Written Culture: How Super scales knowledge at 200+ employees
Read how a scale up uses 5 key written culture principles to ensure knowledge flows across the organization
One of the most critical jobs as a CEO is to make sure information flows freely and openly.
When the company is small that is easy to do. Imagine 7 people sitting in a room. Everyone is aware of what everyone is working on. You can overhear conversations, you can tap people on the shoulder, you can meet formally and informally as much as needed without creating too much friction or overhead. Although there are theoretically 21 different lines of communication — it is still quite easy to manage.
Lines of communication and Brook’s Law
As a team scales, this becomes much harder and the overhead grows exponentially. This ends up creating unnecessary meetings and having individuals repeat things over and over again. It creates information asymmetry and goes against an open and transparent culture. This can be reversed if we operationalize the flow of information — which is best achieved by implementing a culture of writing and reading.
I wanted to write this blog post as a guide for other founders who are scaling up their companies and give some tactical advice on how a written and reading culture can be used to facilitate knowledge and information flow to create a more effective organization.
Why create a written culture?
Not only does a written culture help with the obvious problem stated above — it has many other benefits:
- By asking someone to write their thoughts down it creates well articulated, structured, and precise thoughts which enables the writer themselves to better understand their own line of thinking and makes it easier for others to understand. Read more here from Paul Graham on putting ideas into words.
- It gives everyone in the room a voice, they can all comment vs waiting for their turn to speak or being quieted by a louder voice
- People can write out their questions/concerns/agreements and have more time to process their thoughts vs just shooting from the verbal hip
Super’s 5 written culture principles
In order to help roll out a written culture across the organization, we presented the company with 5 core written culture principles. Let’s go through each one.
1. Compose written briefs for medium to large projects and initiatives
This one seems obvious, but it is shocking how many projects feel like a quick request and a few emails or slack messages but end up being medium sized projects that suffer from no clear direction, documentation, or thought because this critical step was missed! Here is a very simple template you can use for a project brief. Feel free to copy over to your google drive to use.
2. Align on ownership & key stakeholders early (RACI framework)
When the company was small, decision making was pretty easy. It would generally ladder up to the co-founders or more likely the team was so small that alignment and decisions would just happen across the entire group organically. With a larger organization, you actually need to do the work of defining each major task or initiative and deciding who specifically is R (Responsible), A (Accountable), C (Consulted), and I (Informed).
- Responsible: person who performs an activity or does the work.
- Accountable: person who is ultimately accountable and has Yes/No/Veto.
- Consulted: person that needs to provide feedback and contribute to the activity.
- Informed: person that needs to know of the decision or action.
This is not as relevant when all the work is being done within one department, but especially important when the work is spread out across multiple departments and there is potential for gaps in information sharing and execution. Learn more about RACI here.
3. Every meeting must have an agenda & designated note taker
Nothing surprising here. All meetings should have a pre-written agenda that is shared 24 hours in advance of the meeting. It should include the goal of the meeting, if you need a decision or alignment by the end of the meeting, and any specific discussion items. The designated note taken part is where we take it one step further. I am sure we have all been in conversations where we said ‘wait — wasn’t that discussed in the meeting 2 weeks ago’ or ‘yeah — we talked to our partner about that 3 months ago. I can’t remember what they said’. Although admittedly the notes are not often referred to — there are times when the notes from previous meetings are critical information. Again — here is a very simple agenda template for meetings.
4. Use a Decision Making framework for decisive decisions
This is probably the most impactful principle of the 5 on this list. The vast majority of decisions in a company are low-risk and should be made unilaterally by the owner of that area (e.g. should we move the stand up meeting from Mon to Tue this week).
A decision making framework (template here) is needed when there is a lack of clarity about a decision that is higher risk. Higher risk can mean that the decision has long term implications or that it can be costly to unwind if the wrong decision is made. The Decision Making Framework is a consistent, repeatable and efficient process that maximizes chances of optimal outcomes, minimizes rework, and documents commitment and history.
We didn’t come up with this decision making framework. We borrowed it from our friend Brian Armstrong at Coinbase. Read more and find the decision making framework template here.
1 — The creator of the framework fills in all the key parameters. There should typically only be 1 decision maker, but 2 can work on occasion. Don’t forget the key field which is ‘How long will we commit to the decision?’ This allows a decision to be made and committed to for a fixed amount of time so we aren’t constantly revisiting the decision.
2 — Everyone (decision makers and input providers) come to the meeting having pre-read the key documents with all the background and context as well as the decision making framework in advance of the meeting.
3 — When the meeting starts, any clarifying questions can be asked. We then proceed into a round of blind voting (everyone votes at once). You can spread your vote amongst the options, stack votes, but you must use the total number of votes you have (the number of votes should be equal to the number of options)
4 — After everyone votes — we go one by one (from least tenured to most tenured) and that person explains why they voted in the way they did. This sparks an active discussion. After everyone has gone — everyone re-casts their votes and we go through another round for those who changed their vote.
5 — Finally after the second round of voting — the input providers drop off the call and the decision maker(s) make the decision. Note that the decision makers do NOT need to pick the option that received the most votes (although they often do when it is very stacked).
6 — The decision is then communicated to whoever needs to know depending on the scope of the decision.
This process is like magic! Everyone feels heard, and the decision makers get inputs from all the key stakeholders, but are ultimately empowered to make a decisive decision. When we go through this process, even those who disagree with the decision commit to it given they were able to voice their opinion. This decision making framework has saved us a ton of time and I would strongly recommend ALL companies to use this framework. It is highly recommended when there are big high-risk decisions to make, but it is also very helpful when certain ideas/projects are lingering with partial commitments. The decision making framework gives everyone the clarity they need and is a key piece to an effective written culture.
5. Documentation is key (processes, best practices, tools, notes…)
Everyone must get into the habit of documenting everything. Documentation is never fun — so we make it as easy as possible by not forcing a particular tool. Just write. There are certain places that are better for certain types of writing:
- Confluence: company process, standard operating procedures, tools we use, experiment results, best practices. (things that are crystalized)
- Gdocs/sheets: meeting notes, 1:1 docs, project briefs, design docs, OKRs, company wide presentations.. (things that are more fluid/have discussions)
- Jira tickets: day to day tasks, initiatives, requirements… (tactical planning)
- BambooHR: vacation policies, payroll & benefits/perks, employee handbooks, DE&I, onboarding materials.. (HR/Onboarding related items)
Get everyone into the habit of writing
Now that we know the principles — how can you get people writing? When we introduced this written culture practice, a lot of people had simply never written before. So we set an internal OKR for the quarter that each FTE has to write at least 1 doc. It could be anything, as long as it was searchable and useful for someone.
To maintain accountability and to track the progress — we created a spreadsheet with name, title, department, document title, and document link — as you wrote a document you added it to the spreadsheet. Every week in our weekly business review we called out the total number of employees who had written a doc (150/240) = 62% and kept pushing. We would also call out and highlight specifically interesting and helpful documents and would thank departments who would get to that 100% mark. By the end of the quarter, we got some type of written documentation submitted by 95%+ of our employees and we created a culture and habit of putting things down in writing.
But what about the reading? Don’t assume people will read what you write.
Pre-reading for meetings
A lot of this blog post has been dedicated to the writing portion. However, all this writing is not helpful or productive if it is not being read! One of the biggest issues is that everyone is consumed by meetings and their day to day job, that people show up to meetings without pre-reading the relevant documents and come in without the context that they need.
Amazon has a famous solution for this — where Jeff Bezos claims that ‘the smartest thing we ever did’ at Amazon was to start every meeting with a quiet reading period. While we haven’t taken it to this extreme yet — we are starting to test and iterate by starting certain meetings with a quiet reading period. Usually, it is a shared Google doc and for the first 10 minutes of the meeting, people are reading and commenting on the doc directly. Then when the meeting starts — everyone has all the context they need and we can dive straight into a discussion on the questions and comments. This dramatically improves meetings as we then go straight into an active discussion versus spending half the meeting talking about and trying to clarify the content.
Finding Documents when you need it
The reality is that it is impossible to read every document that is being written — but it is important that if you do need some context or information you can find the document/piece of writing that you need. The first step is to make sure that the writing is easily searchable.
To solve this, we partnered with Sequoia backed Glean. It is a simple tool that indexes and makes searchable all our documents across the tools that we use. When anyone asks a question on Slack — the answer is often ‘have you gleaned it’. Usually the answer is available, and if it is not then someone should write about it or create a glean ‘answer’ for that question so the next person that asks can easily find what they are looking for.
Wrapping up
Although the natural reaction is that this is going to take a lot of time writing and documenting everything — the reality is that this saves the organization a TON of time. There is a ton of toil that is saved where people are trying to ‘figure things out’ or try and ‘figure out who to talk to’ in order to get the information they are looking for. Having the answers at our employees’ fingertips promotes an open and transparent culture and honestly — just a more efficient organization. It creates information symmetry and thereby enables everyone to do their best work.
I hope this blog post was helpful! I am sure things will break again when we go from 200+ employees to 2000+ employees. However, I believe creating this written culture at the company ‘early’ is going to help us scale the organization. It would be great to hear from others if they have implemented some of these written culture principles or if you have other suggestions we could use — or add to this blog post. One last thing to remember — when in doubt, write it down!
