Shaping Ideas Together: The Power of Collaborative Writing

Work and social life is becoming increasingly text based. Punctuation has never been more important to convey tone and emotion. It is also arguably more difficult to get someone to truly hear and listen to your message. Working together on that message is a powerful way of ensuring your core message gets across.

I’ve been working recently on a rallying cry for 2025 and beyond. A core message and set of principles I want to ensure gets absorbed and fully understood by my team. In practice, truly getting a message across has many layers to it which need to be unpacked. There is the need to repeat the words (three times is usually the charm), and then there’s the need to unpack the differences between what you said, what you meant, and what was heard on the other end.

So I set my thoughts down in a document, in my own words. I then shared this document with my team as a work in progress and invited feedback. Google Docs makes collaboration so convenient with comments, suggestions, etc. Before I knew it, I had comments and suggestions from a large percentage of the team, all the way from the top to the bottom of the document.

What that means to me is that those people read the entire document at least once, top to bottom. They then probably read it again after their suggestions were incorporated.

The best way to get something to stick is to write it and to read it. We can test this by listening to a book and reading a different book, and then seeing how much one remembers from each. I guarantee you will remember more from the book you read than the book you listened to.

When your message is truly important and nuanced, and needs to be absorbed to a certain level by a group, write it down and ask them to help build it. Each suggestion and comment is the individual helping to shape the document into their own words and making it their own.

A powerful outcome.