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