Writing to Think Slow

Reasons why I write to learn and communicate at scale

Thinking Slow

Early in my career, I intently focused on executing and delivering customer and stakeholder value in every aspect. Often, conversations about "focus on the bigger picture" or "play the long game" came and went with broad vision and strategy statements lacking depth, data, and clarity. Enter Professor Kahneman's iconic 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. The book framed reflexive thinking versus deep grokking. Prof Kahneman's concept imprinted an indelible mark that the human brain's ability to trade off speedy decisions is optimistically biased. Critically, to counterbalance precision with Thinking Slow is tied to logical, measured decision-making. Human behavior requires deeply grokking on decisions over multi-dimensional or significant problems. Yet, something was still missing, just "thinking slow" wasn’t enough.

Writing Forces Thinking

Writing was the answer for me. I've written numerous memos, business cases, and technical documents throughout my professional career. When I joined Meta (Facebook), I witnessed the power of the pen at scale. The entire organization embraces broadcast written communications covering engineering, products, programs, and everything in between. The scale of reach for internal posts is 1 in 8 employees daily. The act of writing forces slow thinking. The benefits of slow thinking brought fidelity to long-term plans with actionable roadmaps. Workplace (Social for Work) facilitated public commenting that refines content. Meaningful follow-up updates are frequently posted, which serve to hold accountability, highlight improvements, and facilitate strategic changes, to name a few. For an organization, writing publicly (or on the company intranet) brings sunshine to disinfect communications decay.

The notion of committing to improvements, projects, or roadmaps in writing creates durable records for reference, providing a solid foundation for future team members to learn about decision making. The best career advice I got to cold start a career is to learn reasons why decisions were made through past writings when I join a team or an organization. These persistent written records not only foster learning but also ensure accountability, instilling confidence in our decision-making processes.

Communicate at Scale

Members of organizations of all sizes will push back on writing, decrying it as a dampener to velocity. However, writing is not just about cementing decisions or strategic directional changes. It's about scaling deep thought and durably communicating the 'why '. Writing at scale and for depth is not unique to Meta, Amazon's culture famously mandates memos that act as a forcing function to ensure details are lost between bullet points or glossy slides. Amazon's PRFAQ highlights the process of 'working backward' by setting the North Star for the project team. Andy Jassy's 2023 shareholder's letter covering primitive services such as functional foundational AWS componentry (S3 or SimpleDB) where assembly creates valued enterprise and consumer products (Hulu, or Netflix). Having a builder culture is not enough, and solving real customer problems is the undisputed focus; writing helps leaders scale deep thought and durably communicate the 'why.' Though writing takes time, and it's hard, it is a worthwhile routine to create persistent documents.

Aside from Andy Jassy's shareholder letter, other notable writers that I glean valuable insights from are:

• Paul Graham's essays https://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

• Stephen Sinofsky: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

• Jamie Dimon's annual shareholder's letter

• Jeff Bezos's early annual shareholder's letters

• Deb Liu: https://debliu.substack.com

Published is better than Perfection

Writing is not only a form of expression; rather, it is forced thinking to coherently and succinctly state learnings on a blank sheet of paper. These posts, memos, notes, documents, and letters are never "done" or "perfected" for my context. These writings will constitute constant learning in progress for me. Through this medium, I will write posts applicable to my learnings in enterprise and consumer AI developments and other things that are salient and top of mind. The writings are mine and don't reflect views of my organizational affiliation; they are merely a learning tool for me to grok publicly.