Do business and technology documents have to be so boring?

Douglas Adams, the great comic science fiction author, wrote that Vogon poetry was so bad that a critic only survived a recitation of it by gnawing his own leg off. I wouldn’t be so extreme, but I was thinking the other day how boring business and technology documents tend to be. I have read, written and reviewed more than 200 strategy documents per year for the last 20 years. Business, IT, digital business strategies. Other documents. Advice we get about how to write business documents (from people like me) is also pretty boring. Strong narrative and clear structure. As brief as possible. Connect the what (actions) to the why (purpose). One of my particular fetishes is adding anti-strategy to a document – things we won’t do, ways we won’t do things. All helpful, but still a bit boring. Of course, business documents have a serious, transactional purpose. Their main purpose isn't to entertain. But that means many people don’t read them. Or at least don’t pay full attention to, absorb and remember them. I like the acronym W.O.R.N. (“Write Once, Read Never”) and the term shelfware, both to refer to how little most business documents get read and used. Could we explicitly try to make our documents a little #unboring too? One reason I think that many documents are really boring is that they lack humility and vulnerability. They are often written in the spirit of ‘how great we are’ and ‘how great the next 3 years are going to be’. Of course, great documents already have risks and issues sections. But could they also be written in a more humble, authentic, vulnerable tone throughout? Also, most are devoid of comedy, which can be a powerful vessel to deliver important messages. A client once told me that he was frustrated that his organization was about to leave one vendor to go to another vendor who was almost exactly the same, when there were more radical options. In order to get everyone’s attention, he told colleagues that it was like leaving your marriage for your partner’s sibling, who was almost the same. Why not look for a hot, new partner who would do things your old partner wouldn’t do. [Please don’t ‘HR incident’ me.] You might question the decency of this, but it definitely got people thinking of the desired point. Being funny is not a sign of disrespect. I would also love us to use more playful linguistic devices. I will finish here with two examples by Douglas Adams. First, he described huge alien spacecraft hovering over the earth “exactly the way bricks don’t”. A beautiful anti-metaphor. Second, he described drinking a cocktail called a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster as ‘like being hit in the face by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick’. Let’s all start measuring the #unboringness of our business and technology documents. #unask #unthink #unlearn #communication #strategy