1 Writing – The most important meta-skill

Writing has less noise Edward Tufte wrote a book, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, critiquing the Power Point as a communication tool. This book inspired Jeff Bezos to ban Power Points in meetings and replace it with the 6 page narrative format that is used in Amazon even today. Socrates, on the other extreme, wrote nothing. He believed that written communication was inferior to oral because text can’t talk back.

This fear was justified in Socrates’ time, but today even text talk back. People comment on blogs, share articles with their praise and ridicule and retweet Twitter aphormisms as endorsement. Today oral medium suffers from the diametrically opposite problem. Shriller and louder voices suppress any ability to talk back in oral communication. We determine the quality of the idea based on a few attributes of the presenter. Written communication reduces the noise by allowing easier transmission of information from the writer to the reader.

Writing improves quality of decision making In today’s corporate world, we rely more on oral communication than on written communication. I believe the reliance on oral communication has weakened our decision-making systems. Noisy oral systems have reduced informed and thoughtful decision making with a high pitch, stressful process where we forfeit meritocracy of ideas. We become numb in a boring presentation and miss out on the good ideas there. The charismatic speaker can persuade the group to make the poor call.

Writing puts the burden of thinking on the writer. Written communication amplified any ambiguity in logic, highlights unstated assumptions and weak arguments. But for this exact reason, inclucating a habit of writing decreases ambiguous logic, weak arguments and dodgy assumptions there by significantly improving decisions.