Defending Design: Writing to Influence

Hey, thanks for being here.

So who speaks for your work when you're not in a room?

And sure, you've got the Sprint Review and Showcase and Roadhouse and all of the Agile things.

But then what happens when the project ends?

Time passes, two months later, a new senior executive comes in and goes, what is this?

And you're not around to explain it to them.

This is where writing comes into play because essentially writing makes our thinking available to others and available to the future.

I thought I'd apply some human centered design methodology to this talk, so I did some research and talked to some people.

I spoke to Donna Spencer, who's one of the legends of UX, and Donna said, If you haven't written it down, it's ephemeral, it's a big fat waste of time.

Here is a picture of a quote for people who like to take pictures of quotes.

So ephemeral is hey, on cue.

So ephemeral is like a boy band, it's here today, gone tomorrow.

Now I want to be really clear here, today is not, this talk right now is not about content design, content strategy, copywriting.

Although as a content strategist and content designer, I've been like binging on the content stream.

Today's about the writing that all of us do as designers, developers, product people, that we use to explain our work, to present our work.

So I'm talking strategies.

I'm talking pitch decks.

I'm talking emails.

I'm talking Slack messages.

Now, quick show of hands for the job that you're doing right now, hands up.

If you did some kind of formal training.

Could have been course.

Okay.

Cool.

Keep your hands up.

If you ever received any formal training, how to write about that thing.

Okay.

Bit less.

So when I was I'm talking to people for this, Prezo, I spoke to some senior design leaders and what they're telling me is I find myself doing the same thing over and over again.

Looking at the writing my team gives me, keeping giving them the same feedback that chews up my time.

So that means I can't spend as much effort on, really adding value.

And then when I spoke to design practitioners, what they said is that I feel like, I don't actually know what good looks like.

I want to have confidence that my work is going to land, is going to have impact, but it's really hard.

It's really ambiguous.

So I actually do some writing training for design teams working with a global software company at the moment.

It's their research leadership team and there's executive churn all over the place.

So they're saying, we don't know what they want.

We have this situation where we have a thing that we are expected to do as a part of our job, and we haven't ever actually been taught how to do it.

Now, I wish I could solve all of that for you in the next 20 minutes, and I can't.

What I'm going to do instead is to give you some tools that you can use to share, to solve that for yourselves.

But just before I get into that, I will try and dispel any credibility I may have to stand up here and talk to you about writing, because, a little while ago, we put in a proposal for a big project.

It was with a client we'd worked with in the past.

We knew the domain was very much in our wall, in our wheelhouse, and we lost.

And if you've been in that position on, agency or consultancy side, you know what that feels like, you get tunnel vision.

And so in that moment, I forgot that I've been doing this for 25 years of running successful projects.

And all I saw was.

The loss.

And I was, then I knew I had to stand up here and do this presentation.

I was like, what credibility do I have or what do I have, to talk to you about how to write well.

And then I remembered, this guy, Thomas Mann, sexy beast, writer.

And he said, a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

All of us, here's a quote, all of us have a craft, right?

And when you choose your craft, you're choosing to struggle with something.

You're choosing to have your ass handed to you on a pretty much daily basis, to bang your head against brick walls and then eventually learn and eventually painfully get better.

And I've chosen to struggle with writing.

And that means I've failed in pretty much every format imaginable from every conceivable direction, and because I've been failing for so long, I've learnt some fundamental principles, some things that underline all aspects of writing at work, and I'm going to share them with you.

Number one, curse of knowledge.

Why don't we make sense to other people?

Number two, front loading, leading with the most important information.

Layering, how we guide people into our content, abstraction, it's, why are you taking a photo of that?

It's all gonna be in the, it's, is it the, squiggle?

Highlights, okay, fine.

Abstraction, which is about, whether you give people the highlights or the detail, and then storytelling.

All right, curse of knowledge.

Best way I can explain this is by one of the psychological studies by which it was discovered.

Hands up if you know 'Curse of Knowledge', by the way.

One person, two people, legends.

This is amazing.

Imagine that you are a psychological researcher.

You can wear a lab coat if you want.

I don't mind.

It's your, fantasy.

I don't need to get into it.

Anyway, so you're in one of those, observation rooms.

You've got the double sided mirror and in the other room, there's a table, and on the table is a tin with, with an M and M wrapper around it.

Into the room comes a boy, Timmy, he's about five years old, and one of the other researchers says to Timmy, What do you think is in that tin?

What does he say?

M & Ms.

So they open it up and inside it's pencils.

Then close it up, bring Timmy around into the observation room with you and the other psychologists, enter another girl looking at the table, the tin that's been sealed back up, and one of the researchers says to Timmy who's watching all of this, What does Rosemary think is in the tin?

What does Timmy say?

He says pencils.

The reason is that when kids are about five, they don't yet have a theory of mind.

Which means a sense of other people's mental emotional states as existing completely separate to our own.

Other people being their own worlds.

We develop it over time but really we're all still Timmy.

We all think that because we make sense to ourselves therefore we make sense to other people.

And this is a problem for our writing because when we read it we don't read what it says we read what we meant to say.

Now, this has good news and bad news for us in our work.

Number one, the good news is that there are always going to be technical experts who are too close to the problem, too deep in their incredible expertise, to actually see it from the outside.

This is why, If you're any kind of designer, content designer, communicator, there's always going to be work for you.

The bad news is that we are not immune.

This is a psychological bias heuristic that all of us have, and a temptation I need to grapple with all the time is that I don't get up myself.

Because I can think that, hey, I'm a writer, I know how to write, therefore, and it becomes more about me following a process, rather than actually thinking, starting with humility, going, I'm going to have this wrong or a bit distorted, how do I catch that?

The ideal scenario is that we do user testing, right?

That's the, gold standard, but we can't user test every Slack message.

Otherwise we would get strong feedback from our colleagues about the amount of bandwidth we're taking up.

So if we can't ask for feedback on everything that we're doing, then we do need to fall back to on some principles, rules of thumb.

So this is where we get to the first one, front loading.

Front loading is about starting with the most important information, then the second most important information, the third most important information, the fourth most important information, and so on, right?

And where this came from is old school newspaper journalism, which I'll get to in a sec.

But if you heard, Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, right?

So in the context of our deliverables, it's Don't Make Me Hunt.

Don't make me read through your 500 page strategy research document to get the findings right at the end.

Where this began, newspaper journalism, the journalists would get a commission, and they'd be told to write an article, but the thing is, they wouldn't actually know exactly how much space they had to work with.

So they'd write it in such a way that if the copy editor who's laying out the newspaper had to cut something, they could just cut, a bit off the bottom, and it would be fine.

And if there was even less space, they could cut it some more.

This is, a really good metaphor for attention, actually.

Because our brains are a bit like the copy editor.

Have you ever read a newspaper article and read the first paragraph and you've been able to pretty much get what the entire article is about?

Or have you read an article and got a bit bored partway through and gone off to read something else?

So the point here is that we want to structure our content such that people don't have to read all of it top to bottom to be able to get the gist.

Now, the thing I love about this is that it can apply at every level of our writing.

If you're doing a report, you could say the executive summary is the front loaded bit, right?

But then even within that, you could say the first paragraph of the executive summary needs to give the gist of what the whole thing's about.

What I see a lot when I look in executive summaries is that there'll tend to be some kind of motherhood statement that's it was the dawn of a new era or something like that, rather than actually tell us what this thing is about, what is the work that it's doing.

But then even at the, at the paragraph level, the first sentence in every paragraph should set the scene for what follows.

Now there's a problem with this approach, which is that it's awkward.

And so what I'm going to, it's awkward for us to do when we're writing, so what I'm going to suggest you do is actually completely ignore me.

So write in whatever way makes sense to you, I don't care.

And then come back and do the front loading when you're reviewing your work.

Or if you're doing a slide deck, go what actually makes sense as the first slide to put here?

I'm saying this because I want us to be a bit easier on ourselves.

Often we're like super, super critical about our writing and we expect to be able to do all the things, conceive, write and edit all at once.

These very different mental processes.

If you do that, you're just going to turn yourself into spaghetti.

So don't.

Here's an example from my work.

So I was doing a content strategy for healthy work in the ACT government.

They're about trying to shift the culture of work away from let's, let's give people muffins and still make them work 80 hour weeks and call that well being.

So they're trying for a more fundamental change.

I was testing the structure of my report with a client and it was introduction, current state of your content, future state of your content, roadmap.

And Carice said, look, we know that our stuff's bad.

We don't need you to tell us that straight up.

So instead, this is a new structure.

Leading with the future state of the content, the roadmap, and then research summary right at the end.

So you can see that's front loaded, right?

The thing that they wanted right up top.

How am I doing so far?

Any questions by the way?

We're good?

We're good.

Alright, awesome.

Let's do one together!

Alright, take out your phones, if you wish, scan the QR code, it will bring up, a sample from a proposal of Flange, which is a fictitious company that I made up, so don't feel bad about critiquing their work.

I would love you to tell me, looking at the sample that you should see, what you think should be front loaded.

Cool.

All right.

What do you reckon should come first?

Yeah, absolutely.

And right now it leads with about Flange, which is a super common play because we need to tell people how awesome we are so that they'll take us seriously.

No, we need to show clients that we understand their world and the problem they're trying to solve.

That's how we win credibility.

Cool.

You'll see more of Flange in a second.

Alright, next up, layering information.

This is about how do we guide people into our, ideas, rather than hitting them with this big wall of stuff all at once.

And there's this genius model that a person from the States, Ginny Reddish, came up with.

It's called the bite, the snack, and the meal.

Does anyone know this one?

Yeah.

So the bite is the smallest possible unit of information.

Think like the headline, for example, and then a snack would be the thing that comes after it.

It's often a paragraph that we're thinking about it in kind of user experience terms.

The snack often contextualizes the heading, it says, this is what it's about, or it may impart like the one key takeaway.

And then the meal is the whole thing.

Real life example.

This is the bite.

Defending design writing to influence by this guy.

So that's the bite.

Then the snack is what you get when you click on that and read the description.

And then the meal is this, what we're all here doing right now.

The problem that I see is really often, people have the bite and the meal, but no snack, So people get that we need to use headings.

Headings are a thing, sure.

But then actually distilling that and going, what's the short version of this?

It's often quite harder.

It's often not done at all.

Here's a real life example.

This is from a report that I saw when I was doing a strategy project from my clients.

So they've got some research.

And so this is the bite, audience and journeys.

Okay.

And then it goes straight into this.

We'll just go bite, meal, bite, meal, bite, meal, bite, meal.

So the problem here is that if I'm a stakeholder trying to make sense of this, I have to do all the hard work.

Don't make me think, don't make me hunt.

There is no digest, no quick so what.

And that assumes that the people who are using our artifacts are going to have the time and the patience to this.

And often, they won't.

So again, I would say writing snacks is quite hard.

Some of you may be top down thinkers.

Some of you may be bottom up thinkers.

We'll say more about that in a sec.

It doesn't really matter as long as we have that short digestible chunk.

All right, ladder of abstraction.

This was in Rupert's talk at the, start.

Best way I can explain is, does anyone have a pen I can borrow?

Thank you.

Cheers.

All right.

So this is a, gel ink ballpoint pen cap type 0.

7 black.

Ballpoint pens.

Pens, stationary, inventory.

So you can see bottom of the ladder, super, concrete, super specific.

As we go up the ladder, you get bigger picture.

It captures more things.

It also potentially gets vaguer.

Thank you very much.

Now, a quick show of hands.

Who tends to be more abstract?

Who feels more comfortable with the big picture vision?

Okay, cool.

And who feels more comfortable in the concrete, grounded down in the detail?

So it's about 50 50.

All right, so neither is better or worse than the other in any absolute sense at all.

I'm neurodivergent, so I'm like really good at both ends and then in the middle it's bad news.

It's all about knowing, where we are and where we need to be in the context we're communicating in.

So if you're more of a big picture thinker, the, the challenge for you is to really say, what's that?

So that's, give me some examples.

What does that look like in practice?

How do we implement that?

Put some meat on the bones.

Here is an example from our friends at Flange.

We exist to unlock tomorrow.

Now, I'm so deeply on board emotionally with what they're saying.

I've just got no idea what that means.

And there are so many HCD consultancy sites that are like this.

It drives me bananas.

So we'd need to give some pretty clear, these are the problems we solve.

Interesting, actually, a lot of consultancies, they do the I'm just realizing now, literally right now, they do the bite and the meal.

So they'll go, this is our big vision, and in here are all of our projects.

There's no context setting layer.

Conversely, if you tend to be more of a detail person, for you, it's going to be, so what?

And, because of the curse of knowledge, the implications of so what's going to be obvious to us.

So we've might've heard of the five whys, as a way of getting to root cause.

I'm trying desperately to pioneer the five so what's.

So that means give me a fact and you say, so what?

Oh, hang on, no, we'll do that.

So what?

So what?

So what?

So what?

So what?

And you keep asking until it feels painfully obvious to you.

And that's probably the point at which the implications of what you're talking will be Clear to someone who doesn't have your context.

Does that make sense?

We'll just quickly go back to the example.

So this is one from a, former client, Officer of the Chief Economist, and had a report full of graphs like this.

Australia's largest trading partner is measured by trade in value added by destination of final demand.

It's great, but what am I even something like China was the number one trading partner.

Even that would be okay as the so what.

Let's do one together.

So here is the fact.

Users added an item to cart in 20 percent of cases.

Someone want to give me a so what?

What are the implications of this?

Sorry?

They're on a purchase path?

Yep.

So if, we're writing a report and we're going, they are on a purchase path, they added an item to cart in 20 percent of cases, I'd still want to like, so what am I supposed to make of this?

Do you have any thoughts?

How does it compare?

Yeah.

So If, like my sense is it's too low.

So in other words, the, so what might be that we're actually not converting or you could frame it as, 80 percent of users are not completing the purchase.

Does that make sense?

All right.

Finally, storytelling.

Now.

Storytelling is not just case studies, although I will give case studies a mention in a sec.

Storytelling could apply to so much of the work that we do and how we communicate that.

I know storytelling is sometimes used in this very nebulous sense.

If anybody wants to see something, make them giggle, un google, no, F, no, F, expletive head.

You are not a storyteller.

I'm talking about stories as what we'd be used to, something that unfolds over time, and has certain attributes to it, I'll outline in a sec.

But the key thing here is that, it could be so much more embedded in how we communicate.

So our proposals, for example, are a story of the experience that our clients will have when they work with us.

That project that I lost, that I mentioned back at the start, their feedback was we couldn't really see how the research was going to flow through to the implication.

There wasn't enough of a story, so we want to be looking for these things.

A good story has a character, someone that I can identify with.

Something is at stake, there's a reason to care, something might be won or lost.

There's movement, it does move through time, and there's a resolution, it finishes up somewhere.

So often I will see stuff that just has movement.

If it's a list of events, that's not enough to make it a good story.

Case studies.

I read this all the time, the client asks us to do some work.

We knew it would be awesome going in and sure enough we were.

Everything worked out exactly as expected.

There is nothing at stake there.

All right, now, as we're thinking about a storytelling mode, it's helpful to think, what kind of storyteller are we?

So a bard is, it unfolds in linear time.

Start at the finish, go through to the end, where the dragon is vanquished.

That can work really well if the person we're talking to is invested enough to sit there through to the end.

If you want to hear masterful Bard style storytelling, then listen to Malcolm Gladwell.

He'll often lead his podcasts off with something like, I've no idea where this is going, but I'm hooked.

Steward, we'll just list facts for others to interpret.

Your Majesty, we have 500 head of cattle and 300, flagons of ale.

It's just lists, And then a scout, front loads.

So a scout might say, Your Majesty, we're being attacked on the Western Front.

And at that point, the scout may choose to switch modes.

They may become a bard.

How did this happen?

Your Majesty, it all began when we alienated the King of Wisteria, or wherever.

Or could switch into steward mode.

What are our damages?

We've lost 30 troops already.

The point is, the scout gets straight to the point right away.

Now again, none of these are objectively better or worse, but it's all about what we tend to do, what our clients need from us.

Hands up if you tend to be like a bit of a bard, that's your, thing.

Yes.

Who tends to be steward ish?

Who's a scout?

I'm pretty sure not everyone's put up their hand, so someone is, someone, oh my math is off.

All right, bring it home.

What do I actually do?

I've given you a lot of classic consultancy, it depends, advice.

And so one thing we can do is think about it in the context of a customer's customer journey.

So in other words, at each stage, what level of abstraction do they need?

What storytelling mode do they need?

From gathering support, pitching, negotiating scope, discovery, delivery, So just as an example, right at the top when we're gathering support, what would our level of abstraction be?

High?

Low?

Somewhere in the middle?

What do you think?

High?

Big picture?

Yeah, Exactly.

So thinking about what our client needs and their stage can help us to make some calls.

However, I also want us to get away from this idea of writing as being this God given talent, excuse me, that some of us have and some of us don't.

Because the truth is writing is something that everyone can get better at with practice, and we can think about writing as like a designed artifact.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be fit for purpose.

And we can want there to be shortcuts, right?

And we can want to skip steps, and we can get quite impatient with ourselves.

The results end up in something like this.

So there is a site that will ask you give you AI generated inspirational slogans so that you can get to the inspiration without having to do the hard work and hard thinking.

And if you wanna do that, then seek success, but prepare for vegetables.

So in other words, we need to allow ourselves to be the writer that we are now, so that we can be the writer and the communicator that we wanna be in five years time and 10 years time.

We need to iterate.

And I've done this talk or course based on this several times and every time I look at it I go ehhhh.

And then you fix something.

You get better.

Lastly, writing is a team sport.

We mentioned the curse of knowledge right up top.

So my question is if you are doing writing the whole team has a stake in how can you lean on your peers as a sounding board to quickly go, Carolyn, I've written this, I'm going cross eyed, can you tell me does this make any sense to you?

Give me, yeah, give me some feedback.

Because I'm an introvert and I can't talk to all of you, I have this thing where If you want, you can scan this QR code and tell me your writing question and I'll send you something just for you.

No spam, ever.

Otherwise, oh hang on, that's for anyone who wants to take a photo of it.

Sorry, I'll get out of your way.

Otherwise, thank you very much for listening to my talk.

This is me.

Applause.