#49: Writing Creates Alignment
As I've begun to write more, I've noticed that writing is a powerful tool to create alignment across an organization. Here are a few ways writing fosters alignment:
1. Writing ensures that the story communicated up, down, and across the chain of command remains consistent.
Within organizations, many different conversations happen. And if you're a leader, which you are, you need to make sure that the narrative and details that you are sharing are consistent across all of those conversations. This is easier said than done. By writing down your thoughts and sharing them, you greatly increase the odds that your story is the same across all conversations. Because anyone can reference your written word, it allows people in the organization to ask clarifying questions in a very specific manner and see where they may have misinterpreted something you said or disagreed with something you said.
2. Writing conveys transparency.
If you write something and share that, even if people don't know if you've shared it up the chain of command, they know that they can hold you to your word. That in itself creates the feeling of transparency, and that feeling is not false, because you can be held to those words. If you've ever worked for someone who you suspect says different things to different people, this should resonate with you. If someone writes out their thoughts and emails them to everyone or posts them in a place where everyone can see them, you know for certain what is being communicated.
3. Writing lasts through time, aligning us on what happened in the past.
During the Korean War, Chesty Puller, a legend in the Marine Corps, writes to his wife:
Everything is quiet and I now have little to do except get my reports prepared and submitted. I wish I had a flair for writing, as then I am certain this regiment would get the credit due them when the history of this operation is finally written. Now everyone knows, but in a few years what is written will govern. Rest assured that I will do a better job of getting the facts in my reports than I did in the past war. I will also claim everything due the regiment.
Many times I have regretted that my English education was cut short during the first war. Please do your best to impress on our children the necessity of taking advantage of every opportunity... in this hard old world of ours."
"In a few years, what is written will govern." As our memory fades with time, if we write down what has happened and how things transpired as they do in real-time, we allow ourselves the ability to reflect on that and learn the lessons of our own history. If we aren’t aligned on our history, we won’t be aligned on the lessons learned from history.