I'd Rather Be Writing » thinking

What Does It Mean to Be Innovative?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:04:25 +0000

Last week while attending the STC Summit, I learned that MindTouch named my blog, I’d Rather Be Writing, the most innovative blog in technical communication. In their post, 2011 Technical Communication Innovation Award Winners, they write,

This honor is bestowed upon long-time technical documentation professional Tom Johnson for creating some of the best — and most innovative — original content about the ﬁeld of technical communication (and related disciplines) on his ultra-popular blog, I’d Rather Be Writing.

Johnson creates top quality content. It’s thoughtful, well-researched, consistent, and available in a variety of formats. Whether it’s a podcast interview, a book review, a collaborative post, or a how-to article, Johnson does it right. He’s open to new ideas, not afraid of change, and willing to challenge his readers, service providers, and the industry itself to think in new and innovative ways. Always a great read!

It’s cool to receive an award about being innovative. Thanks MindTouch! Over the last several days I’ve been mulling over exactly what it means to be innovative.

Metrics for Innovation

It’s interesting to compare MindTouch’s list of innovators to their list of the most influential technical communicators, published last year. In their influencers list, they carefully spelled out their metrics for measuring influence:

Our Most Influential Blogger (MIB) formula consists of a weighted average across a range of metrics including Alexa, Klout Influence, Google Page Rank, Technorati Authority, and Twitter Followers.

When it comes to innovation, why isn’t there a list of comparable metrics to measure the degree of innovation? Innovation is typically defined as providing new and useful ideas and approaches. But who decides what is new or useful? As such, innovation is harder to evaluate than influence.

The challenge is not without solutions, though. According to Katie Delahaye Paine in Measure What Matters, when it comes to social media, the metric that matters most is relationships. Measuring relationships seems just as tough as measuring innovation. Paine explains that one way you can measure relationships is by having a sample of your audience respond to some standard questions from the Grunig Relationship Survey. Your sample audience would answer whether they agree the following:

I am happy with this organization.

Whenever this organization makes an important decision, I know it will be concerned about people like me.

This organization can be relied on to keep its promises.

I believe that this organization takes the opinions of people like me into account when making decisions.

I feel very confident about this organization’s skills. (p.58)

You could score their level of agreement on a scale from 1 to 5, and then use this score for establishing a metric for measuring relationships. (By the way, these questions are only a selection.)

Could we measure innovation by asking similar questions? Here are some questions that I could use to sample my audience.

Posts on I’d Rather Be Writing often explore ideas I hadn’t considered before.
After reading I’d Rather Be Writing, it sometimes changes the way I think about what I do.
I look forward to posts from I’d Rather Be Writing because I know they will present a different spin on topics.
What I learn from I’d Rather Be Writing makes me a more effective technical communicator.
The ideas from I’d Rather Be Writing are useful and improve the way I do things.

I could survey a group of people about whether they agree or disagree with these statements, along with maybe 20 other blogs, and then compare the scores. That of course would be time consuming and costly, but it would provide a way to measure innovation.

What I Do That’s Innovative

Whether or not I am actually more innovative in comparison to other technical communicators remains to be proven. However, I have tried a variety of things on my blog: podcasts, screencasts, WordPress training/consulting, videocasts, video interviews, audio interviews, series posts, curation-type posts, book reviews, guest posts, presentation recordings, sponsors posts, collaborative posts, and more.

These are merely formats, though. I like to think that my text posts are where the most innovation happens, because that’s where I challenge assumptions. A good text post gets me thinking hard about a subject, and in writing about it, I often change how I think about it. This is the beauty of writing: it’s a catalyst for thought. Almost every post that explores a topic with depth gets you thinking critically, challenging traditional ideas, uncovering assumptions, and looking from different perspectives.

Last year I wrote a post titled Being Contrarian, in which I spelled out the disagreeing mindset. A couple years ago I pointed out the difference between knowledge posts and creative posts. I favor posts where writers explore an idea rather than just explaining what they already know. Almost all the posts I enjoy writing are creative, contrarian posts. No doubt this is why some see my blog as innovative.

Future Directions: Story

Now that I’ve rambled on about innovation for a while, I want to outline my future directions. Although I’m interested in a lot of different topics (from findability to visual illustration to screencasting to content strategy), what moves me most is story. Story structures everything with meaning and relevance.

By story I don’t mean that I want to tell more workplace stories with increasing transparency. Nor do the stories I tell even need to be anecdotal. At the heart of a story is a conflict that drives action. In an essay, the action is mental action, and the conflict is a question you’re wrestling with. A recent post by Dinah Lenney gets to the core of what I mean. Lenney writes,

Here’s a story about one of those times that made all the difference: I was in the middle of getting my MFA in a low residency program – also, I should add, in the throes of despair about my work – and I went to a reading at a gallery in Santa Monica. At some point in the evening I found myself standing in front of a painting, and beside me was one of my mentors, a fine writer named Jim Krusoe. “How’s the writing?” Jim asked. Come to find out, talking in a gallery is a little like talking in a car; something about not having to look a person in the eye (and this is maybe a bit like writing, too) makes all kinds of confession possible. And so, when Jim asked, “How’s the writing?,” I was honest with him. “What writing? Fuck writing,” I said. “I’m never writing anything again.” Then Jim asked, “What question are you trying to answer?” (Against Knowing)

Lenney goes on to explain that not knowing is what makes writing interesting. When you don’t know, you’re pursuing the answer to some question. You’re wrestling with uncertainty about something. Along the exploration, you stumble across a discovery that is transformative. This basic structure that Lenney describes, wrestling with a question, is story — at least in the nonfiction genre. It’s the essay in the most literal sense of the word, as Montaigne used it, to “try” or “attempt.”

That direction, wrestling with a question, attempting to find answers despite uncertainty, is what drives my writing. It’s what prompts me to explore new directions. I think overall it’s what makes me innovative.

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Drawing as a Tool for Thinking: The Back of the Napkin

Tom Johnson — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:08:50 +0000

Lately I’ve been reading Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin: Selling Ideas and Solving Problems Through Pictures. In the book, Roam asserts that drawing pictures can help you solve problems. It’s a simple but profound assertion.

You’re no doubt familiar with the same assertion with writing. Writing is a tool for thinking, a method for unlocking ideas. Writing about something helps you think about it, helps you see the problem more clearly, helps you see what you’re trying to say. Most people who write know this. It’s what teachers in writing courses tell students who dislike writing—that even if you’re not going to be a writer, writing is a worthwhile skill because it extends your critical thinking faculties.

Roam essentially says drawing provides much the same critical thinking tool.

It sounds cool, but does it really work? I decided to give it a try. Here’s the problem I was trying to solve. Next month I’m giving a five-hour WordPress workshop in Vienna (as part of the TransAlpine conference). Five hours is a long time. If I stand up there and lecture, not only will I collapse from exhaustion after three hours, everyone else will either leave or fall asleep. Also, the room won’t have Internet. How can I keep people awake and engaged?

Roam has a specific heuristic to follow when drawing. Not only should you explore the 6 W’s—the who, when, why, what, how / how many, and where—you should also look at various angles: simple versus elaborate, quality versus quantity, vision versus execution, individual versus comparison, and change versus as-is.

I decided to keep it simple and mostly focus on the first set of questions, but you can imagine how each of these angles would prompt a different inquiry. Here’s what I drew.

Drawing the problem helps you come up with solutions

As you can see, I’m not an artist, but that’s okay, Roam says, because the purpose of these drawings is to analyze and explore the problem, not to represent something aesthetically.

My chicken-scratch drawings may look unintelligible, but they did help me consider solutions and additional facets of the problem that I hadn’t previously considered. While I was drawing, here are some of the ideas I thought about.

In drawing the how, I realized (and this may be small) that I’ll need a long cord to extend to the projector if the projector is in the back of the room. I doubt the room is set up that way, but drawing it made me think about the layout of the room and what technical problems I may encounter. If I need sound, how will I orchestrate that? What problems will the 220 current from European outlets pose for my American equipment? Will I set my laptop on a table beside me or on a slanted podium?

In drawing the why, I realized that I’ll be filling the participants with enthusiasm and excitement for WordPress, but if there’s no outlet, no way of putting that enthusiasm into practice, it will be an exercise in frustration. I’ll need some practice problems for everyone to follow. To facilitate practice with WordPress offline, I’ll have to walk them through local installations of WordPress on their own computer through something like WAMP server.

In drawing the what, I decided I’ll need a workbook of some kind for the participants to follow along. The workbook will give structure to the course and provide a safety blanket for people who may feel they’re not entirely getting a concept. I already started on a WordPress Quick Reference Guide last year, so perhaps I should update it, extend it, and illustrate it with more pictures.

In drawing the how many, I realized that of the 20 to 30 people who might attend the course, the participants will likely have a variety of technical backgrounds, from people who can’t code a hyperlink to people employed as professional web designers. I need to be aware of the different skill levels and start from the ground up, assume that many will have little understanding of CSS and later move into advanced concepts.

In drawing the how many, I also realized that not everyone may be planning to use WordPress as a blogging tool, but might be looking to use it to sell products, build a chapter site, or implement it for some other purpose. I know that’s a somewhat obvious point, but I didn’t think about it until I drew forty separate audience members, each of whom looked a little different.

So you see, drawing out various scenarios, answering the who, when, what, why, where, how, and how many, did bring up some important issues and help prompt some solutions. Drawing really is a tool for thinking, a heuristic for investigating ideas.

Part of the reason drawing works, I believe, is because our visual sense is critical to the way we understand the world. It’s how we process what happens around us. As children, we instinctively draw. The urge is unstoppable. Even as bad as the pictures are, we don’t care. I can’t help but think that, unconsciously, children draw to help make sense of the world, to understand what they’re seeing and to express what they’re feeling.

Perhaps we draw less as we learn to write, but drawing does not provide the same analytical results as the written word—it’s another sense and medium. As a unique medium, the answers are often unique as well. Whatever the reason, drawing as a tool for thinking does give you another tool for solving problems. (And it’s a great excuse to doodle on paper.)