Understanding Writing: What The Written Word Really Means Now In The New Digital Age With Rob Ashton

I guess that writing or the misunderstanding of the writing and reading process is something that I've become obsessed with. I think that bio doesn't really capture that in the sense that, yes, I've spent a long time doing it, but the longer I've done it, the more this has become an obsession. It's one of those things where I just see this problem everywhere now, and it's quite hard to let it go because once you see that, you can't unsee it. So yeah, I would say that.

Terrific. You used the word problem, so I'd love to just dive right into that spot. Let's define what the problem that you're referring to is.

Writing is one of those things, or reading is one of those processes that is just invisible. We don't realize we're doing it. The whole world seems to run on written communication now. And in fact, I was in a discussion with Adam Grant last week about this, and because he said that it's the most undervalued skill of our time, he said the most undervalued skill of our time is the ability to write. And I was asking him, why do you say that? And he said, well, we're doing it all the time. That it used to be that the spoken word was paramount, and now it's all about text-based communication. And he's absolutely right. This is something I've been saying for a while now, that we communicate with text. That could be email, that could be messaging apps like Slack or Teams chat. We do that all the time. from when we wake up in the morning to when we go to bed at night. So it's ever-present. In fact, if my phone rings, I assume something's wrong. There's something about writing or reading that's seductive. It draws us in and we just stay there. So we might have a— be there for half an hour trying to resolve a difficult issue or even an argument by text message. If we took that thing that we are using to text the phone and we just kind of took it from there, moved it up to our ear, then the problem would probably be solved in a couple of minutes if we used voices, but we don't see it that way. We don't think of it as writing. If I say I'm a specialist, I research writing and its impact on our lives, people kind of look at me in a puzzled way and think, what do you mean writing? Do you mean creative writing? Do you mean how to write a novel? Do you mean handwriting? I say, no, I mean that thing we're doing all day. And so it's just invisible. And the reason it becomes a problem is it's not something that we evolved to do. So we did not evolve to read and write. We evolved to speak and listen. The earliest examples of writing are about, as far as we know, are from about 5,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Iraq. But for most of the time, even since then, it's only a couple of hundred years ago that most people had access to the written word. And even 5,000 years might sound like a very long time, but in evolutionary terms, it's just a heartbeat. Now, it takes much longer than that for the brain to evolve major change. And so what happens when we learn to read is we have to wire together parts of the brain that we evolved for other things. This is actually what happens. Yeah, we grow a network in the brain and that takes a long time. In fact, to learn to read, it takes really around 10 years to learn to read properly, whereas we can communicate with our voices out of the womb, though you can't ignore a baby's cry. And we will learn to speak and we will learn spoken language to understand it. We'll learn that passively with no tuition, just by people talking to us. But it always, writing always remains suboptimal. It's always something that can go wrong very, very easily, partly because we didn't evolve to do it and partly because we expect it to do way too much heavy lifting.

That's fascinating. And not even playing the angel's advocate here, but just curious that the movement toward text communication, and I see this very close to me in my own work and in my, just with our families, you and I, right before we hit record, we were talking about our kids and you have 2 and we have 4 and our youngest is 22 and our oldest is 30. And the 22 and the 30 were in a conversation the other day. We happened to be away. We were in Hawaii and And our 22 was in California and they were having a fight. All right. I only knew they were having an argument, let's say, because they were having a text argument. We happened to be with our oldest daughter and her husband and their newborn baby and all that, our grandbaby. And she says, I'm in a fight with our little girl by text. And it's just what you said, Rob. I was like, you could just pick up the phone and resolve it, or I guess escalate it. I mean, there's a chance that it could also just go the other direction, but So I saw what you just said live and in person. I'm just curious if we weren't evolved, or the writing aspect of our communication certainly would be secondary to our verbal communication. Is the shortening of it, meaning to go from longhand and the writing of letters that was commonplace in the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, people wrote each other letters, then they wrote postcards. Now it's gotten shortened to the point, and then they wrote emails, and now they're just communicating in shorter text form. Is that a movement somehow back to what is primal to us that we don't use writing as our main form of communication? You are the researcher.

Well, I think it's part of the problem. I think getting shorter and shorter is part of the problem because we're getting faster and faster at this writing. Those examples you gave, we didn't do very much of that. It's kind of, if you got a letter, it was a big thing.

Yeah.

You might wait days for someone to write to you and you loved it.

There was so much anticipation, right?

It was amazing. Yeah. And you'd read it again, but it's uneven memos. The email evolved from memos, but last year we sent and received around 319 billion emails every day. Every day. And that daily figure each year is going up by another 15 to 20 billion emails every day. So we're becoming more reliant on this. But it is, we do it quickly. So if you were writing by hand, if you were writing one of those letters, it'll be a slow, deliberate process. You would think about what you were writing.

It was agonizing at times.

It wasn't, but it still can be agonizing, of course. You know, it's—

I mean, in a great way, when you were done, it was like you gave birth to something at the moment, your emotional state, what was in your brain, just what it is that you needed to communicate, wanted to communicate. And when it was done, it was like, wow. I can fold it and put it in an envelope and stick a stamp, lick a stamp, stick it in the mailbox. And there was so much patience that was involved, right? On all sides to that.

Yeah. And it's like writing is cheap now. Writing is—

writing has gotten cheapened.

Yeah. And it's something we do without thinking. And I think this is part of the problem because if we're writing, whether we're tapping on the keyboard on our phone, or whether we're writing on our laptop or our desktop, we're using a tool that's become an extension of our brains. We do develop networks when we use tools repeatedly. And so what happens is, let's think of the laptop, you know, that's become an extension of your brain and you are looking at a screen and you are seeing this reflection of your thoughts on that screen. And incidentally, in that situation, you are solitary. It's just you. The trouble is you are also in a social situation in the sense that you are communicating with another person, except it's just you. You are on your own communicating with another person. It's a complete paradox. And so you are using the thought processes that you would use on your own. You're thinking to yourself. You are also using the kind of backing track, if you like. You know all the thinking that goes behind what you are writing, Not just tone, that's very important, or humor. You might be being humorous, so you can hear that. But the other person, they are also on their own. This thing lands in their in-tray and they open it, and in isolation, they see this quite bald, unadorned message, which doesn't have the backing track, doesn't have the context. It's writing, which is what psychologists call a low-capacity channel. There's not much information you can get across. Or at least far less than you can with your voice. And not only can they not hear your backing track, they're listening to their backing track and they've got their thought process. 'Cause now they could be receiving that message anywhere. They could be upset about something. They could be late dropping the kids off to school. They could be stuck in a traffic jam and open their email in a misguided attempt to get some relief from that. And they could be angry, wound up, and they see your message and that's the context it lands in. So there's so much going on that we take for granted. Really, it's not so much a surprise that it goes wrong so often, it's a miracle that it ever goes right, really.

Yeah. So in your work, you are known for a number of things, but this intersection of words in the mind, I'm really curious. Say a little bit more if you could about that.

Sure. Well, set up this training consultancy back in 1998, and back then most people didn't even have websites. In fact, back then people were saying, why are you setting up a training consultancy focusing on writing? Because no one's writing anymore. Well, that didn't quite work, did it? And I've seen writing become dominant in the working world, but also at home as you described that situation. And about 6 years ago, because I've got a science background, going way back, I used to work as a molecular biologist and that curiosity of the science has never really gone away. And I was in the fortunate position in that I could take a step back from the business and focus on looking into this and thinking, okay, let's see if there's any research on this. And I gave myself 6 months. I thought, okay, I'll look into it. I'll read up on the science. I'll write a book. And it was a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I did not know what I didn't know.

Yeah.

And here I am 6 years later, really only getting to grips with it because There is lots of research out there, but it's across disciplines. It's in neuroscience and the various branches of that. It's in the various branches of psychology and even in developmental neuroscience and developmental psychology, how we learn to read. So it's taken a long time, but I guess that the privileged position I'm in is that I've spent all this time in the world of work outside, work beyond academia. And I see organizations getting this wrong again and again. And so what I'm trying to do is link the two together and the intersection of words in the mind. I mean, that's really the key to it because it's all about how the written word, text-based communication affects us for better or worse, how we misunderstand it, how we process it normally in as far as we know, because this is still Very much a developing field. And if anybody tells you they know all the neuroscience behind this, they're lying. It's so complex. But some of it is really fascinating.

I don't know if it's even possible, but to hit the nail on the head, I mean, again, with a, what feels like a very complex set of things that interplay and I would imagine visually a diagram, a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap between disciplines, as you said. Is text a good thing or not such a good thing? What does the research tell us today about whether we're— the text and our use of it currently and the way we're using it, is it heading us in the right direction evolutionarily? It's all right. It's always all right. I think that's my belief system anyway. But does it feel like we're going in the right direction now or going backwards in some way?

Not to cop out, but it is so difficult to answer that because I kind of think of the science as neutral. It's like you can apply it in a bad way or a good way. Like most science, we can't go back. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. And in fact, nor should we want to because we have grown so much because of this amazing ability to communicate at speed with anyone in the world using our keyboards. And organizations are able to grow at warp speed because of that. Go back to 2020 when suddenly we were all working from home, or most of us, a lot of us were working from home. Zoom grabbed the headlines, but really it was things like Slack and email and Teams chat that, that's where most of the communication was. We spent less time overall in meetings than when we were working in offices, even though we had more meetings. But what were we doing in between? We were writing to each other and that kind of dramatic digital transformation would not have been possible without communicating through the written word. And then look at how much Literature has enriched our lives and the advancement of science is done through publication. This is all written communication, and I don't think it is a bad thing. I think it's a fantastic opportunity. Where it does go wrong is when we overestimate how much communication or how easy it is to communicate in writing well. And I think probably the biggest mistake we make is to think of it as just a case of data transfer from one brain to another. And if you just give someone the data, you just give them the information, then everything will be fine. It's a more complex process than that. So you can't just simply give someone the information. You can't just, for instance, give them a series of bullets. That was a piece went viral a few years ago, which recommended exactly that. It was about writing like the military was the title because it was talking about bottom line up front, which you'll bluff, which is very popular in the military and here in the UK. And it was saying, use bullets, keep it brief. And the trouble is, although brevity can be a really good thing, it's very, very easy to miscommunicate when you do that. Again, because of this lack of context, it becomes a little bit like trying to study for an exam using somebody else's study notes, somebody else's lecture notes. They've got all the context. It triggers things in their brain and doesn't in yours. Yeah, it's, that's

a, I guess, I guess really what I'm wanting to get at, I mean, I was Being a little cheeky, I suppose, with the good bad thing, but I'm a trend follower. We do quite a bit of resilience research in the world right on that topic. And I'm a resilience keynote speaker on that and lead workshops and work same as you with organizations on how to develop things internally that produce longevity, produce productivity in the long run. So I'm, we're following trends, we're looking at trajectories. When kids are in the house and they're texting each other from room to room, I mean, in our house we'd scream. That was, that was the mode of communication. And I'm not saying kids are not screaming at each other, siblings and parents, et cetera. But at the extreme level, people texting one another at the dinner table, there's just a lot of hyperbole around that. But we see it, we see people out there. I mean, how many times have you been in a restaurant where 2 people sitting at the table have their phones out at the dinner table in a restaurant?

That's so common.

Now let's say it's a high-end restaurant and now we're not talking about millennials because they're always getting the short end of the stick for a lot of these things. No, I'm talking about baby boomer age people that are at the table with their phones out. That's why I'm just saying from a trend standpoint, a trajectory standpoint, that we're reducing our communications to these pithy little LOLs and other acronyms, which there are too many to keep up with. LMAO. It's like, well, from a research standpoint, can we say anything about what that trajectory looks like or is it too impossible to sort of predict? Those kind of things.

Yeah, I think it's, we can say what the effects of doing this has on the individual. We've got some stuff on that, but in terms of where it's going, then really that's just conjecture. But personally, I don't think it's a good thing. Those situations you describe, I think unequivocally not a great thing, not taking us in the right direction. We need to start speaking to each other more. Definitely. I've seen this in my own life because we are all, none of us is immune to this. It's, I am as prone to getting irritated and inappropriately by written messages as anybody else and getting triggered by tweets or whatever. When we are writing, we're— it's a limit to how much you can get across through doing that. But there's some research that shows that— so when you're speaking, there's some research that shows that oxytocin release is triggered. Okay? So you hear a human voice, you're speaking to somebody, it's oxytocin release. And this is this thing that's been called the love hormone, but it's more complicated than that. But it's something that's central to human interaction.

How we're wired, like our physiology.

It's how we're wired. And it's when we're speaking, you've got all sorts of things on your side because we've got millions of years of evolution behind us on that. But there's evidence that when we're reading something from the same person, okay, so the same person has written something and we're reading it, the oxytocin release isn't triggered. And so we don't get that. And I've seen this in my own life where I was in a Slack conversation with member of my team a few years ago, and I asked him for an update on a project and I said, how's it going? And he just replied with one word. He said, why? It's kind of, you know, that's such a loaded thing. He's a bright guy, but I knew that sometimes discussions could go a little bit wrong.

Oh, come on, Rob. You can say it. You lost it. No, I didn't.

Neither of us.

You didn't.

No, no. Because what I did is I started treading on eggshells. And in fact, I think even my first question to him was so caveated and nuanced, I was on the back foot already. And anyway, long story short, I replied, he replied, and then to his enormous credit, he just said, should we have a chat about this? And I said, yeah, sure. And it was just like calling time out. And he came into my office and we started speaking. And as soon as we started speaking, I've— my shoulders dropped, his shoulders dropped. I could feel this kind of feeling wash over me, probably fanciful to say that was oxytocin, but it was definitely this kind of feeling of, whoa, that's so much better. I'm not kidding. I mean, immediately the whole tension had gone and we were starting to sort it out. And I think part of it is not just oxytocin, it's that you can react in real time. You can see that person's reaction. You can see if they don't get it or you can see their hesitation. Even with the human voice, even just a pause of a few seconds is, that's a very, very long pause.

It is.

Especially if it's response to a question like, you know, I love you, or, you know, or why do you love me? You know, it's kind of like, you know, kind of like just a few seconds hesitation there is kind of, we're going to know. All

right. Right. Do you love me? And then the pause is a little too long. It's like, oh no, what does that mean?

Yeah. Just to my hand, like, look, look at this. You know, it's kind of like, oh, just a pause.

It's like, did you get my text? I was in a bad— I was going through the tube, you know, and there was no service for a few minutes. But—

So we make a big mistake when we just, we rely on that too much and we don't try and sort things out using our voices and we just stay stuck in it. But I think there is really something unique about writing that draws us in. You can't not read something, even though reading is a complex process. You see a word, you'll read it. That's why it's a big mistake, for instance, to have lots of text on a screen on a PowerPoint deck if you're making a presentation.

Oh, no kidding. Right.

Someone's going to read that. And I'm not even talking about filling the slide with text, which a lot of people do, but even just having a few bullet points. If you're speaking, well, they're not listening to you. They're reading because it's an involved process. They have to focus on that. And it's very difficult to walk and read. I don't know if you've ever done this, Adam, where you're kind of, you're reading a text. And you're walking along and then you find yourself stopping and reading it. So it's even walking and reading is difficult.

Yeah. Usually when you're about to run into, walk into some other person. Yeah.

Yeah. Probably doing the same thing.

Doing the same exact thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's so fascinating too because we can see the value. We all can see the value in being able to be more efficient. I mean, business and personal-wise, there's a lot going on. There's a lot in our lives. The universe is constantly expanding. So that's normal. That just makes sense that people's lives were simpler, maybe more boring, whatever you would want to say 50 years ago. So it's exciting. There's a lot going on. We've got to be able to walk, as you walk and chew gum now, walk and read, walk and multitask, et cetera, on some level. And yet I think the problems are also showing. What's evident is that there's just heightened anxiety, and obviously it's been attributed to the pandemic. It's been attributed to exhaustion in the workplace, which is something that we study in the context of resilience. But the anxiety levels across the globe are so high, almost sort of, they're off charts that they have to create new charts to measure how people are doing in that area. And it would seem to me that when our communication is so, is abbreviated in the way that it is, that like you said, we're not getting filled up sort of our energetic tanks are constantly in a state of depletion. And normally when we're in a conversation, as you say, if oxytocin's being produced or something else has the equivalent of sort of filling us back up, we're being reenergized by that interaction. Well, then we always have a little gas in the tank. But when it's just, you're not getting something back through a text message or through technology, then that depletion just becomes more, I would say it compounds anxiety levels. We cannot ignore the fact that so many people are showing signs of breakdown, of burnout. You must see it in your work all the time.

Absolutely. And I think it's difficult to overstate the importance of that. We're relying on the written word now. We're reading from when we wake up in the morning to when we go to bed at night, whether it's the news or whether it's texts, or social media or our email. We're just reading a lot. If you are talking about building resilience, then look no further as a place to start because the effect on that, on the human psyche is enormous. It's, for a start, you've got the news media who depend on concentrating bad news. That's their business model, always has been. And so, whereas at the beginning when early newspapers, you'd get a newspaper and you would read it and that would be it. Maybe just a sheet. But now we've got this constitutive flow of news 24/7, 7 days a week, wherever you happen to be, you can look at the news. You know, it's not just texting that people do in restaurants. They're looking at the news and they're looking for something a little bit more interesting. And let's sort of think about that. You've got one person in front of you and you could have a conversation with them, or you've got access to all the world's information. Which is going to be more interesting? You know, it's not much of a fair— it's not really a fair contest, is it? You know, and so we end up devaluing the human relationships that we have, but it also has other negative effects. So you're going to get a dopamine hit from checking your email. Dopamine is all about motivation. It's the molecule of more. It's the thing that makes you— it is central to drug addiction, for instance, the dopamine response. Dopamine also, by the way, mediates attention. People with ADHD have a problem with their dopamine system thought to affect concentration and focus on things and switching between mind wandering and focusing on one thing. So they end up doing the 2 things together. So you're going to get this dopamine hit from this, whatever it is. And so you're going to keep doing it. But when you do that, You are, as you say, you're emptying the tank. You're not filling yourself up. It feels like you are because you're filling yourself up with information, but you are fragmenting your attention because you've got all these quick hits of information. So you reduce your ability to think clearly. You lose perspective. You lose your ability to solve problems. And then you can get depressed, stressed from things that actually immediately are going to have no effect on you, but were very difficult, very bad at differentiating world events that aren't going to affect us right now from things that we need to do now. And you end up worrying about these things.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height All of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So, go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Before we even hit the record, you and I were talking a little bit about the fact that chaos is really the norm if you look at history. Pick a time when there wasn't some form of chaos happening in the world. I was a child in the '60s, not, I wasn't an adult then. I was born in the '60s. So the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere in the world was blowing up when I was just a baby, when I was just a kid. But the '70s were a time of great inflation and tumult in the United States. You know, it was Watergate and Nixon resigns and the '80s, AIDS is on the scene and people don't know what the heck is going on with that. And people are scared. And the wall comes down. I mean, every decade, pick a decade, pick a time. It's just as chaotic as today. And yet we're seeing that we are fragmented. I love that. Thank you for using that word, that the fragmentation, that the fraying, I would use that word too, that people are more frayed. And it's not because we're less resilient. We're more resilient, I think, than we were then. But there's something that's also that's pulling at us that I think has to be defined. That's why I love the work that you do and was such a pleasure to be able to set this conversation up really, because I think people, it's important that we understand what our experience is and it's tough to understand our experience. Very difficult while you're in it. Like the goldfish in the bowl can't know that you don't know you're in the bowl. So it's helpful. It's very helpful. I don't know that we can do more than point to certain things. I, we were just the way I mentioned earlier, we were on vacation. For 8 days. I made the decision when I landed in Kauai that my phone was getting turned off, went dark. I did not pick up the phone until we landed back in San Diego. Now, in all honesty, I checked email once or twice on my computer, but I didn't have this constant thing that is literally an appendage to my body, this cell phone that at all hours of the morning, noon, or night, no matter what context, I could be at dinner, I could be in the most intimate setting. I could have my grandson right next to me. I could pick this thing up and like you say, be drawn into the thought stream of other people and their agendas because the world is interesting. Politics are interesting. Things are happening that I'm curious about, and this thing is constantly drawing me into that if I allow it. 8 days without it, I didn't die. I can tell you that much.

Absolutely. Even day to day now, I find I have to do Something like that. I use an app called Freedom and I block news, social media, anything that I know I'm going to look at when I should be working, when I should be doing deep work. So I block that until 1:00 PM and I find I have to do that. If I do it for a few days and I think, oh yeah, I've got it now, I won't look tomorrow. I don't need to set that. Well, I might not, but the next day I will. A week later I'll be thinking everything's fragmented. I'm not getting anything done. And then you get really stressed. Because you're not able to focus. I should say I did some research on this back in 2020 when we were in the full throes of the pandemic and did a lot of research worldwide on use of trigger words in media headlines. And yeah, there were words like infection, for instance, you know, or bug or whatever. You would expect those to go up, but there were also words like panic saw a 5-fold increase in usage during the first quarter of 2020. In cases it was deliberate. Some of those headlines were a masterclass in how to wring maximum anxiety out of a few words. So here in the UK, there's a newspaper and news site called The Mirror, and the headline was tragic. Now that's a trigger word. Okay, so tragic coronavirus death toll. So you've got lots of very emotive words there. Okay, tragic coronavirus death toll rises by— whoa, this isn't good. Rises by lowest level or lowest amount in 7 weeks. They were just— it was a positive news headline. It's a positive thing. It was an improvement. But the way we process sentences by prediction, and this is key, it's absolutely central to understanding how we read. We predict what's coming up. Our eyes are not sophisticated enough, believe it or not, to take in all the information. Most of the information when we're reading is coming from our brain. And then our eyes are checking to see if we're right. That's why we miss huge typos in PowerPoint presentations that we only spot when we're in an auditorium of 300 people. That's why, because we're predicting. And it's true with email. It's one of the reasons we lose it when we're reading email because we're not reading it. We are just predicting what's coming up.

Sort of sight wording.

Yeah. But that prediction, it's a bit like predictive texting, that predictive texting works on what's the statistical likelihood that the next word, you know, what's most likely to come up after those 2 words or those 3 words. Our brains work like that too. We have to take these shortcuts. And it means that, you know, if someone's ever sent you instructions and they say, I wrote you the instructions, you know, didn't you follow them? Because they knew what the instructions said. This happened to me recently. You know, somebody said, oh yeah, it's very simple. And he gave me these instructions, which were, Anything but simple. But to him, they seem to be because he knew it already. So prediction is so, so important. But it also means that with those news headlines, the media can play on this and it's their job. It's their job to get eyeballs on the pages. It's not necessarily a criticism, it's just they're doing their job. But it's being aware of it when you're reading it and being aware of the limits of reading and the effect that stuff has on you. That, as I say, is central to building resilience, that being aware of that, of how limited reading and writing are and the effects it can have on you because it's there, it's in your brain straight away, it's part of your world and you're isolated. You have no context. You're not actually speaking to anybody about it. So it's going straight in, straight to your amygdala, and it can be combined. It can be really bad news. But the good news is that if you look at that, that's a good place to start if you want to build resilience.

You said something earlier about that organizations are getting it wrong. Would you say a little bit more about what you mean by that?

The thing is, if you look at leadership, okay, so communication, one of the pillars of leadership, but most of the time when people talk about communication, they're really talking about the spoken word, not the written word. And when they talk about the written word, they're generally talking about remedial stuff, getting the grammar and punctuation right, getting the spelling right. So it's seen as this kind of low-level, remedial thing. And what I've noticed is that organizations will tend to spend around 10 times as much on presentation skills training as they will on helping their people to communicate through their writing, even though those people who get the presentation skills training probably go nowhere near a lectern, most of them, and yet they spend all day communicating through the written word. So it's like we've got it back to front, and I think it comes back to this invisibility. And you talk about the goldfish, we're so steeped, we're so surrounded by writing, so much a part of our world that we don't even see it. It's just there. And so I think that the good news is that it is an opportunity because if you improve that, and this is particularly with things like organizational change, it's kind of the opportunity to make the workplace so much better is there by optimizing how people are communicating with each other through their keyboards. But also, if you look at achieving strategic goals, you know, you've got strategy, you've got execution, you've got feedback, you've refined the strategy. What's connecting those things? Usually it's the written word. Yes, people will speak to each other, they'll have meetings, But in between everything else is writing. And so it's like the thread that runs through everything, or like the rising tide that lifts all boats. If you improve the writing, you improve everything else. And yet it's not something that people tend to do, and it's not something that they even look at because they're not aware of it. And also partly because people do what other people do. You know, if they don't see other people doing it, then yeah, it's, we're far less logical than we think we are. We're social beings at work as much as anywhere else.

In your work with organizations, are you ever actually tasked with or hired to teach writing?

Yeah. So the company I founded in 1998, Emphasis, has worked with 80,000 people since then doing exactly that. And that's all pretty much been in small groups of 8 to 10. It's a lot. So it happens a lot. And it was my privilege to work with so many people through that and to get to examine that issue and tackle it. But what I will say is that those organizations, and we're talking the tech giants of Silicon Valley right through to even the royal household here in the UK, it remains with the possible exception of that second example, that last example, it remains a minority interest. It's something that only a few people work on.

That's what I was thinking is that just in my work as a lawyer and as a writer myself, I know how excruciating writing is. Not just the longhand letters that we don't do anymore, but I have many memories of now to, you know, just writing a card. I don't know how many people still actually write cards to other people. Some I think probably still do for birthdays and things, but the art in it really is quite an art and a science, I suppose. The written word and being able to communicate effectively through that is something that I went to law school. They didn't teach writing in law school. I wasn't taking business courses. I was an undergrad. There was writing. There was certainly writing taught in a little bit in high school and a little bit in— I was an English major in college. It taught some writing. But once I got out into the business world, I've yet to really see any focus, as you said, on this very vital and important skill. And I'm just thinking as we're having this conversation, what an important thing it would be if part of resilience is what you said earlier, that it's about awareness. That the concept of just understanding, being aware of that these things are at play, and that if we've taken in our conversation attack where we can see that potentially it's led to fragmentation, it's led to more anxiety. There are many other effects of the way the speed of communication has led to shortcutting, that this shortcutting, there's a serious cost to it. That one of the things, and I want to use our last couple of minutes here to talk about the solution side because I I don't personally love it when all I ever hear in a discussion of something is the problem of it. Like, what the hell do we do about it?

It's all terrible.

Thank you guys. I appreciate it. I feel a little worse now than I did an hour ago, whatever. But like, no, what's the solution side? So I see as one of the possible things that the organizations and individuals can focus on, we can do this at all levels, is really the work on our ability to communicate more effectively in writing than we Currently have been trained to do. Some people have a facility, they're just good writers, whatever it is, they have a skill at it, they're creative, et cetera. And others not so much. I think mostly I see bad writing. I've seen bad writing in emails and any number of other things for eons. But we can for sure improve our writing skills. And you help people to do that. Your organization in the past has done that with more than 80,000 people, which is remarkable. Is there something that you now share with organizations As to the process for that, that we can introduce? I've got one other thing I want to bring to the table too. But so how do we improve our writing? And do you have any suggestions for that for leaders?

There are lots of things people can do around the language you use, for instance, simplifying it, which doesn't mean dumbing down. It's usually the words in between the jargon that cause the problem, as long as everybody understands the jargon. And I've got an example here actually, which is you might say, for instance, Could you give me some assistance in making a decision? That's 10 words. It's 15 syllables. But if you've got words in there like decision, anything that ends in S-I-O-N or T-I-O-N, it should sound an alarm bell. It indicates you've probably got too many words in there because you have to use other words to make that word work. Okay? So you don't make a decision. You can't say, can you decision? You have to say, can you make a decision? But you could say decide. And then if you're saying assistance, you could change that to help. And if you kind of work with that, you could say, please help me decide. Okay. Which is 4 words and 5 syllables. So if you imagine the effect of that all the way through an organization or through every document, you're massively going to reduce the brainpower required to process all of that. What's going to happen is the message will come through and the ideas will come through, and then you kind of have this Almost like this release of the knowledge capital in an organization where suddenly the ideas can start to flow a lot more. So I would say talk more. Don't try to use writing for something that it's not very good at. Don't use it for emotive issues. If you can't avoid that, if you need to communicate with a lot of people about something quite emotive, then don't start with the emotive thing. So, you know, this bottom line up front doesn't work in a lot of instances. If you start with or leave is canceled next week. Okay? That's the bottom line up front, but that's like a punch in the face. And because of the way our brains work, that psychology, that's something called the affect heuristic. You'll be angry and that's where the prediction comes in and you will misinterpret everything else. In fact, you won't even be reading it properly. So be very mindful of that. And what I say to people is there's even a mnemonic you can remember, which is SCRAP, which is situation, complication, Resolution, action, and politeness. And situation is things that get people nodding, things everyone can agree with. So if you think a situation is where we are now, complication is why we can't stay there or why there's an issue with that. Resolution is what we can do about that. Action is what we need to do next. And politeness is just rounding on a positive. So situation, complication, resolution, action, politeness, SCRAP. It's a very good way of introducing what I call human-centered communication into your emails. The final thing is, I would say, and really it's central to all of it, is put the reader first and do everything you can to put yourself in the reader's shoes. Now, it's not easy, but it could mean just taking a notepad and just writing down what are they interested in? What are they likely to be? What are their likely thoughts on this topic? What are their priorities? How much do know, because we vastly overestimate what people know. And in doing that, you force yourself to get into their shoes and step out of yours, if you like. And that can really help with written communication. So there is a lot you can do. And that organization Emphasis is still very much alive and kicking and doing great work. But there is on their website, which is at writing-skills.com, there's a ton of stuff There, if you go to the blog, if you want to go direct to it, just go /blog. It's probably the biggest repository, you know, library of information on how to communicate effectively in writing, probably in the world. You know, it's been going since 2008. There's so much stuff on there. And so there's a lot you can do to help yourself. It's not all doom and gloom.

And often it is that we in our communications take an assumptive position. That is, we assume other people know what we mean. They know why, they know the context. And we expect people often unconsciously, I think more often than not, we expect others to just know what we're thinking. So they're expecting others to be mind readers. And how often we do that in our intimate relationships with people that know us as well as in other areas, which when we assume we know the old mnemonic about that. So my one suggestion, I so appreciate the solutions and multiple solutions that you just offered. I'm going to just share something that's worked for me over the last couple of years when it comes to the text thing, because we're not going to get rid of text. The communication has sped up. As you said, the genie has left the bottle. I don't even think there's any reason to try to put the genie back in the bottle, but we do have to be more aware to be resilient. We have to be more aware. So, for example, when I'm sending a text message these days, I would say 50% of the time I will send a text memo. Instead. Now, of course, this has to do whether you're on an iPhone or you're on an Android. And so there's a bit of a challenge there because if you are communicating from an iPhone to an Android, you cannot leave a voice text because those platforms are not compatible in that way. And here's a call to action to the tech folks to get rid of that barrier, 'cause that's ridiculous. But if you are platform to platform, to send a voice memo is so much different and it takes It takes me less time to leave a voice memo for someone as opposed to the text message that my thumbs are constantly revising. And you know what? I'm shortening it to the point of like, I'm not going to give somebody 3 paragraphs to read, but by shortening it in the process, I'm not really simplifying. I'm actually making the communication less effective, I think, and losing the nuance. And maybe, as you said earlier, so important. I never heard this before. Losing the opportunity to create that oxytocin for the person I'm sending this message to. So they're not hearing the love in my voice. They're not hearing the tone that I want them to receive the feedback. If it's feedback, for example, they just see the feedback in writing. It's like, well, this person is— Adam's pissed at me, or he's disappointed, or he's asking me to do yet another thing, which doesn't come across when I leave that voice text. So So I just think there's a lot of ways that we can work with this because the genie is not going to, we're not going to get it back. So nor do we want it to. But what do we do to just lift our resilience, be more able to leverage these technological advances to our benefit and not just see it depleting us, which I think we are seeing signs of that. So

that's such a good idea. Somebody did that. If you use WhatsApp, for instance, I'm not a great user of WhatsApp just because of habit, but You can do that and that is platform independent. But somebody did that the other day with me. They left me a voice memo and it's not like a voicemail for some reason. You know, I never check, you know, I don't even bother leaving voicemails now, you know, but it wasn't like that. I could see it there. It was visual because you just got a little player in the message and then it's like, oh, what's he said? And I played it and it was a message that was about 20 seconds long. So it would've taken him presumably not much more than 20 seconds to record. And yet said so much more because he was actually communicating bad news, but it was okay. It worked. I think it was genius. I think it's a really, really good idea.

Rob, we're going to end here, but I could literally talk to you for days. I think people are listening to this now, watching this now are feeling the same way. We will have full show notes. So this is a message to our audience, full show notes. Rob has a wonderful website. There's a lot that you can find about his work in the world. Everything that you might want to know and how to engage him is all going to be in those show notes as well. And Rob, I just thank you for your time today. Thank you for the quality of the conversation. I've just loved it and look forward to us being able to chat again soon.

Absolutely my pleasure, Adam. It's been a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure all mine. Folks, if you would be kind enough to leave a comment, Or review adamarkel.com/podcast. You can leave a comment there. The reviews are fantastic. They really help us out. So on whatever platform you might be listening to this, you can leave us a 5-star review. That'd be terrific. But again, we thrive on the feedback. So the comments and your thoughts are ever so important, and I'm personally the one to respond to those things. So don't think it's some bot or somebody else. It's me. And again, if this is an episode that you've gotten value from, and I got to assume you have, Please share it with a friend. Find somebody that maybe they could use some help with their communication skills, or they're struggling with the communication of members of their team. And this is so prevalent these days, or even people that are just feeling that anxiety and don't maybe exactly know what it's from. I think there's some great insight in what Rob shared with us today about where we might look for answers there. And again, just wishing everybody a wonderful rest of your day, your evening, or wherever you might be in the moment. Thank you so much for your time. We'll see you soon. Ciao for now, everybody. Man, I just loved my conversation today with Rob. I mean, honestly, we spoke about some of the most important things that I think we're all struggling with these days, how it is that we are experiencing fragmentation, what it looks like to develop a better relationship with our text messaging. I know it sounds funny, but But we're so attached to these cell phones and we're using that texting mechanism all the time. It's a part of what's happened in, in the information age and in the technology age that we're living in right now. Communications are so fast and many of us would like to slow them down, but as Rob said, there's no getting that genie back in the bottle. So we have to learn how to use those things more effectively. I think we really covered quite a bit of what is challenging in the space. We think about how frayed we are because of the speed and the frequency of the communications that we're all involved in and the content that we're reading and consuming each and every day. We are in many ways frayed. We are exhausted. We're seeing the heightened level of anxiety, industries across geographies, across the globe. Really, it's affecting all of us. And at the same time that we have this awareness, and this, I'd say, heightened awareness based on some of the insights that this amazing expert shared with us today. We were also able to not just put a bow around the problems and talk about them, even if some of the problems that we talked about are things that maybe you've never heard of before, you never spoke about before, never heard people speaking about before. I know some of these things were brand new for me in the course of my interview of Rob. So, It was to me so valuable in that area. And yet so many things we can't dwell in the lowlands. We can't dwell on the plain. We have to get to the top of the mountain. And the top of the mountain is always, what do we do about things? How do we use our heightened awareness? How do we use our understanding to be able to make change or plan for change, or dare I say it, create solutions? Sometimes we can't move into solution too quickly. We have to, to sit with things. We have to be willing to marinate in them, as my daughter would say. But in this instance, I think we all get this. We've been living with this. We've all had the experience of sitting in a restaurant, a beautiful restaurant, and watching people at this beautiful restaurant on their cell phones, sometimes communicating with each other, I suppose, in that regard. I mean, people texting one another from different areas of the same house. We've all seen these things. We've all experienced it. We've all probably judged it. And we've all probably been guilty of doing those things ourselves from time to time. So it's important that we have conversation about that and yet be able to know what are the small things we can change? How do we take that awareness and actually turn it into some action that not only makes our resilience tank, our resilience score higher, but helps to give permission other people to do the same? That has a ripple effect, if you will, that only increases the resilience all around us in our teams, within the organizations that we're a part of, within the organizations that are our communities, our families. Some of the tools, some of the tips, some of the hacks, I would say even that Rob shared with us are just first rate. They simply are. I did my best to keep up with him and contribute some things, and I felt decent about that, but he's the expert. That's why we have him on. This is something he's been doing, studying, researching for a very, very long time. So how to think about the digital age in regard to the context of what Rob spoke about, I think for me was elevated. I see the digital world a little differently today because of this conversation. I think you will as well, and I think there'll be people in your world that you'll want to share this episode with. I know I'm going to do that even though, even though we share this with our community, as you would imagine. There's some very specific people that I think really would benefit from listening to this. I hope that you've enjoyed it. Please leave a comment, adamarkel.com/podcast. Leave a review. We love those 5-star reviews. If you'd be kind enough to do that, that's also super helpful. And most importantly, put these things to action. There's some very actionable techniques, suggestions that come after we fully explored the problem. I think we did cover it quite well. So You be the judge of that, of course. But let's all work on this. I think this is something that we're gonna see collective benefit, worldwide benefit, even if we're all a little bit more aware and if we can take these very simple steps that Rob and I spoke about today. If you are curious about how resilient you are these days, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, feel free to do something that 5,000+ leaders have done already, and that is to get your resilient leader assessment in just 3 minutes by going to rankmyresilience.com. Rankmyresilience.com. We'll get the job done for you and it won't cost you a thing. And most importantly, it'll give you that heightened level of awareness, a baseline from which to build from and build forward, which is what we're all busy doing right now. So without saying any more than that, I'll just say I bid you a beautiful day, rest of your day, and ciao for now.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com/becomechangeproof.