Writing as a Thinking Tool is a Superpower

The hidden force behind organizations such as Stripe, Amazon, and GitLab.

I love writing, but I’ve never worked at a company with a strong writing culture. That’s why I asked Marcelo Calbucci, who used to work at Amazon as a Director of Product & Tech, to write a guest post about the importance of having a strong writing culture. He recently published his book on the PRFAQ framework, an innovation framework based on his experience at Amazon and launching multiple successful start-ups.

From here on, all words are Marcelo’s and enjoy! - Maarten

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Did you ever write a Slack message or email and halfway through you realize you didn't have to send that message or that the topic was different from when you started? That's writing as thinking at work. Since the early days of blogging, I learned the value of writing to think and articulate ideas.

When I joined Amazon, I was immediately exposed to their writing and reading culture–every employee is. The difference between what Amazon does and what most organizations do is that Amazon is deliberate and systematic about their approach to writing and reading. As soon as I started to familiarize myself with the Amazon way, I was hooked.

When Amazon was growing fast in the early 2000s, the executives could not keep up with the context of decisions they needed to make or to understand the status and consequences of the decisions they made. Long story short, Jeff Bezos and his Senior VPs abandoned PowerPoint and embraced documents in a big way.

It’s hard to know how organizations operate without peeking behind the curtains. You have heard of dysfunctional organizations with countless meetings, team misalignment, product strategies that change every quarter, and more. I don’t have data about it, but I’d guess that organizations that don’t embrace a writing and reading culture are more likely to be dysfunctional than the ones that do. Every organization has problems. However, when they embrace writing and reading for strategy and decision, a large portion of those problems go away.

Since then, every important decision to be made, or to recap the consequences of previous decisions is backed by a document in the style of a narrative following one of the frameworks Amazon has invented, including the Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (PRFAQ) — also known as the Amazon Working Backwards 6-pager—, Correction of Error (COE), Weekly Business Review (WBR), Operating Plan 1 (OP1), and more.

Why Writing?

I spent six months studying writing and reading to author my book—not how to write or how to read content, but the cognitive science behind them. I’m far from an expert on the topic, but the evidence is abundant: writing is thinking!

You know people who “talk-to-think.” They process ideas by verbalizing them. As they talk out loud, they find the flaws and the jewels in their ideas, refine, develop, and continue to talk about them. Writing is thinking that works for everyone.

Writing a narrative about a business idea, a product feature, or a new HR program helps you, the innovator, think clearly about the feasibility, viability, and value of the idea. Your brain will feel uncomfortable if what you are writing is not coherent. It forces you to retreat, rethink, and refine your idea. Even if no one will read your text and you decide to shelve the idea, the writing played a crucial role in helping you arrive at that decision.

That’s exactly what happens when you draft an email or Slack message and halfway through realize you don’t need to send the message, or that you should check one more thing, or even that your original topic was not what you needed to ask or explain—it was something else. That’s writing-as-thinking at work.

Writing not only helps you bring clarity to your idea by thinking critically, it trains you to articulate an idea effectively. If you can’t convey your idea to other people, how good is the idea, anyway? We need to figure out how to get them out of our heads and into words for them to be useful.

Finally, writing can be inspiring by painting a vision of a new product, business, service, or program. It’s easier to rally people around a vision if they understand it, even when they are not fully bought into it.

The Obstacles to Writing

Every organization does writing—emails, Slack, PRDs, memos, proposals, and more. The difference between these and embracing a writing culture is that in an organization that embraces it, the writing is intentional. The organization trains and sets expectations on how to do writing right. It’s not different from software engineering teams that have specific coding practices, or design teams that created a design system. Organizations should have a “writing system.” For example, creating structured templates, language style guidelines, writing planners and guides, and guidance on methods to create, review, and revise documents.

Change is difficult. As the saying goes, “everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change.” It’s hard to change an organization—I’ve tried many times, some with success, some not so much. Like changing your behavior, it’s much easier if you start small and are consistent. There are things that play a major role in why organizations will resist more writing (and reading).

Here are three reasons that people will push back and how to overcome them:

• They feel they lack the skills. People confuse great prose with business writing. Business writing is not romanticized or eloquent. It’s practical and precise. If you work in a company, I’m sure you can string a sentence together, and a few sentences to create a paragraph that is clear and coherent. That’s how you get started.

• Writing takes time. Yes, it does. But you know what takes more time than writing a document that aligns the team? Having a team where people are confused or have a different idea about the project direction, vision, and goal—and need countless meetings and project restarts.

• Overcoming PowerPoint. That’s the hardest one. It’s so easy to start a new PowerPoint and create a half-dozen slides with five bullet points or a diagram on each slide. PowerPoint is a shallow tool that doesn’t require critical thinking. If you are using PowerPoint for important decisions, you are leaving too much to chance and interpretation.

Try Writing

There are plenty of structured writing frameworks out there, including the PR

FAQ. The next time you have a project that you are starting, be intentional and systematic. A great place to start is a one-pager. Write a narrative page explaining what the project is, why you are doing it, and other valuable context elements.

Ask everyone to read the document before you move to a presentation or discussion, to use it as a forcing function for alignment. It takes three minutes to read a page. The only reason this wouldn’t go well is if the team doesn’t have clarity on the purpose, the goal, and the strategy, in which case, the writing worked! Go and get clarity, then come back, instead of pretending that everyone is aligned.