Why we write everything down
Decisions, tradeoffs, post-mortems, the conversation we had in the kitchen at 4pm on a Thursday. If it is not written down, it did not happen, and the next person to ask will be told a different version.
We write everything down. We write the brief. We write the decision in the Slack channel. We write the conversation we had in the kitchen at 4pm on a Thursday. We write the reason we did not pick the obvious approach. We write the post-mortem.
Writing is the cheapest collaboration tool in the world. It is also the most unfashionable. The fashionable collaboration tools are the ones with logos: synchronous video, shared whiteboards, fancy presentation platforms. The unfashionable one is a flat text file in a shared folder.
The argument for writing everything down is not romantic. It is operational. Every project we have ever shipped has, at some point, had a moment where two people on the team remembered the same conversation differently. If the conversation was written down, the disagreement is resolved in thirty seconds. If it was not, the disagreement is resolved in thirty minutes by re-deciding what was already decided.
We also write things down because the studio is small and the team rotates through engagements. When a new team member joins a project six weeks in, the project is fully readable from its written record. They do not have to ask. They do not have to be brought up to speed. They read the record and they understand. This is enormously valuable when a senior leaves the studio. It is also valuable when a senior takes a holiday.
The last reason we write everything down is that clients sometimes come back to us a year later asking what we decided about the thing. If it is written down, we can answer. If it is not, we cannot, and the answer is invented in the moment. The invented answer is almost always wrong. The written one is almost always right.
What we write down is, on average, twenty-eight to thirty written documents per engagement. Briefs, decisions, weekly summaries, post-mortems, field manuals, written quotes, written change requests. Twenty-eight documents sounds like a lot. It is. It is also why our engagements close cleanly, six weeks after handover, with nothing outstanding.