Generally, give as much information and detail as you can. We can do this by being more narrative and not sticking to chat level conversations that operate at word or short sentence level. As a manager this is very helpful in building your communication skills.
Our discussions, posts and topics are better and more useful when they’re made up of complete sentences and ideally, a series of paragraphs that tell a coherent story. As a organisation leveraging community to build products, we cannot succeed if we do this any differently.
Basically, being narrative and giving as much detail as your listener could possibly need, makes what you’ve shared a valid source of truth for them and anyone else. They can always come back to it and it answers all their questions.
For instance, think about when you’d have to share reports or give feedback, you’ll want people who read them to have all the information they can possibly need. This makes them trust your skills. And you find that they start to take what you say as their bible or source of truth on topics you speak about, as they no longer need any external party to give any extra information. This makes you all the more smarter.
So, everyone here should be able to write and explain in detail everything they share and not just short paragraphs. Amazon uses this extensively to excel and I have learnt it from Jeff Atwood a very successful entrepreneur.
See an article on it on how Jeff Bezos did it an Amazon:
Just ignore the hero worshipping bits in the article and focus on how writing has helped the company even shoot away unnecessary meetings and PowerPoint or presentation slides.
This is why we are using Discourse to build what we are building. It will allow us to give as much detail as we possibly can on what we are doing, why we are doing it, asking whether we should be doing it and engaging in critical and detailed discussions with ourselves.
From Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer, we have another take on this. Marc Andreessen (M.A.) is one of the pioneers of dotcom companies and one of the most influential investors globally.
N.S.: Recently you’ve invested in at least two companies, Clubhouse and Substack, that are part of a new wave of social media. Discord might also be included in that wave. Why now? What was lacking in the “old social media” of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube? How might the new networks improve on that?
M.A.: It’s not so much what is lacking in the incumbents. It’s more the importance of communication as the foundation of everything that people do, and how we open up new ways for people to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate. Like software, communication technology is something that people tend to pooh-pooh, or even scorn – but, when you compare what any one of us can do alone, to what we can do when we are part of a group or a community or a company or a nation, there’s no question that communication forms the backbone of virtually all progress in the world. And so improving our ability to communicate is fundamental.
To end this I’ll say let’s build something awesome together leveraging one of the hidden super powers of business; the Power of the Paragraph.