Work / Note
A thinkpiece is a designed object
An organisation writes a particular kind of document — long, considered, meant to shift how a group thinks. It is almost never designed. It is written, reviewed, and circulated, and then it does not work, and nobody can say why.
The situation
Most organisations of any size produce a genre of internal writing that sits between a memo and a report. It exists to change minds rather than to record decisions. People put real effort into these documents, and a large share of them have no detectable effect.
When one fails, the diagnosis is usually about the writing — it was too long, it was unclear, it was not compelling. Sometimes that is true. More often the writing was fine and the document was built for a job it was never going to do.
The question
What if you treated the genre the way you would treat any other designed object: something with a job, a user, a context of use, and a characteristic failure mode?
The move
Start with the job. A piece meant to open a question is a different object from one meant to close it. The first should end wider than it began and can afford to be inconclusive. The second has to arrive somewhere, and the reader should be able to state the conclusion afterwards in one sentence. Most failed pieces are trying to do both, which means opening a question and then resolving it too quickly to be convincing.
Then the reader, specifically. Not a notional audience but the actual person who will read it, in the actual condition they will read it in — usually short of time, on a screen, between two other things, with no obligation to finish. A document that requires uninterrupted attention it will not receive has made a design error, not a writing one.
Then the failure mode. For this genre it is being agreed with and forgotten. That outcome feels like success at the time: nobody objects, several people say it was interesting, and nothing changes. A piece that is going to survive has to be specific enough that agreeing with it commits you to something.
And finally the form. Length, structure, the presence or absence of a diagram, whether the argument is stated up front or built toward — these are design decisions with consequences, not stylistic preferences.
What it produced
The most useful change was asking, before drafting, what the reader should be able to do afterwards that they could not do before. Very often there was no answer, which was itself the finding: the piece did not need to be written yet, or did not need to be written at all.
The second was permission to be shorter. Length in this genre functions as a signal of seriousness, which is why the documents keep growing. Naming that out loud made it possible to ship a piece that was two pages because two pages was the size of the argument.
The third was that the diagram stopped being an illustration added at the end. If the argument had a shape, drawing the shape first told you whether the shape was real. Several pieces did not survive that test, and they were better for having failed it early.
The point
What transfers
The reason this page exists, rather than the story that produced it.
- Any recurring document type is a genre, and genres can be designed. If your organisation produces the same kind of thing repeatedly and it works inconsistently, the variable is usually the brief, not the writer.
- Ask what the reader should be able to do afterwards. If there is no answer, the problem is upstream of the writing.
- Identify the failure mode that looks like success. For persuasive internal writing it is being agreed with and forgotten, and it is invisible unless you go looking.
- If the argument has a shape, draw it before you write it. Undrawable arguments are usually unfinished ones.