Fixing problems with our oral culture
At Local Welcome we work in a lean and agile multidisciplinary team. We plan together, work together and reflect together. It’s the same approach we used at GDS and it’s increasingly common for knowledge workers.
One way of thinking about this is that it’s primarily an oral culture. Oral cultures are great for rapid product development because people with deep expertise talk things through as they come up. They’re natural and human - you sit together, do stand-ups, chat over the top of monitors (or on Slack), and pick up on body language. Not much is written down because it’s easier to just ask someone.
At Local Welcome we learned that oral cultures have problems too. We’ve learned five ways to move to more of a written culture where it counts:
These experiments with written cultures were not about abandoning our oral culture altogether. They were about finding ways to specific solve problems we faced.
Problems with oral cultures
Earlier this year I read about oral and written cultures in Conway's Law: latency versus throughput. It contrasts oral cultures of co-located lean and agile teams with written cultures of distributed open-source software development efforts. It’s a great read.
It made me realise that there are significant problems with oral cultures:
Oral cultures struggle when someone goes on holiday. Maybe the person writes handover notes. Maybe their work stops while they’re away. Or maybe they end up doing work while they’re by the pool. None of these are good outcomes for them or the team.
Oral cultures fail when someone leaves. In organisations adopting lean and agile methods the phrase you hear is “knowledge walks out the door”. Organisations often have to do the work again. It hurts morale. It’s one reason modern IT projects get delayed.
Oral cultures are fragile when it comes to working remotely. Video calls of talking heads are a poor substitute for meeting in person. Grabbing someone for a chat isn’t as easy. Water cooler gossip moments disappear. These interactions are the glue of oral culture.
Oral cultures amplify the loudest talkers regardless of their expertise. Worse, oral cultures can minimise or silence anyone who finds the social context difficult. If we care about diverse perspectives neither of these things are good.
These are serious problems faced by organisations that rely on lean and agile teams. I saw the long-term effects of these when working at GDS and the Home Office. Initial momentum and excitement often gave way to a jaded, unproductive hopelessness.
We found five ways to mitigate these problems at Local Welcome.
1. Live meeting notes make for better meetings
Our simplest and most effective piece of written culture was taking live notes during meetings. Simple change. Huge benefits.
At the start of every meeting we created new notes. We listed topics that we wanted to talk about and prioritised them. Then we discussed the topics with one of us making close-to-verbatim notes as we went.
The thing that made it sing was sharing the live notes where everyone could see them. On video calls we shared the screen with the notes. When we were in the same room we threw them up on the projector.
Doing live meeting notes like this made all our meetings better because:
We set the agenda together. Everyone added topics and helped with prioritisation. It brought our divergent ways of thinking out. Meetings meant more to us because we created them together.
It kept things moving. The remaining topics were a constant visible reminder of what we hadn’t covered yet. We all got skittish if we sensed we were spending too much time on any one topic.
Everybody’s contribution was honoured. There was magic in seeing your words on screen. You felt heard. You were heard. Your words remained even if someone started talking over you.
We could go back and see what was said. Sometimes we scrolled up during the meeting to pick up a missed point. Sometimes we checked in later to re-read a decision that was central to our work.
It made it easy to act. Whenever we agreed an action we added it as a checkbox item. Everyone helped by pointing out actions as we went. We sent them round at the end. Stuff. Got. Done.
Of course there were trade-offs. But we found workarounds:
Doing semi-verbatim live notes works because you’re not parsing for importance (unlike minutes). But you do have to type fast. Most people type fast enough and everyone gets quicker with practice.
It’s hard - maybe impossible - to make live notes when you are contributing to the discussion. We learned to ask a colleague to step in and note if we started speaking. It worked surprisingly well.
There’s no point in live notes that disappear later. All our meeting notes - kickoffs, leadership, all-hands, 1:1s - were stored in Notion sections shared only with attendees. Secure. Private. Easy to find.
If anyone can change the notes then anyone can game the notes. We had version control to fall back on. But mostly we trusted that our team wouldn’t do this. What is a team like ours without trust?
I’ve never had such focused and productive meetings as we did at Local Welcome with our written culture of live meeting notes.
2. Shared documents collapse distance
Another part of our written culture was working on shared documents during video calls rather than staring at each others’ faces. It collapsed the distance and made us feel like we were all in the same room.
Let’s back up. Lots of people have been remote working this year. There’s a lazy assumption that working together online means chucking everyone into a video call and hoping for the best. This doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work because it’s not how we work together for real.
When I work with someone for real we’re always looking at a shared document. Maybe it’s my terrible sketch. Maybe it’s a lovely spreadsheet. Perhaps I’m angrily marking up a print-out with a red pen. Or I’m in front of a messy whiteboard drawing squiggles and waving my arms.
The secret to working together is the shared document. Not our faces. (I’m not even sure that body language is as important as everyone says.)
In 2020, shared documents are largely solved for remote work. We’ve got Google Docs, Google Sheets, Miro boards, Notion pages, and so on. Anything where lots of people can work on a single document that is stored in the cloud and see everyone’s edits as they happen in real-time.
That’s how we worked together remotely. We turned our cams off but left our mics on. We all opened a shared document. Each of us interacted with the document using our own computer, our own viewport settings, our own shortcut keys, our own input devices. We felt natural, at ease, and in control. We chattered away to each other in our headphones. And before we knew it two hours had gone by. Without exhausting us.
At its best it was actually better than working in person. We stopped having problems with handwriting (fonts!), running out of space (infinite canvas!), losing work in dead-ends (version control!) or coming in to find that someone had wiped away our precious system architecture.
I’ve been working remotely for nine months. It always felt like working together thanks to our written culture of working on shared documents.
3. Documenting operations improves resilience
The biggest move we made to a written culture was documenting our team’s operational processes. This was a lot of work but it paid off.
We documented our operational processes because we needed to operate our meals service by doing specific tasks at different times:
Weekly tasks like briefing leaders or arranging grocery deliveries
Monthly tasks like checking leader availability or booking venues.
Occasional tasks like opening a group or inviting a support animal.
Event-driven tasks like cancelling a meal or retiring a leader.
We learned that operations work was different to service development. When designing our service the oral culture worked because we could improvise with information in our heads. When operating our service we had to do tasks the same way each time and our oral culture fell apart.
We started with an information architecture of nine operational areas:
Start a new group
Recruit leaders
Recruit guest partners
Do monthly meal planning
Prepare for a week’s meals
Be on-call for the meals
Debrief and archive the meals
Cancel a meal
Do maintenance tasks
Each of the operational areas contained a subpage for each of the tasks we needed to do. Each subpage had a list of instructions, links, videos and step-by-steps to ensure we did these tasks the same way each time. Any member of the team could update the instructions at any time.
This improved our operational efficiency. But it did something else too. In writing down how to do our own operational tasks we created a manual for others to do them when we weren’t there. Suddenly it was OK to go on holiday without writing handover notes! Bliss.
I’m leaving Local Welcome at Christmas but I know the team will be fine because my processes are documented as part of our written culture.
4. Automating is easier if things are written down
One useful side effect of our written culture is that it became easier to automate the painful and repetitive processes that we’d documented.
At Local Welcome our goal was to design a great service, work out how to operate it, and scale it up to 100 locations. This meant we grew until we ran out of capacity to grow any more. Then we stopped to figure out what we could automate to let us grow again. Over and over again.
Documenting processes made it easier to automate things in two ways:
It made it clear which operational processes were most painful. “Do monthly meals” involved emailing 100 local leaders, asking for Sunday availability, jigsawing into free slots, sending calendar invites, setting up the meals in Eventbrite and on and on. I only had to look at the process page for about five seconds to realise this was an unsustainable manual process after about 20 groups.
It made it clear how to approach automation. The process page told us what technical capabilities we’d need. Send emails, collect choices via personalised URLs, make allocation decisions with a custom algorithm, use Google Calendar API to create invites, use Eventbrite API to publish events etc. It showed we couldn’t do this without hiring a developer - and what that brief should look like.
Local Welcome can’t grow without automating lots of things. It’s easier to know what to automate and how to do it with a written culture.
5. Notion makes a better written culture possible
We used a tool called Notion for our written culture. Notion is an intranet tool that actually works. This is a miracle.
Intranets are usually the graveyards of organisational knowledge. They are horribly designed, poorly structured, difficult to use, hard to edit, and impossible to use on your phone. These problems, taken together, mean that all intranets go out of date and stop being used at some point. Even saying the word ‘intranet’ to people makes them shudder.
Notion is an intranet tool that solves these problems:
It’s easy to use. If you can use a Google Doc you can use Notion. It has basic text controls and lets you embed maps, videos, images etc. Everything is edit-in-place so the learning curve is minimal.
It’s a multi-editor tool. Everyone can edit at the same time. You see edits being made by people in the same document. There’s no saving things, or checking things out, or any of that nonsense.
It’s got just-enough structure. In Notion every page has its place (yes!). Yet it’s easy to move things around by dragging them to a new place. It’s the first tool I’ve used that lets the whole team evolve an information architecture on the fly. It’s a marvel.
It’s everywhere you need it. It works on all your devices because it has all the native applications (Android, iOS, Windows, OSX) and a beautiful web interface. It’s cloud-based so it’s always in sync.
It lets you recover from mistakes. Deleted pages are easily restored. Each page has a version history that will save you if something goes wrong. This frees people to make changes.
The killer feature that makes Notion work for a written culture is the approach to sharing and privacy. Written culture needs granular sharing and privacy controls. Policies are for everyone. Leadership discussions are for leadership eyes only. And 1:1 notes are just for the 1 and the 1.
Google Drive is a hot mess for this kind of sharing.
Notion has a team area (everyone can access everything), a private area (only you can access) and your shared area. When you share a page with two people it appears in your shared area. Every page you add beneath is shared with those two people (and no one else). Dragging from the team area to the shared area changes the sharing. It makes sharing visual.
Notion made our written culture work because everyone used the same tool for everything that we wrote down. We were all on the same page.
Tradeoffs and mitigations in our written culture
Of course there were problems with moving to a written culture as well as benefits. Every change we made had tradeoffs and mitigations:
Writing things down enforced a clarity that talking about things forgave. Spoken words are slippery where written words are not. This often made people feel uncomfortable, especially in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, and we had to find a way of talking that reconciled this discomfort. Strong ideas, weakly held etc.
Some people struggled to write or read fast, maybe because they were dyslexic, or because they weren’t used to doing this. We only asked people to note who felt comfortable and we left extra time for reading (or listening with speech synths). We paid attention to practices that might exclude people, just like with all our work.
System thinkers (me included!) often got carried away with building ‘one system to rule them all’. One of the things that kills a written culture is trying to write down everything. We kept the many parts of oral culture that worked for us. We tried to be intentional about which bits of our work would benefit from a written culture.
Despite these problems and tradeoffs we loved developing a written culture at Local Welcome. It made us stronger and more resilient.
Yes, in the short term, it’s more natural and human to ask a question than to look in the documentation. Especially when you realise how much effort it takes to create and maintain good documentation.
But, in the long term, many of the problems that plague our workplaces - knowledge loss, pointless rework, dominance of loud talkers, porous work/life boundaries - stem from the problems of our oral cultures.
It might be OK for a software team to follow the Agile Manifesto and prioritise working software over comprehensive documentation.
But service organisations? I think we need a little more written culture to thrive.
Say hello to @myddelton and let me know what you think. I’m looking for my next product role from January 2021 so get in touch if you have any suggestions! Also this post owes a huge debt to Ellis Pratt who interviewed me about moving from an oral to a written culture on the Cherryleaf podcast earlier this year.