Imagine a world where you are developing a process or standard, and you’re close to finished, and someone makes changes, but there’s no evidence of the change. There’s no indication that a change has been made. There’s no redline, there’s no vertical blackline in the margin, there’s no bubble callouts to explain the change.

I can’t, and don’t want to, imagine that world.

I use MSWord’s “Track Changes” functionality all the time. I also use the “Compare” function as well. It’s so very useful in identifying what changed between editions. (Version control: that’s a different topic that needs attention too).

A consensus is an outcome of group decision-making, when the goal is widespread agreement among group members, rather than majority rules.

When writing company procedures or standards, or when deciding on an organisational structure, when the decision affects a group of people, achieving consensus is the best outcome that can be reasonably expected.

In order to reach consensus, there needs to be robust discussion as well as respect.

Consensus allows for some of the group to not entirely agree. Everyone’s opinion should be heard and respected, and consensus represents the best solution that the group can achieve at the time.

Besides just knowing your audience, another key insight for documentation is to think through the ‘use case’ for it. This means thinking about why someone would look for your document, or what information they would be looking for.

The ‘use case’ concept is mostly used in software and website development. It’s a key step to clearly consider how the user will perform tasks on the website.

The same approach works for documents as well: consider what the reader is looking for.

It’s a different perspective, considering what they are thinking, instead of only thinking about what you are telling them.

I’ve been calling it “knowledge management”, but it never felt quite right. Then today I came across the word “articulation”, and maybe that’s a better word for it.

Knowledge articulation work. It’s the connection and coordination of knowledge.

In project teams (or any business teams), we need the ability to ‘articulate’ our knowledge: clearly convey what we know, and also see how it can help solve complex problems. So, it’s not just managing knowledge, it’s the articulation of it.

Working in groups will always be a factor in work life, and maybe lack of knowledge articulation causes a few mishaps.

One of the most under-represented stresses in the workplace is that of mismatched expectations. Whether it’s around time commitment or availability, or related to documentation or following a process, the impact of mismatched expectations is major.

It’s not discussed enough, our expectations of each other. Know yours, and keep in mind that other person might have different expectations.

When there’s a belief that something is going to happen, or someone will behave a certain way, and that’s not how it turns out, then there can only be disappointment.

So if you’re disappointed all the time, maybe you have inflated expectations.

Everyone likes an executive summary. Good executive summaries distil the content of a longer report into the key topics or outcomes. The executive summary helps the reader get the ‘gist’ of the document, without having to read the whole document.

Perhaps we should all just write in executive summaries. Keep it short and to the point. Maybe there’s no need to write the whole document.

But of course, that’s not right. The explanations need to be written, so that it can then be summarised. In order to write the summary, the author needs to be very familiar with the content.

The activity of sense-making includes explaining things, putting things in order, and understanding relationships. Sense-making is the act of simplification and organising. When we’re able to explain something, we’ve made sense of it. When we’re able to predict what comes next, it makes sense to us. If something is hard to explain, or we don’t know what will happen next, then there’s an open loop in our brain. And that causes cognitive load.

Little things like predictive routines and familiar processes give us comfort, because it makes sense. This is why standardisation and habits help: they close an open loop.

I can’t stress it enough: when it comes to documents, be very, very clear about who is the audience of that document. Think about who will read it, who will look for it. Think about why they’d look for it. And consider what situation would cause someone to appreciate having that document.

The corporate world of documents is drowning in documents, probably because of the ease in which we can create them. Most of them never get read. Technology allows us to organise them, file them, tag them. Organisation of documents is good, but more importantly, know who’s reading them.

When something doesn’t get done, it’s because you’ve prioritised something else over it.

The hard part is deciding what to prioritise.

This is the dilemma of any number of workers, entrepreneurs, project managers, dual-career families, parents or students. Anyone who has ‘a million’ things to do. The real problem is the difficulty in prioritising.

Because doing one thing, any of the million things that need doing, means you are prioritising that over the others.

And calling that out is sometimes telling. It’s not “I’m too busy to do that”, it’s “I’ve prioritised something else over that”. Just own the decision.

Most humans strive to organise, even just a little. Even those who don’t feel particularly organised, still you seek to group things.

We group the cutlery in the kitchen drawer, we group our clothes in the closet (don’t you?), and we group our documents and emails, in whatever way suits us at the moment (often ineffectively).

It’s an attempt to visually represent relationships. The human brain looks for patterns and familiarity. By grouping things together, we have a bit of a shortcut. For more complex activities or artefacts, the grouping helps to inform structure and helps to navigate the subject.

Standards and procedures are created, written, and managed as documents or artefacts. In other words, they are written outputs to represent a thought process. The most important part of standardisation is in the processes that they represent. It’s almost impossible to cover every possibility, and yet the standard has to cover enough for it to be useful.

Standards and procedures make knowledge, skills, and decision-making visible. They are physical artefacts attempting to represent complex thought processes, which happen instantaneously and in a non-linear way. They codify a process, including decision-making and application of judgement in the face of incomplete information.

When standards or procedures are working well, they are almost invisible, and maybe even are taken for granted. When they are referred to often for ‘the answer’, that means they’ve achieved their goal. It means they are simple but elegant, and more importantly, understood and used. Good standards or procedures clearly represent the technical knowledge of the users who apply them.

Standards and procedures are good when they produce a reliable result. That’s the point of having standards and procedures. But like all elegant things, it’s not easy to achieve. Getting to reliability includes dealing with a lot of ambiguity.

Peter Morville writes, in a book called Ambient Findability (2005), about the slippery slope of semantics (the meaning of words):

“It’s all about words. Words as labels. Words as links. Keywords. …And words are messy little critters. Imprecise and undependable, their meaning shifts with context. One person’s paradise is another person’s oblivion. Synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, contranyms; the challenges of communication are part of the human condition, unsusceptible to the eager advances of technology.”

When designing structures to organise knowledge or to store documentation, or when trying to standardise, there is an inescapable link to the words. Those messy little critters.

There are only a few guidance documents out there about how to write procedures and standards. There are many more opinions out there than there are reference documents to learn from.

The context in which standards and procedures are written is obviously complex. This is especially true when we consider the broad technical, and organisational, issues that standardisation has to deal with.

There are competing vocabularies to contend with, and meanwhile technology comes along offering advanced machine-based standards and procedures. These don’t take into enough account the human reality of work and the workplace, even if it is mostly online.

When I went looking for the theoretical side of knowledge management, I didn’t expect to find a whole book about it. “Organising Knowledge” was published in 2007, and it is 260 pages long.

It’s a deep dive into classifying information, categorising knowledge, and developing standards and procedures to organise the storage environment. It includes the concept of findability. Being able to find information is too often left unconsidered, when building any filing or document management system.

Even though it was published 14 years ago, and technology has swept through our lives, the fundamentals of organising knowledge haven’t changed that much.

Last week our TV broke. Granted, it was a 15-year-old Sony Bravia, which had been through 3 moves with us, including an international one. But this isn’t about the TV: it’s about what we’re doing in the evenings instead.

We now play cards after dinner. Gin Rummy. And besides getting us talking to each other, it’s making us use our brains in the evening, in creative and mathematical ways.

There’s been enough written about turning off the screens, I don’t need to repeat all that. There’s something to analogue entertainment. We’re considering looking for a Bridge club next. How 70s!

Here’s a simplified, almost pithy, summary of a recent Cal Newport newsletter, “lessons learned from teaching career advice to thousands of students”.

Newport wrote the excellent book Deep Work, and many others. His advice for top performers follows along his advice for career development (also the title of another book): be so good they can’t ignore you.

• Be reliable and do what you say you’ll do.

• Find existing paths before forging your own.

• Do real work, using skills requiring interaction with others.

• Do higher learning only if there is good evidence you need it.

• Ask about others’ career success stories.

Working with procedures and standards over the years has forced me to learn that there are many ways to interpret words, or a combination of words.

For example, whether a “report” and a “record” are – or aren’t – the same thing, has been the subject of much deliberation.

Procedure writing needs to be precise, and succinct. Sometimes in achieving that, though, meaning and interpretation is lost. It’s an ongoing challenge for those writing the words. My hat’s off to all of you in the middle of these experiences: learn from it, enjoy it, and most of all, don’t take it personally.

The more we set up our business to be audited, in the safety, quality, or technical realm, the more we think about the process, rather than the process outcome.

The business of auditing has evolved to focus on auditing the business processes: auditors check that the process is in place. The scope of an audit is often about the process, rather than the process outcome. An example is the setting up of processes to be easily audited, but not really considering the outcome of the process. It’s like measuring the number of meetings instead of the achievements of the meeting.

The whole “start with why” concept has a lot of merit.

Business cases should be written with the ‘why’ in mind: know why the customer would want to buy. When starting a new habit or routine: it’s valuable to have a clear idea of why. If you don’t know why, the habit may not stick.

It’s the same with documents, procedures, and reports: ask yourself why it is being written. Sometimes it hurts to admit that maybe that document doesn’t need to be written. But if it does, in thinking about why, you’ll have a good concept of your audience.