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Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!
Hey, everybody, and welcome to Essential Dynamics. My name is Bryn Griffiths. I'm one of your hosts. The other host is Derek Hudson. Hey, Derek.
Bryn:When we get going here, I wanted to bring up a quote that I saw, thanks to you, and that is from Joan Didion. And the quote was, I don't know what I think until I write it down. And I thought to myself, wow. That, that's pretty much me in a nutshell. I just if I don't write things down these days, I just hey.
Bryn:One, I'm lost. Two, I'll forget. But I don't know where how do you wanna dig in on this one today?
Derek:Well, what I'm really interested in is helping leaders of organizations get system flow to design and operate systems to produce the value that the organizations are supposed to produce. And to do that, I think you have to constantly be thinking about the best way of doing things. And I find that many business leaders today for lots of good reasons don't spend a lot of time writing. And so this quote kind of suggests that if you're not spending a lot of time writing, are you spending a lot of time thinking?
Bryn:Yeah.
Derek:And so I just really wanna explore what contribution to the practice of writing can have for a business leader and then the sort of how does that tie into essential dynamics.
Bryn:Let me ask you this because there's so many different types of writing. Are we talking about hanging out, reach over here and I've got sticky notes. Reach over here and I got I got a pad. I also dictate into my I have notes on my computer. Like what type of writing are we talking about here?
Derek:Well, that's a great question. So what I really wanna think about is the kind of writing where you're it it can be point form, it can be full paragraphs, but it's putting thoughts down on paper to try to solve problems and make things better. So it's a little different than a grocery list which you should also write down.
Bryn:I do that.
Derek:I have lists for all of my camping and outdoor activities and I invariably forget stuff because I check it off when I didn't actually put it in my car or I thought it was in the bag that it turns out it wasn't in. You bad boy. So that's a different thing. That's there's but I'm talking about the time you spend trying to piece together what's happening or what needs to happen. And the the premise is that when you write it down, your thinking gets clear.
Derek:And if you have clear thinking, you're probably gonna take make better choices and be more effective in leading your organization.
Bryn:Is it fair to say that writing forces clarity? Forces being the keyword there.
Derek:No. I would say that without writing, it's very difficult to get to clarity but I would say that there is a lot of writing available to us or that comes sort of off our own pens or keyboards. Right. That's not clear. So I took a course in business writing one year after graduating from university when I was in training at Pricewaterhouse.
Derek:And it was a course taught by a business writing instructor. And it was maybe two or three days long and I learned more in that course than I did in university about writing. And the thing that I learned more than anything is that writing is hard work and don't stop until it's good. And so what I've seen in professional writing sort of ever since is there's lazy writing and there's diligent writing. Okay.
Derek:Not like there's people aren't bad writers or good writers. They're either lazy or they're diligent.
Bryn:Okay, can we define that just a little more broadly here so people understand the difference and then we'll carry on? Yeah, so Like what's lazy writing?
Derek:Lazy writing is stream of consciousness, I have a report for my boss or I'm trying to pitch a product or whatever and you just write what comes out of your head.
Bryn:Okay.
Derek:And you have run on sentences and you repeat yourself and you make leaps of logic and you use bad grammar and bad spelling and yeah. Just just ineffective writing. But you wrote it down and you think that one pass and you're good and you hand it in. Okay. And I think that anyone can be a good writer if after they write the first time they read it and say, does this make sense?
Derek:Is there a better way to write this? Has this set out my case? Does the logic flow? And I can tell you after writing literally a 100 consulting reports and reports to boards and stuff like that, When I get to the end and it's where it needs to be, I look at it and I say, that's pretty good. Why didn't I just write that the first time?
Derek:And the answer is that there is no other path. You have to start with bad writing to get to good writing.
Bryn:You know what? It's crazy. And I'm gonna use a little different analogy that maybe some people will figure out. When we pack to go on a trip, I have one rule of thumb here and that is we pack what we wanna take, we unpack it, we take what we think we should take, and then we unpack here at the house, and then we pack what we have to take. And it's amazing to me how much we how much baggage we can leave behind by just going through that process.
Bryn:And then we always find when we're on holidays, we have we are traveling lighter, but we're traveling way more effectively. And that sounds exactly like what you're talking about.
Derek:Well, this this instructor, it brings to mind his quote, which I probably didn't have it in my mind when we when I brought him up. Anyway, his quote was, omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words. Okay. He says, you're writing to express not to impress. And if you've ever tried to write a 750 word essay and you pull in at 510 and now you need 240 more words to get to your seven fifty, like that's that's not what we're talking about here.
Derek:We we use only only the words we need to express the idea that we have. And if you do that, then you could get to clarity. But that's not the kind of writing that we typically see. I teach a university class, love my students. Some of them listen to the podcast, so I'm not criticizing any individual here.
Derek:But sometimes when I get papers, I look at them and think, you know, did you even read this yourself? Did you know that there are all kinds of tools now that can read your writing and tell you where you've messed up Yeah. That aren't that aren't cheating. You could give it to a friend or family member and say, hey. Does this make any sense?
Derek:But we don't wanna do that because it's work. I'm not talking here. I really don't want to talk about writing for Marx. What I want to talk about is writing for understanding. I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
Derek:There's something about putting the words on paper where you go, well, that doesn't make any sense. So by the time it makes sense, now you have a coherent thought.
Bryn:Wow. Yeah. Pretty crazy. I totally agree with you. I know there's a lot of tools.
Bryn:The other thing too is people I don't know how valuable people perceive their time. Right? People are always looking for a shortcut, that kind of thing. I think when it comes to writing, you can never worry about the time. You've got to worry about the writing.
Derek:Don't know
Bryn:how fair that is to say, but that that's how it is for me and you talk about your students. Everybody's got a different system. Right?
Derek:Yeah. But that's a very good point. So we say in Essential Dynamics that the that critical constraint of an organization is the leader's time and attention.
Bryn:Right.
Derek:Because any other constraint, any other problem can get fixed if the leader pays attention to it but the leader only has so much attention if they look at this problem, they can't look at that problem. So that time that a leader has, discretionary time that they can put on one topic or another is the most valuable time in an organization. And if that's the case, then if a leader were to take some of that time and dedicate it to writing, then they get all kinds of benefits. That's probably the point of this podcast. One of them is they have to think.
Derek:So they're actually you know what? You can think you're thinking about stuff and your mind's pulled a bunch of directions. But when you write, you start to see the output of your thoughts. So there's that. You're actually dedicating time.
Derek:Okay. Second thing right off the top is whatever you write down, you can pick up the next time you come in. And so you can make progress. It's like a sort of a ratchet system where if you click past, then you don't fall down further. Can lock down at a point which is where you left off your writing.
Derek:And so even if it's a few days, you can get back, you can pick it up. Probably the third thing is that we've said this before and even in recent podcasts, you can't see the system from inside the system. That's one of the reasons why we suggest people have a guide that's outside the system in a conversation. But writing I think is a form of conversation and it's not a bad substitute. If you can't talk to someone then write.
Derek:And if you write and you're describing the system, in effect you're pulling yourself outside the system. And then another thing, I'm on a roll here, another thing is that when you have it written down, you can share it with other people. Correct. Yeah. And you can say, hey, I wrote this about this situation, does it make sense?
Derek:Do you come to the same conclusions? Did I miss anything? Or if you're really confident, you can say I wrote this down. This is the plan. Read it and then you'll know the plan.
Derek:And then maybe the last thing is if you have it written down, then you can change it. So you can say our business model is based on these three or four logical steps and it's going nowhere and so we need to make a change. If it's written down, you can say, well, cross out that sentence and write that sentence. A few episodes ago we talked about Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel and they had a conversation about where their business was going and they concluded that the Japanese were going to beat them in the memory market and they needed to get into integrated circuits. You can imagine that somewhere there, there was a plan that they were giving the board about their memory business.
Derek:And then there was a new plan that's written down that says this is how we're going to get into integrated circuits. If you actually have those things written down, you can change them. But most businesses don't operate that way. Most businesses operate by intuition. They operate by a response in the moment.
Bryn:Yeah.
Derek:Firefighting, all that stuff is just going on and you're tired. When did the leader think? And what did they think? And what did they learn? That stuff might be a blip in someone's mind as they're driving to the next place, but then it goes away.
Derek:And so that's one of the reasons I'm so interested in talking about writing.
Bryn:I think for me is what what it does for my head. It takes a lot of tension away for me. The the big one too is overnight. I'll wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. I know it sounds crazy, but activity.
Bryn:I've got the notepad off the side of the bed just so I can make a brief little quick note of something that came up to me at like 02:42 in the morning. And then I'm able to pick it up again around seven when I get up. Right? And so but but I don't know if that's a healthy thing or not, it makes me sleep better.
Derek:Well, if you don't write it down, you wake up in the morning and go, oh, I had a really good idea last night.
Bryn:Drives me crazy.
Derek:I have no idea what it was. So I have a hashtag in my notes - #midnightmusings.
Bryn:Really?
Derek:And when I wake up, if I remember, I'll hashtag it that and then I'll put my thought in.
Derek:And I can confidently say that last week, probably Friday night to Saturday morning, I was thinking, what's my topic for the podcast next week?
Bryn:Should've written it down.
Derek:Started to formulate. So like I did actually pull out my phone
Bryn:Nice.
Derek:Wrote it down. I said, you know, writing matters or something and then I went back to sleep. Exactly the same experience.
Bryn:So this podcast and probably a couple others are gonna it's all boiling down to something you thought about in the middle of the night last week. Is that what you're telling me here? Kinda?
Derek:I mean, there's a hashtag. Like I can click on it and I get them all, right? So there's something to early mornings or middle of the night clarity that I like, but you lose it if you don't write it down. So that's just kind of capturing the idea but I'm probably what we need to spend more time on is working the idea in writing.
Bryn:Okay. Got it. The other thing too, I wanted to talk about is trying to take that blurry feeling that you have on most subjects and try to flush it out as much as you can, that type of thing. From what I'm kinda hearing from you that it's it's very important to do that. I I can tell you right thing.
Bryn:The one thing for me, I could write it down, but I gotta read it over and over and over a couple of times to make sure that I'm I'm I'm basically getting to the the point, which is funny because I'm going on and on and on about how I can't get to the point right now with you. But to me, it's just about rereading. Rereading, it's one thing to write it. I gotta reread it a little bit to make sure that I'm kinda going down the road I wanna go down. Is that is that fair?
Derek:Yeah. You got and you got to read it with a critical view. And it's not like, I a good writer or aren't aren't I so smart? It's if you're trying to get to truth, then you can write something down which isn't true. And if you look at it hard enough, you might figure that out.
Derek:It might take the bank or five years in the wrong market or something like that to also reveal it to you, but it's worth a try to look at it and say, oh, that doesn't make any sense. And the number of business plans I've seen where it's and the total addressable market for this product is, you know, dollars 2,500,000,000.0 and if we only get 1% of that, then this is how much revenue we're gonna get and we're gonna be $50,000,000 company in two years and they write all this stuff down. And all you have to do is ask, if this happens, is that the thing thing that's gonna happen next? And will that cause that thing to happen? And we can kind of think those things and say, and then it'll be awesome, but then when you lay it out, you go, there's absolutely no requirement for B to fall away in this case.
Derek:What I've got is a lofty goal and a vague idea that I might get there, but I don't have a plan. I don't have a hypothesis that states here's the sequence of steps that build on each other. Here's how I'm going to know that I can take the next one. And I don't think you can do that unless you write it down. You know, I mean there are people that can kind of hold those things in their head, but for most of us, you gotta write it down and then you gotta ask yourself, will this happen?
Derek:Doctor. Goldratt, who we quote often in Theory of Constraints, later in his professional career had this thing called this viable vision and strategy and tactics trees. I think I'll probably link it in the notes. But he was very vigorous in his strategy and tactics asking, so this is the thing that we want to have happen, what are the the prerequisites? What are the things that have to happen first?
Derek:And he was very specific talking about necessity and sufficiency. So for example, if I want to go on a trip, I wanna take my car somewhere, one of the things that's necessary is gas in my tank. But is having gas in my tank sufficient? Not if I don't have the keys to my car.
Bryn:Or air in your tires.
Derek:Or air in my tires. Right?
Bryn:Oil change Yeah.
Derek:Radiator that works. And so we don't like to think of logic things with that degree of rigor. And I think the only way to really get to that degree of rigor is to write stuff down. And so my hope in this and probably the next episode we talk about is how to help busy people feel like it's valuable, in fact possibly the most valuable time to spend thinking and writing or perhaps it's writing and thinking. We have another quotation that was similar to the first one you gave, which is I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Derek:Yeah. And one that kind of sparked this where I couldn't find a source for was an academic who was asked what he thought about a topic and he said, I don't know, I haven't written about it yet.
Bryn:Yeah.
Derek:And if you think about how we consume news and make our decisions on political things, what if we wrote a position paper on a topic and then searched out candidates that followed that as opposed to thinking through sound bites and just sort of vague impressions. I really encourage this practice and I mean, you don't have to be a CEO of a company to get value out of it, which is for things that are important to you, write down something. Write down a description of what's happening. Write down the list of the things you don't like about it. Write down why you're successful and what all the pieces that have to be in place are.
Derek:I remember one thing I wrote down, which was when I was thinking about leaving the professional accounting firm. I wanted to be the CFO of a really interesting, maybe tech based organization. That was kind of the vision that I had. So I wrote down 10 points that I wanted to find in a position. And probably about six months later, had an opportunity to interview with Alberta Microelectronics Centre, which became MicraLyne.
Derek:And I've talked about that a lot. Somewhere early in that interview process, I got my list out and went check, check, check, check, check, checked all 10. I was fortunate that they offered me a job and I was quick to accept in those thirteen and a half years there, I think. So that checklist was valuable. But one of the things that I find frustrating about some business literature and stuff like that is you have to be able to write down how you're going to get there too.
Derek:And having a wish list of goals is not usually enough. We figure need out the steps we're going to take. We talk about that a lot in Essential Dynamics. As a guide, I have all kinds of conversations with business leaders but I'm finding that I think they would go better if business leaders took more time to write things down and not just like a list of goals but to write down what the actual steps are they think they can take to accomplish the things they know they need to do.
Bryn:I'm really big on proper leadership at the top. Right? And I've worked for a lot of companies and that type of thing. My favorite type of leaders or leadership is it follows along a certain path. One, I love it when leaders know what their goal is and their vision.
Bryn:But you know what I really love is when they share it.
Derek:Mhmm.
Bryn:If they're not sharing it with me, if they don't share it with me, how am I gonna buy in? Right? Mhmm. I also like to work for companies where I can see that they have an end goal or not only just an end goal, but where they wanna be at the end of this year, at the end
Derek:of next
Bryn:year, that charges me up as an employee. And I just don't see it enough from enough CEOs or COO's. I wish they would do a better job of sharing that information, but they haven't written it down. They don't have it anywhere. They have it right up here.
Bryn:And I think to myself, and it's funny we were talking about this on the episode today. I just I I think it's essential that people do that, That if you've got a vision, share it.
Derek:Well, yeah, you have to have enough confidence in your vision to share it and it has to be something that's useful enough to share. And it asked also has to have the interests of the people incorporated into it or they don't care. So if the CEO's goal is, well, I'm gonna run this for two more years, flip it and then take all the money and go sit on the beach for the rest of my life, That's not the kind of vision that you are is gonna get your employees up in the morning.
Bryn:That's a personal vision. Yeah. Right?
Derek:Yeah. So our you know, we talk a lot about having a purpose X and a purpose Y. That should be encompassing enough so that you can get everyone behind it. And even the logic of that is something that you're not going to get to unless you start writing stuff down. So if I've made my point for this episode, it's, there is a tremendous amount of value in the practice of sort of clearing your desk blank piece of paper out and then writing down the things that are most important, the things that are most troubling, the things that you wanna accomplish more than anything else, checking the logic and then sharing that with others.
Derek:If you write it down, you've got all that available. If not, you're a cork in the stream and you're bouncing along and you're busy but you're not building a system, you can't see the system, you certainly can't communicate the system. Now I will say that writing down things is hard. It was hard in school, it's hard when it's not required. So we should take some time on another episode to give some tips on how to do that.
Derek:Okay. But for this episode, I would just like to emphasize that there is so much power in taking the time to write things down to find out what you think.
Bryn:Gonna write that down, goal. Another episode. Okay, got it. Okay. Have it.
Bryn:I love it. Thank you.
Derek:So thanks to you, Brent, for coming on and being the host. It's great to have someone to talk to about these things. And
Bryn:what's your operation called now? Mine? Yeah. Mighty Mouth Communications.
Derek:Mighty Mouth Communications is the technical lead on this. I'm Derek Hudson. I'm from unconstrained until next time. Consider your quest.