Episode 149 –The Write Way – Mastering Written Communication

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Mastering written communication and focusing on the hidden science behind how our reading and writing influences our thoughts and actions. Hear some best practices when it comes to writing winning bids, pitfalls we should avoid, as well as common workplace communication errors. Table of Contents 02:02 … Rob’s Background Story03:17 … Misfired Messages07:23 … Knowing When to Call a Time-out10:53 … Recognizing the Warning Signs12:56 … Effective Writing in Project Management15:45 … Fluency Heuristic17:01 … Overloading the Decision-Maker22:46 … An Attention-Grabbing Introduction26:57 … “Garden-Pathing”27:49 … Email Salutations29:18 … Compelling Subject Lines30:54 … Words of Advice34:01 … Contact Rob35:01 … Closing ROB ASHTON:  ...write as if you are writing for a human because you are.  You know, not for the position.  You don’t look at someone’s job title.  Think of them as a human being.  They are as human as you are, and they’re subject to the same mental shortcuts and the same irritations and the same cognitive biases. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We are so glad you’re joining us.  If you like what you hear, please visit us at Velociteach.com, where you can leave a comment on our Manage This Podcast page.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Today we’re very excited about our guest.  We’ve never really talked about written communication.  Rob Ashton has a very interesting background.  He’s actually been in science and research.  And because of that he got into the process of reading and writing because of writing scientific reports and research papers.  But he has a very unique perspective on why so much of our written communication just doesn’t work. BILL YATES:  That’s true.  Now we’re in a remote workforce more so than ever.  So many of us are working virtually.  So what do you do?  You pop open Slack.  You pop open Skype.  And you pop open Teams.  And you just instant message with your team back and forth, back and forth.  Which many times that’s totally appropriate.  I think as Rob will get into, we have a number of different tools at our disposal.  You’ve got to pick the right tool for the right message, or you’re going to get into trouble. WENDY GROUNDS:  Right, right.  I’m excited to talk to Rob.  A little bit about him before we get there is he’s the founder of a global learning company called Emphasis, which specializes in written communication.  Some of his high-profile clients have been Big 4 accounting firms, big tech, big pharma.  He’s also done some work with the U.K. Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street, and even the royal household at Buckingham Palace.  So we’re in good company. BILL YATES:  Yes.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Rob.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for joining us today. ROB ASHTON:  Hey, it’s great to be here.  Thanks for inviting me. Rob’s Background Story WENDY GROUNDS:  Rob, before we get into our conversation on written communication, can you tell us how you got into this field and what your background is? ROB ASHTON:  I started off as a research scientist before a love of words led me into publishing.  So originally trained as an editor.  And I did that for a while, and I found that I guess I just got a little tired of applying the same techniques again and again to the words I was trying to knock into shape.  And I decided that instead of doing that, I would go and teach people to do it.  So I set up a training company to do that, and that was called Emphasis.  And that was 23 years ago. And then six years ago I decided that I would go back to my roots, and I would start to look at the science of this because there’s very little out there on the science of written communication, or at least in the business world.  There’s a ton of stuff out there in the academic world, but virtually none of it makes its way into the business world.  And I wanted to see why.  First of all I wanted to see if I was right.  It seemed to work in practice, but I didn’t know why, and maybe there’s better ways to do it.  In fact, I thought that would take a few months.  I gave myself six months, and I thought I’d write a book on it.  And of course that was incredibly naive.  And here I am six years later, finally working on the book.  So it’s been a six-year odyssey to look into the science of written communication. Misfired Messages WENDY GROUNDS:  We are very excited about this topic.  We’ve had many podcasts on communication, leadership, those types of things.  But never before have we spoken on communication and the written word.  And I think it’s definitely a very relevant topic to discuss. BILL YATES:  I think everybody’s going to have to read the transcript closely. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  We will have it all written down there for you folk.  You know, we’ve all had that scenario when you’re having an innocent chat with someone on messaging.  You get that text that comes in.  And you take it the wrong way.  Or it’s what you call misfired messages are going back and forth all of a sudden, and you don’t really get clarity as to what’s going on, and we end up getting in hot water.  Rob, what happens there?  Why do we so often misinterpret these messages that we’re receiving? ROB ASHTON:  Great question.  It’s something that happens an awful lot.  It’s funny, what you’re talking about there is written communication.  And yet we don’t think of it as written communication.  We’re thinking of it as talking.  You know, we’re chatting.  And in fact you even see it on customer help desks.  It’s called “live chat.”  It’s chat, talking; and yet it’s not talking, it’s writing.  And I think right at the heart of that problem is something that most people don’t realize, and that’s that we didn’t evolve to read and write. Now, when I say that, I’ve actually taken a lot of flak on social media for this recently by saying that.  People say, what are you talking about?  It doesn’t matter.  We didn’t evolve to drive motor cars, you know.  Why does that even matter?  Or they’ll say, yes, we did.  We’ve been reading and writing for a long time.  And we’ve evolved to do it.  Some people even think we’ve evolved to do it since we started using the web to communicate.  But the fact is that as a species, we’ve been reading and writing for about 5,000 years, which sounds like a very long time; right?  But it’s not.  It’s only a heartbeat in evolutionary terms.  When you are reading and writing, you are using circuitry that you have developed since you were born.  This is why takes us so long to learn to read and write.  We can understand our parents’ voices, or at least we can react to our parents’ voices, and we can make our presence felt to our parents by crying when we’re babies.  You know, we use our voices to communicate.  We use our hearing to communicate straight out of the womb.  But when it comes to reading and writing, this is something we have to learn to do, it takes years, and we are rewiring the brain.  And what we’re doing is we’re joining up parts of the brain that we evolved for other purposes, such as for hearing, for example. If you’ve ever thought about reading, reading is a miracle, really, because you see dots and squiggles on a screen or on a page, and you hear voices in your head.  You know, that’s just miraculous, I think.  So it’s very easy to take that for granted and to think that it’s just something we can just do, and we do it naturally, and we do it easily.  But it’s really, it’s like the ultimate brain hack, reading and writing.  We are operating, though we may not realize it, on the edge of our cognitive abilities when we’re doing that. So to your question, it doesn’t leave much room for things like emotional control.  I think this emotional control thing is one of the keys for why we so often end up in hot water when we’re communicating in that way, when we’re messaging.  It’s why we so often misinterpret things, although there are other things we can dig into there.  But, you know, if you are irritated already, then we often check these things in situations that we would never have been reading in before.  Normally, reading was something we did, you know, you go back a long time, you go back even a couple of decades, you would be reading a book; you would be reading a magazine.  You wouldn’t be doing it while you sat in a traffic jam getting really wound up about traffic. But when we are already irritated, and a message lands, we look.  That just confirms that we’re right to be irritated, and we start to think that it’s that message that has irritated us, that has made us angry.  So there are all sorts of reasons.  But I think the key to it all is that we didn’t evolve to read and write. Knowing When to Call a Time-out BILL YATES:  One of the things that really cracked me up was reading through one of the blog posts that you had about a very innocent question that you asked a teammate that was on a project.  You simply asked for a project status.  Talk us through that interaction. ROB ASHTON:  But you know, I still remember it like it was yesterday because it had such a profound effect on me.  I sat there in my office.  We were just looking at the screen full of Gantt charts and Trello boards.  And we’d had a standup, one of our regular weekly project meetings on the Monday.  And I think it was Wednesday by this point.  It was the middle of the week.  And that the standup everybody had said, “Yeah, everything’s going fine.”  They’d been really positive about what they were working on.  But as I was looking at those things, I just thought just something doesn’t feel right. So I just turned to Slack.  And I said to my colleague, “Can you just give me an update?”  You know, just how’s it going?  How is that project going?  And, now,