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Comment by fogetti | Hacker News Reader

The author is proposing writing as a tool for self-improvement and to find clarity.

Sure enough, that will help to find clarity for sure. Just don't expect that it will help to find clarity for anyone else beside the author.

In a fast moving team setting, what most people hate the most is reading. If the context is not clearly set why reading something is utterly important, most people won't even bother to open the page, document, note or whatever.

The mental load is immense these days, and reading adds an enormous plus to that in a very negative way, so most people tries to escape this cognitive load.

Of course, you can use your authority to force people to read, but people will simply hate the experience even more.

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This is true for most organizations. Note though that the practice the author describes at Amazon is that everyone gets the document to read at the beginning of the meeting. The structure of the meeting means that (1) someone is forced to produce the narrative ahead of time and (2) everyone has to read it alone together.

That's an odd setup, but it's probably what makes this system work -- an organizational admission that this meeting setup is actually better than walking people through slides. One advantage the author doesn't mention is that this "alone together" mode gives each participant more time to think before having to fit their thoughts into a group discussion, which likely promotes divergent thinking and gives people room to ask important, difficult questions.

I believe your frame of reference is a small environment.

If all the stakeholders fit in the "2 pizza" team, regularly talk/meet, and regularly review progress/ideas/etc. then sure, writing is irrelevant.

Frankly, for me, reading is a far LOWER mental load than listening to someone talk.

Talking is linear, and often stream of consciousness. I can't jump forwards to see if they are drawing the conclusion they seem to be aiming at, and if so, scan the rest for any variations.

I can't jump back, without disrupting others, when they have made a cognitive leap that I didn't follow, to re-read to see if I missed anything.

Often people aren't able to quickly order their thoughts, speak to these points, and stay on point/relevant in the face of q&a when it's a deep technical topic. I'd much rather read their perspective.

That "fast moving" more often than not describes only the velocity, but not the displacement. What's good in moving rapidly in random directions and not going anywhere? Maybe spending some time on quality writing and reading would pay off ten-fold.

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