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A Critique of Smart Brevity® In Corporate Communications

The truncated business writing style Smart Brevity® aims to solve problems that plague communications: incoherency, inconsistency, and verbosity.

The goal of Smart Brevity® is simple: tell people what they need to know and why they should care with the option to read further.

In principal, this is great advice. Writers should be more thoughtful of their readers. They shouldn’t burden them with unnecessary details or force them to grok the purpose of a message.

Recognizing the modern need to structure messages for mobile consumption unencumbered by physical limitations of the printed page, this style of truncated communication helps tighten biz speak in digital sales materials, technical guides, emails, announcements, and status reports.

As an offender who writes dense emails and Slack posts, I welcome the KISS reminder from my technical colleagues!

Likewise, I’m skeptical about mandating the Smart Brevity® model across an organization without caveats.

  • It risks oversimplification and missing important details.
  • It sanitizes communications to something more technical and transactional. Sometimes writers need to communicate fresh ideas and educational material without assuming foundation knowledge like teaching a new concept, relaying historical context, and articulating a strategy with a detailed plan.
  • It places an imbalanced burden upon the transmitter to get the message right for an audience they may not know. How can they presume to know the receiver’s acumen and what they need?
  • It can come across as abrupt or blunt. Radical candor is not an excuse to be an asshole.
  • It fosters siloed communications. Creative people may not speak up out of fear of being tone-policed or accused of violating a nebulous signal-to-noise ratio. They’ll overthink their message without the cultural grace to speak openly if imperfectly.
  • It dumbs down communications for executives. Blaming workplace failure on ineffective communication (a stated justification for implementing the model) reveals a manager’s inability to think strategically before acting decisively. If you’re too busy to get to the heart of a matter, especially if your people cannot even see the problem or they struggle to articulate it, you cannot expect your organization to reach peak performance. Even worse, blame-shifting can have catastrophic results. It’s your job to unearth root causes and properly support the necessary fix.
  • It’s not universally applicable, and therefore it’s confusing when expressed as a blanket mandate.
Artistic rendering of Kevin Malone from The Office humorously mocks the problems of truncated messaging models like Smart Brevity® when he says why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.
The Office brilliantly mocked clipped speech.
Reprinted with permission by the artist Miranda Lawrence.
Buy this print

Axios, the AI company behind Smart Brevity®, claims the model is built by journalists “to prioritize essential news, explain its impact on readers, and deliver both in a concise and visual format.”

I see the parallel between this style and journalism’s generational trend toward clickbait headlines amid social platform word limits. While these formats may currently be the most popular means of news dissemination targeting shorter attention spans, they don’t address the classic liberal notion of sense-making and idea exploration that long-form media delivers.

The pursuit of brevity isn’t the right level of analysis for strategic thinking and compelling storytelling. Creative writing orchestrates words and sentences toward persuasion. How often is the mind moved by the heart? What of the poetic license among great leaders to rally their team to a cause?

Universally applied, the model over-indexes on short-form writing. Even the Smart Brevity® explainer mirrors the cringe tech-bro style mocked on the r/LinkedInLunatics subreddit often characterized by single sentence paragraphs written in a simple shallow style. These posts lack nuance, counterpoint, and analysis to burn strawmen. They drift into the realm of “glurge” when their stories seem fabricated or overly sentimental. They rely on single bullets and distracting emojis 🔥🔥🔥.

For companies mandating Smart Brevity ® – especially distributed teams where tone can be missed in async communications – I advise augmenting this model with a few other tools to avoid the Law of Instrument cognitive bias.

  • You have more than a hammer. Not every problem is a nail.
  • Focus on substance over style.
  • You’re asking people to be a writer and an editor. Barring investment in AI like Axios to serve as the virtual editor, recognize editing for brevity is one of the hardest aspects of writing. Cut your people some slack, especially if they’re contributing to a healthy culture of ownership and craftsmanship.
  • Be sure you have an alternate means for deeper freeform reflection and creative expression, e.g. internal blogs, meetups, and structured sync calls above the weekly cadence. Give people space to think out loud, especially on speculative endeavors.
  • Be intentional about how you store various types of communication so recipients can control their personal capacity for information flow. For example… Slack is for daily ops and quick syncs (preferably in channels, not DMs). Notion / Figma / Miro / Mural are for idea capture and markup collaboration. Gdrive is for storing artifacts. Internal blogs are for deeper personal and/or team reflections with nested comments. External blogs are for market listening and thought leadership. Email is for external communications only (ideally).
  • Where structure is necessary, e.g. CRM, PRM, ERP posts, provide a template that captures what managements wants to see, and measures what is important. Include a field for freeform narratives in the writer’s voice.
  • Establish asynchronous communication as a core organizational value. Give people the time they need to consume and respond to messages in their own time without expectation if it’s not urgent.
  • Develop your own messaging framework centered around your vision for the market, your mission, and your core values that everyone can orient themselves and reference.
  • Embrace diverse personalities and include everyone. Great leaders help people find their voice and speak their mind as matter of individual dignity and for the common good.

For anyone concerned with clarity and cohesion in their writing, I recommend the classic handbook Elements of Style. Professor Strunk & author E.B. White encouraged brevity, active voice, and proper grammar more than 100 years ago.

UPDATE: I came across a delightful New Yorker article, The Dubious Wisdom of Smart Brevity. To wit, the product developer and marketer in me recognizes the model as a slick opinionated vehicle for Axios promotion (and why I made liberal use of ®).

Feature image is from Thomas Griggs on Unsplash

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Business Culture Leadership

How to Speak Up With Courage: See Something? Say Something!

As an executive producer in digital media, I’m drawn tragic and preventable story of the film, Rust. What happened?

I remember how Brandon Lee died after being shot by a prop gun, and the directorial hubris that contributed to the Twilight Zone helicopter crash. We become so engrossed in cinematic story telling, in part, because the of its realism, which can be dangerous to capture.

One of the remarkable outcomes from the Challenger tragedy is that low-level engineers foresaw the risk of o-ring failure, but project leadership failed to recognize the level of risk, and downgraded the priority of remediation. Same with low ranking agents deep in the bowels of intelligence agencies with early concerns of flight school infiltration that failed to rise to meaningful action that might have prevented terrorist attacks on 9/11. History is replete with preventative disaster, or at least mitigated loss, from the Titanic to Halifax, Pearl Harbor to Hurricane Katrina. There were always warning signs.

And so it goes with Rust.

I can’t imagine Halyna Hutchins’s husband who is undoubtedly reeling in early stages of grief marked by disbelief after the accidental shooting of his wife by Alec Baldwin. Apparently they spoke by phone, shortly after the shooting, where he said the actor expressed confusion and a remorseful conciliatory tone.

I’m reticent to cast blame on the inexperienced armorer Hannah Guiterrez Reed who admitted her inexperience on set, though she had been deep knowledge of firearms, and had been on many sets with the legendary armor Thell Reed, her father. On the set of Rust, she split her attention between being armor and prop master, a resourcing issue overseen by the film’s producer, who also happened to be the shooter. And remarkably, earlier in the day, members of the film crew quit in protest of unsafe working conditions.

How can this be? How do we mitigate risk on mission critical work?

Fundamentally, I think the answer is summoning the courage to speak truth, no matter how difficult. Or at least not lie, by commission or omission.

I’m practicing this lesson myself. I have a personal tendency to not speak up when I intuit my words won’t matter. I’ve long dismissed this dreadful practice as being staunchly Gen X, embracing the angst of my low population sandwiched between Boomers and Millenials. We’re old enough to know The Greatest Generation, and lived through the real threat of nuclear annihilation. Our culture, music, films and literature express underlying frustration with the insufferable state of being. Gen X wanted change, not tearing institutions down.

Our solution? Shut up, it doesn’t matter, carry your cross and continue. Raging against the machine

I’ve come to learn we’re wrong. Or at least not quite right. Our eff-it attitude is rooted in helplessness and fear. Fear turns to anger, then resentment, contempt and ultimately nihilism. We care too much to let the world fall into cynicism and despair.

Fortunately, we’re smart enough to not dismiss sage advice, but I fret our timeline is too small. It’s a folly for a modern man to ignore his ancestors, to assume we know better than those who dreamed big with less energy and technology, who laid the foundation for everything we know and have today.

Raging against the proverbial machine hasn’t been sufficient. We have to articulate problems as we see them. We have to listen carefully, in humility, and hone our disposition toward justice and mercy, to develop the intelligence and courage necessary to avoid pitfalls.

And so it went with the production of Rust. Emphasis is mine:

This tragedy is not just down to cost-cutting measures or crew fatigue. Wolf says movie sets can be so intimidating, staffed with young crew members who are star-struck or cowed by a demanding director or just thrilled to be working in the industry, that most would never speak up. 

From the NY Post. Steve Wolf is a firearms and special effects expert in Hollywood.

In Pursuit of Truth, Beauty and Good

The ancient Hebrew texts of Sirach offers timeless counsel on the practicality of speaking truth coupled with wise silence.

One is silent and is thought wise; another, for being talkative, is disliked. One is silent, having nothing to say; another is silent, biding his time. The wise remain silent till the right time comes, but a boasting fool misses the proper time.

Sirach 20:5-7

The knowledge of the wise wells up like a flood, and their counsel like a living spring. A fool’s mind is like a broken jar: it cannot hold any knowledge at all. The mind of fools is in their mouths, but the mouth of the wise is in their mind.

Sirach 21:13-14,26

Written 2200 years ago, this sage advise doesn’t mean wise people need to be silent. On the contrary, they need to speak up, and properly discern the right time to do so.

Sirach captures the idea of capital-T Truth as a universal spirit, originating in ideas and intuition, and animated in our communication. We participate in the advancement of Truth by speaking it, even roughly, to bring reality to life.

My favorite leaders in business are those who have the courage to listen, to encourage dialogue, and to share bold opinions. Personally, I flourish in these environments because I believe an idea can come from anywhere. Truth has a way of revealing itself in the collective good of earnest people pursuing a noble goal.

I’ve watched organizations and micro-cultures lose the core value of dialogue. In these environments, I’ve grieved the loss of my own voice and others like me who drown in a sea of prideful certainty.

You can spot loud cowards when they thwart inspiration. They’ll uprooting the very source of potential, with skepticism and snark. They offer bad advice unsolicited, and lead with criticism. If an idea is incomplete, they’ll not iterate. They withhold encouragement, let alone a better way. They lack imagination. They see the world in terms of scarcity instead of abundance. They see people motivated by power, not purpose. They murder ideas with little daggers like sales forecasts and weak budgets, senseless deadlines and quarterly results.

To wit, beauty is crafted in order. We don’t build great cathedrals and engineering marvels without systems. Knives are wielded by madmen and master chefs, to cut and to kill.

We bring about Beauty in Truth for the common Good.

Feature image is The Pórtico de la Gloria, en la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela created in 1075. Since the 9th century, countless pilgrims have walked the “camino” Way of St. James the Great to visit the shrine and burial site of the apostle. Santiago de Compostela is the capital city of Galicia in northwestern Spain. The Old Town district is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Photo by Axencia Turismo de Galicia.

Categories
Business Leadership

Takeaways from Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Everyone is on a quest for their own sense of meaning. Maintaining a proper sense of perspective is essential.

I received a timely gift from my friend and colleague.

Adam Griffin sent several folks in WordPress VIP a copy Greg Mckeown’s book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. I listened to the Audible version at 1.5x speed over the weekend and felt a sense of micro renewal.

Adam describes the book as something he returns often. Given the current global reality, he thought it would be helpful to focus on “small hinges that swing big doors.” (Love that!)

Key Takeaways…

There is a path to our highest contribution. Mckeowen asks, at the end of your life, will you say, “I wish I’d been less true to myself and done all the nonessential things others expected of me?”

Our highest contribution matters most. On any given day, we have things we could do and should do. The could is the easy stuff, the should is the hard stuff. If we’re not prioritizing the should stuff, it means we’re borrowing from our future success.

I can do anything, but not everything. This means the things we choose to do need to have our full attention, especially when stress runs high. This is a great reminder, especially for people that wear lots of hats (like me).

If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. We all have people vying for our attention, which is limited bandwidth. Prioritizing our time is a gift we can give to ourselves and to others. Don’t rush to make other peoples problems your own.

Trigger phrases need disruptive thinking. Taking a note from Stephen Covey’s famous maxims, Notice and change phrases…
“I must!” –> “I choose.”
“It’s important!” –> “Only a few things matter.”
“I can do both.” –> “I can do anything, but not everything”

Trade-offs are an inherent part of life! Saying yes to something means saying no to something else. Instead of thinking about what you’re sacrificing, think about where you can go big.

I especially appreciated McKeown’s long view on metanoia, or change through inner conversion. Our work in digital media blends form and function, art and tech, the mystical and lucid. Mckeowen encourages the modern thinker to read the classics in philosophy and literature. He swims in the deep end of the pool with theological concepts of chronos and kairos, a refreshing surprise within a business text.