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.