting mechanism). Similarly to us, she argues that writing matters as a process or a practice: "The process of writing, and particularly reflective writing, has an extraordinary capacity to aid creative and critical thinking and deal with complex emotions".

In our book, through analyses of past and current written exchanges, we unpack the mechanisms of writing which supports creative and critical thinking, articulating and managing emotions and building communities.

Powell's note focuses on providing practical tips to develop reflective writing, in particular in a world of digital media and information overload and shows how it can help managers in developing and implementing change programs. For example, she claims that by writing down "the whole story", managers can then figure out what are the problems to solve and develop new solutions and stronger arguments to convince their peers and employees. Reflective writing for Powell is more like a diary mode of writing; yet, the audience (or what we call the addressing mechanism) is presupposed. 

Blogs as public diaries: writing for an audience

This morning I went to a great presentation at Helsinki Design Lab (HDL) on the research they are doing in the field of strategic design. During the presentation, Bryan Boyer, who was our host at HDL,  made an interesting comment who highlighted the importance of writing mechanisms.
Discussing artifacts the design team used, Bryan explained how their website, and in particular their blog had become a communication artifact. They are posting a weekly (sometimes) bi-weekly post, posts that he described as " a diary of our work". He noted how writing these posts helped him to think about,  articulate and reflect on his work [great reference to the reflecting and analyzing mechanism].

He also added how it was important to make these notes public on the blog rather than just writing them down as private notes. Indeed, when you write on a blog, you write for an audience and you have to think about the audience [Here I could not prevent myself from smiling and thinking about the addressing mechanism]. While written for others (he blog is public and shared with others with an "open door" to conversations - through the comment feature), posts are also written for oneself: to keep a trace and make sense of what was done, what happened. Objectifying here is both the output and the process.

Not only I found this reference to the blog as a diary of the work of the Helsinki Design Lab relevant in the context of the 4 mechanisms of writing we defined in our book, but also it reminded me of the distinction made between letters and diaries made by Joanne Trautmann Banks about Virginia Woolf's correspondence and diaries.  Trautmann Banks made a point that letters revealed more about Virginia Woolf's because they were addressed to someone (and public to a certain extent).

The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail)

Such is the title of an article by Randall Stross in the NY Times (February 2010) where he describes the emergence of the post, and "cheap posting" in England and in the US (after a postal reform in the 1839 in England and a few years later in the US).
Stross highlights how many of the practices developed at the time can be compared to today's practices with emails and other media. He cites in particular the great book by Catherine Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writting (2009) who was a great resource for us as we worked on The Power of Writing in Organizations. Among other things, one learns reading this book how frequent was the postal service with people in London complaining if a letter was not arriving in a couple of hours. "And, not unlike us, most Victorian letter writers seemed more concerned about getting a rapid response than a long one", notes Stross.
In this article, Stross notes that people were often forwarding newspapers rather than sending letters: it reminded me of the times where I forward an article, a call for a conference, an interesting piece of information with only a few words "maybe of interest", "FYI". One could also think of it as the ancestor of the attachment in particular when you read that "the  Victorians mailed all sorts of things besides words: tree cuttings, leeches, mosses and even manure, Ms. Golden writes."
Stross to conclude that "the only thing left for the modern correspondent to invent was the completely empty envelope — the Facebook “poke,” the sending of a greeting without saying so much as “hi.”
When one Facebook member clicks to “poke” another, of course, the receiver can poke back, returning the wordless greeting. Compared with a poke, even a brief e-mail message seems impressively articulate."
This article not only highlights how much one can learn from taking a historical perspective and realizing how some practices have been enacted in other times and with other media. It also stresses the diversity of the type of writing, reminding us that letter writing in the 19th century was a multiple genre as email writing is today.

Mobility makes us loose two key dimensions of writing: reflecting and specifying

Here is an interesting article on the impact of mobile technologies on productivity. It shows, just as we have argued, that productivity is closely linked to the ability to think and go beyond reactive answers.  

Is Mobile Computing Good For Productivity?

Consultant Deborah Lovich could be accomplishing the management feat of the mobile era. She's convinced hundreds of agile-thumbed, on-at-all-hours colleagues to put down their smart phones and stop working or checking e-mail all evening long.

True, the break happens only once a week. But Boston Consulting Group's "predictable time off" experiment has been a hit. Since it was widely introduced in 2009, more than 900 internal teams have taken part, and the program has become standard practice at most BCG offices in North America and Europe.

Lovich, head of BCG staff in Boston, developed the program with Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow, who in studies begun in 2005 found that BCG consultants felt burnout not only because of long hours, but because they could never predict or control when they might have a break from work.

The problem was BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. BCG workers felt pressure to respond to e-mails from a boss or client right away, even when it wasn't urgent. Responding to one message could set off a chain reaction of e-mails lasting until bedtime.

This book started as a conversation.... Why is writing seen as the "ugly ducking?"

We are both very excited by the forthcoming publication of our book with Routledge The Power of Writing in Organizations: From Letters to Online Interactions.
We believe it provides key insights on how writing's mechanisms is crucial in today's organizations where distributed collaboration is increasing and where there is a crucial need for creative thinking.

This book started as a conversation about debates in the academic worlds about the effects of technology on communication as well as our observations in our teaching and everyday life. On the one hand, we are writing more and more: post-it notes, emails, instant messaging, power point decks, and even texting on our phones rather than calling, yet, there is a disregard towards writing and a belief that face-to-face or variations of face-to-face like videos are better than writing for collaboration and relations.

We paused and wondered: Why this tension? Why is writing always seen as the ugly duckling when it comes to expressions of subtle emotions or complicated thoughts. Maybe it is because we are both academics, maybe it is because we have both been reading and writing for so many years, yet there is more than a personal story and our own biases.

We thought of specific examples that we knew: correspondences of famous philosophers, scientists and novelists - Descartes, Darwin, Einstein, Kafka, or Virginia Woolf - and we started reading them and analyzing them to figure out how writing supported the expression of emotions, the development of ideas and the building of relationships. We also discovered correspondences of many less famous ones which have been kept and played a key role in the development of distributed organizations such as Hudson Bay Company and East India Company.

Our reading of scholars in classical studies such as Ong and Havelock showed us the importance of the development of the alphabet and writing in Ancient Greece in the development of the thinking process as we experienced it. This was confirmed by the fascinating work of psychologists such as Maryanne Wolf who showed how the development of writing influenced the structure of our brains and allowed us to develop analytical and creative powers.

We then went from the historical correspondences to current online communities - Open Source, OpenIDEO and a public forum on Knowledge Management - to see what has changed. We realized that successful collaborations in these online contexts could be explained with the same mechanisms of writing than in the historical letters from the 17th, 18, 19th and beginning of the 20th century. This was really exciting and it confirmed our belief that writing was a powerful mode of communication, crucial for the expression of emotions, the development of new ideas and the building of relationships. It was also somewhat worrisome as most of the interviews we did with professional and managers showed that writing was becoming a weak mode of communication and with it, several key skills such as analysis, articulation of ideas, reflection - all crucial skills to thinking, were at the risk of disappearing. We do not think that technology does not allow us to use and develop these skills, but in many cases, it allows to be lazy and stop practicing them.

This book in that sense ends with a call for action: let's acknowledge what we can do with writing and let's cultivate it while enjoying all the potential unleashed by today's technology.