I'd Rather Be Writing

Content Strategy Workshops: Interview with Rahel Bailie

Tom Johnson — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:52:26 +0000

Content Strategy Workshops

This year Rahel Bailie and Scott Abel are putting on a new event called Content Strategy Workshops. It’s a two-day event, held October 9-10 in Portland, Oregon that follows the Lavacon Conference (held October 7-9, same hotel). I helped work on the website a bit, and I wanted to highlight this new event through an interview with Rahel.

Tell me about the new Content Strategy Workshop conference you’re putting on this year.

That’s a good opening question because I want to clarify that this is not a conference, but two days of intensive workshops where practitioners can hone their skills. Scott and I are excited about the Content Strategy Workshops (CSW) event because we want it to become an annual event that practitioners consider a valuable part of their professional development plan, and think of as a resource toward building their skill sets and maintaining their currency in the marketplace.

What prompted you to put on this event?

The practice area of content strategy has coalesced relatively quickly, and practitioners are still scrambling to come to a common vocabulary, come to an agreement on some best practices, define deliverables. There are no continuing education programs (at least not yet) that teach content strategy in any holistic way, so we wanted to fill that gap. Last year, eBay launched the Content Strategy Applied series, wherein practitioners could learn skills that they could take home and start using in the workplace immediately. We wanted to provide that same opportunity to content strategists in North America.

How does CSW differ from Content Strategy Applied, Content Strategy Forum, and Confab?

This is a bit of a complicated question, but an important one because it can be confusing to understand the conference landscape when it comes to content strategy.

The first Content Strategy Forum was put on by the Society for Technical Communication and was focused on the type of content strategy practices that technical communicators could relate to. The second year, there was a huge swing to focus on the type of content strategy topics of interest to marketing communicators in interactive agencies. I have no idea what the focus will be for this year’s conference. It has moved to South Africa this year, though, so it may be out of reach for many North American practitioners who can’t go around the world to attend.

Likewise, Confab is a conference, supplemented by a day of workshops. The first year, I found the topics more focused on areas of interest to strategists handling the editorial side of content: marketing, branding, and engagement strategies, content usability, and so on. There is obviously great demand for this, as they’ve had great success with this format. But any conference can’t address all the needs of all practitioners, and we’re focusing on the needs of a different segment of practitioners.

Content Strategy Applied is really the event that we connect with the most. That eBay-sponsored event is two days of workshops, bracketed by plenary sessions. We wanted to put on a sister event to CS Applied, and I’d like to acknowledge their influence in our decision to bring that format to this side of the pond. Quite frankly, we thought of calling our event “Content Strategy Applied – North America” but the complications of sharing a brand with a multinational just seemed an unneeded obstacle to overcome, so we struck out on our own. And Content Strategy Workshops says exactly what our event is about: skill-building workshops, delivered by industry leaders, that attendees can apply in the workplace.

Does content strategy fall within the tech comm discipline or the marketing discipline, or both? It seems like Confab is more heavily weighted to marketing than tech comm. Will your event have more of a tech comm feel to it?

Content strategy does fit “within” either discipline, but is actually a superset of these combined disciplines plus other related disciplines that produce content. Situationally, some projects focus on a particular aspect of content strategy, such as the “web refresh” project. But when you think about what’s on that website, you could have content of several genres: marketing content, technical content, user-generated content, social content, and so on. And because each content type serves a different purpose, it needs a different treatment. Some of that content may interact with other content of a different genre. So you can see where your question poses a bit of a challenge to answer.

Rather than the division being by discipline, I’d rather peg our event as more focused on the technical than editorial aspects of content, and particularly on delivery aspects. We do have some editorial, but it’s more of the technical side of editorial: benchmarking metrics for content quality, a strategy for integrating cross-silo content, content for international markets.

Both Scott and I are known for talking about how having a strong technical foundation is critical to being able to leverage content as a business asset. So a strong part of our workshop series is how to add some serious technopower to content. We have workshops on analytics, content typing and modeling, content migration, multi-channel outputs, and other technical aspects that can seriously hobble a content strategy if done wrong.

Content strategists are looking to learn about these topics, if not to immerse themselves in doing it, at least to know enough so that they don’t get bamboozled by developers or CMS integrators. It’s not easy to find that type of training – you often have to seek out a workshop from an adjacent profession, and then figure out how to transfer that knowledge to your own practice area – so to come to an event where you get to pick from eight different workshops in two days is like hitting the jackpot.

Why did you decide to dovetail the conference with Lavacon? Are you hoping to make it easy for tech comm professionals to attend the conference?

We owe Jack Molisani, the Lavacon organizer, a big thank you for working with us to figure out a way to co-locate his conference with our workshops. He would generally have a day of workshops adjacent to Lavacon, and the difference is that we’re running the workshops as a separate event. By doing that, we can curate the workshops to create an end-to-end experience for registrants.

The Lavacon audience, which used to be slanted more to technical communicators, has become a healthy mix of content professionals, and the Lavacon program reflects that – it’s not as tech-heavy as it used to be, and has more strategy sessions. It makes sense to offer the workshops to these professionals, as they’ve already travelled to the conference, and instead of taking a disconnected workshop, they can put together a workshop program that suits their training needs.

How exactly do the two events fit together? Isn’t 5 days of sessions a bit like an ironman conference effort?

Actually, it’s not five consecutive days – that would be a marathon! Many conferences are three days, plus a day of workshops. Lavacon runs two-and-a-half days: all day Sunday and Monday, and Tuesday morning. Content Strategy Workshops runs two days: it overlaps with Lavacon on Tuesday morning, and continues the rest of Tuesday and all day on Wednesday.

The two events share a plenary: the closing session of Lavacon is also the opening session of CSW. Because of the arrangement we agreed upon with Lavacon, both events are offering a very sweet deal to registrants: sign up for one event (both events are the same price), and get the second event for $500. So it’s quite flexible – two days of workshops, or a couple of days of conference sessions and a couple of days of workshops.

Is this the first event you’re running? What have you learned so far?

This is definitely not my first event. I was the conference manager for a wildly successful STC Regional Conference in 2002, and I was conference organizer for the first content strategy conference in 2008 called Content Convergence and Integration, which is still fondly remembered by the content strategists who attended for its high quality program. And Scott has been behind many a successful conference, and certainly knows the industry.

We’ve put our collective knowledge into the organization of the event: make the event repeatable by tapping into knowledge gaps and filling them, commit to program quality by getting input from industry leaders, start small and stay focused, charge what the event is worth but don’t overcharge. We’re both innovative people and have certain reputations in the industry, so we’re counting on leveraging our own knowledge and contacts to make this a not-to-be-missed event.

You can learn more about Content Strategy Workshops at http://contentstrategyworkshops.com.

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When Wikis Succeed and Fail — Collaboration Alternatives

Tom Johnson — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:32:39 +0000

I am currently at the STC Summit in Chicago. One of the reasons I love the STC Summit so much is that it feels like home. I know so many people at this conference, and it’s great to chat with them. People like Sarah Maddox, Ellis Pratt, Janet Swisher, Arnold Burian, Matt Pierce, Todd Deluca, Mark Lewis, Kirsty Taylor, Joe Gollner, Gina Wadley, Kai Weber, Kit Brown, Alyssa Fox, Tommy Barker, Larry Kunz, Rahel Bailie, Richard Hamilton, and many more.

Although many of us may have different job titles, most attendees strongly identify as technical writers of one sort or another. This common ground binds us together and gives us a lot to talk about (in ways that the Confab crowd lacks because their roles are more diverse).

Why just one session on wikis?

Because I helped review Summit proposals, I stood for a couple of hours at the registration booth to answer questions. Few people actually come up to the booth, but during this time I had the chance to talk with Paul Mueller, the program advisory committee conference chair. (By the way, if I’m ever talking to you and you don’t want me to ever blog our conversation, you need to let me know.) I asked Paul why there was only one session on wikis this year, compared to numerous sessions in years past.

Paul has worked a lot with wikis. As a consultant for WebWorks, which Alan Porter once noted was a wiki-driven company, Paul has a lot of insight and experience with wikis.

Wikis are an outdated technology, Paul said. Paul noted that in some situations, wikis make sense. When you have a group of people who are expected to collaborate, wikis work well. And internally, wikis are still popular because they provide easy collaboration for employees. In fact, Paul noted that the STC Summit committee uses a wiki to collaborate. So wikis still have a place and purpose.

But if you just have documentation geared toward end-users who are not expected to collaborate or contribute, wikis aren’t the right tool.

When you need a wiki, and when you don't

Paul’s explanation made a lot of sense to me. Wikis that are working well in companies are wikis intended for developer-author communities or wikis where many technical authors are collaborating on the same platform.

For more common help authoring situations, when you have tech writing teams creating help for end-users, wikis aren’t needed.

In fact, Paul said that when WebWorks switched their end-user documentation away from wikis toward Reverb, a more online friendly format, user satisfaction shot way up.

End-user experiences with wikis

I know that I have written a lot about wikis on my blog. Wikis have many compelling elements that make them ideal in some ways. Wikis are web-based, fit well with agile software methodology, allow information to continually evolve, enable easy collaboration among authors, empower users to participate in documentation, make it easy to update documentation on the fly, and more.

However, unless you’re writing in an environment where many users are expected to contribute, giving people options to edit the content often just confuses them. For example, I recently received an e-mail from a concerned user yesterday who thought there was a security vulnerability because he could edit page content.

Another user recently asked how we establish whether documentation is authoritative given that anyone can edit it.

Many other users make edits to the pages that show they have no idea what they’re doing, such as noting bugs or glitches right in product descriptions (rather than in forums or discussion boards), and more.

I like the idea that documentation is never finished but always keeps evolving to a more complete, accurate state. While this idea of information evolution, which underlies the philosophy of wikis, has conceptual appeal, it turns into a kind of never-ending babysitting of documentation.

Instead of wikis, multi-device authoring

Rather than focusing on collaboration, it seems the trend now is to output to or adapt content for multiple devices. The ability to adapt content for mobile, tablet, and other devices seems to occupy the most attention right now, and only becomes more of a priority as devices proliferate.

I actually won a Kindle Fire from Writing Assistance at the Summit, so now I’m carrying a laptop, iPhone, and tablet device with me, making the need information for to be compatible across devices ever more apparent.

It’s hard for me to admit this, but I think wikis are kind of dead as a platform for non-collaborating end-users — even if you use the wiki hoping that the users will begin collaborating. Unless you work in a highly collaborative environment, where lots of different people are expected to write on a collective canvas, don’t use a wiki. Instead, use a help authoring tool, if you’re a lone author, or a content management solution, if you have enterprise-level needs.

I say this even though I literally have more than 100 volunteers in my community who are eager to help me with writing tasks. Even in such an environment, wikis aren’t necessarily the right tool. Volunteers are much more comfortable writing in Microsoft Word and sharing files through Dropbox or JIRA. It’s hard enough to get people to write at all; teaching them wiki syntax and asking them to publish is another step that many writers are uncomfortable with. Most volunteers want you to edit and review their writing before it gets published anyway.

Additionally, if you do have an online community, engaging volunteers to write isn’t always the best strategy, since so few people can actually write professionally. It’s often better to engage volunteers in other tasks, such as verifying the accuracy of instructions, doing usability testing, tagging content, doing research, sorting metrics, highlighting trends in feedback, and so on. You don’t need a wiki for these collaborative tasks.

Taking a break from wikis, not from collaboration

For now I’m going to take a break from wiki authoring and revert to a more traditional help authoring tool (either Author-it or Flare — we have both). When I floated this idea to Janet Swisher, who works at Mozilla in a highly collaborative environment, she agreed that you can still collaborate with volunteers without having a wiki platform (though she was sorry to see my abandon the wiki format).

I asked Sarah Maddox, author of Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate, for her opinion, and she noted that maybe the lack of wiki use isn’t due to a dwindling trend, but rather because wikis are an innovation not yet adopted by the majority. Certainly some organizations, like iFixit, are doing amazing things on a wiki platform. But they seem to be rare exceptions rather than trends.

Am I wrong about wikis being dead? Maybe. But collaboration and community aren’t dead. And here’s where I’m conflicted. All the really interesting developments on the web involve community — Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Google, the iPhone App Store, Android Market, Amazon, Craigslist, Twitter — the list goes on and on. The community is what drives the innovation and makes the site/platform/service interesting. When you subtract community from the equation, all of those platforms become b-o-r-i-n-g.

In fact, the web itself could be thought of as a giant wiki, with each new page on the Internet similar to a page on a wiki. The web/wiki continues to grow, morphing into a more and more intelligent body of information.

Given that community platforms are the most interesting innovations on the web, why would I want to move away from such an endeavor? Why is it that wikis don’t seem to leverage community contributions in the same intelligent way? Perhaps I’m giving up too early, moving on before giving the wiki platform a full opportunity to transform into what it wants to become.

On the other hand, the wiki is not new technology. Wikis are almost as old as the Internet itself (the first wiki appeared in 1995). After 17 years, wikis have seen a lot of variation (there are about 100 different wiki platforms). But have they really caught on?

Wikis are founded on the right ideas, but …

My suspicion is that wikis have continued as long as they have because they’re founded on the right idea — user empowerment, participation, interaction, community, knowledge evolution, and so on. But perhaps the model needs some adjustment. There may be a better way to encourage collaboration and community. I doubt that reverting to a static help authoring tool is the solution, but the collaboration model needs to evolve in a way that gets compelling results.

In Sarah Maddox’s presentation on wikis at the Summit, she noted that when her Confluence team had a comments feature available on their wiki pages, they received so many comments that the pages became extremely long. They became so long, in fact, that users began to complain about the length, and so Sarah said they removed comments from pages and instead linked to forum threads where people could carry on discussions. (Sarah seemed a little conflicted about the decision to remove comments.)

It seems that a feature to show/hide the comments might have solved the length problem, or a better threaded expand/collapse widget for the conversations. But just hearing the success of the user interaction with the content was encouraging. Commenting features on pages actually work — whether it’s blogs, wikis, product reviews, or some other format. Capturing comments does harness user input, participation, interaction, and collective knowledge.

The reason users find commenting so natural and easy is because leaving a comment is natural and easy — it’s a standard convention on the web. Whereas one rarely is presented with edit options to change the actual article content, the ability to comment is ubiquitous. And it’s also easy, because you can jot down your thoughts in a quick, unplanned manner and move on.

If we’re going to encourage user collaboration, providing a comments feature is probably more useful than using a wiki.

Which leads me to the final advice Paul gave me. As I confessed my deliberation about platforms for help, Paul suggested that I look into using WordPress. WordPress allows users to comment below articles, giving the benefits I just described. But WordPress also gives users an edit button for those who need authoring capability. The edit button only appears for those users who are logged in with the right role.

Hmmm, WordPress. I have heard of that software once before, I think.

I probably won’t be migrating to WordPress for a variety of reasons (namely, lack of an XML output that translation memory systems can parse, lack of print output, lack of content reuse, etc.), but I like the way the direction this conversation is going. We can look for collaboration in ways other than wikis.

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Confab 2012: Thoughts and Reactions

Tom Johnson — Sat, 19 May 2012 22:39:26 +0000

I recently attended Confab in Minneapolis. I was one of about 5 technical writers among the 650 attendees, which is why I found it surprising to hear Kristina Halverson say, We can learn a lot from tech comm. Let me repeat that. We can learn a lot from tech comm.

I felt pleased to hear this shout-out to my profession, and then tried to unpack exactly what she meant. Throughout the conference, a number of presenters emphasized the need for structured authoring. This refrain seemed loudest in Karen McGrane’s talk on Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content (a presentation she is also giving at the STC Summit).

I believe they respect tech comm for our expertise in structured authoring, which theoretically gives rise to an ability to publish many different outputs from one source. If you can publish to web, mobile, tablet, flipbook, print, intranet, blog, white paper, social media, brochures, and other content from one source, because you’ve tagged that content in the right way, then you have a strong competitive advantage in the marketplace. Yes, “structured authoring is definitely the way to go” was the message I kept hearing.

If you want to write your content once and “spray” it (to use a verb I heard in Karen’s presentation) to a dozen different publishing destinations, then you need to structure your content with the right tags, metadata, and other semantic markup to make it flexible and adaptable to the platform and context it resides on.

Despite all the enthusiasm for structured authoring, I didn’t hear much about the nitty-gritty technical details. In fact, in one presentation, the speaker talked extensively about metadata, and had us map out a taxonomy for a website. The idea was that through metadata, the content management system (CMS) would dynamically pull content into various spaces on the website based on the metadata and content model rules.

I guess sticking with concepts is fine, but I would have appreciated some refreshing realism about the difficulty of doing this. Does a CMS that pulls different objects based on metadata require about 100K and a team of programmers to implement? Or are we talking about something much simpler here?

And to write once, publish everywhere, do we have a dozen or so custom XSLT transforms to manipulate XML-tagged content into different outputs? From what I’ve heard, setting these transforms up requires developer-level expertise, and getting the PDF deliverable is so difficult that the most one can hope for is a plain-looking output that is merely acceptable rather than downright ugly. Or is responsive design the model instead?

Two words I didn’t hear

The Confab conference had many top-notch sessions. I listened to Lou Rosenfeld, Jared Spool, Mailchimp content strategists, and other well-known people. Their sessions were lively and memorable. However, I must confess that I was disappointed not hear the words “collaborative authoring” or “blog” during any presentation (except maybe as a brief word on a slide).

Why are these two concepts downplayed? First, I do not think the content strategists who attend Confab have any interest in wikis or collaborative authoring. From what I can tell, most attendees are content strategists in their organization, which usually means they write/edit/review the copy for their organization’s website and other collateral, provide a style guide, and help in myriad other undefined ways. (To be honest, I’m always a little curious to hear what people who call themselves content strategists actually do in their organizations.)

I can understand the absence of discussion around wikis, because wikis are more the domain of tech comm. Wikis are more suited for technical publishing, when you regularly interact with subject matter experts, work with constantly changing information, follow an agile methodology, and draw knowledge from product users. Wikis are not typically for marketers.

But why no discussions about blogging? In fact, no sessions scheduled for the STC Summit address blogging either. What happened to blogging? Is it simply aggregated into a larger umbrella of social media? Is blogging now just considered another form of content? Or has the unthinkable happened — has blogging become … passé?

It wasn’t too long ago that it seemed blogs were discussed more directly, and as a powerful, new form of content, rather than simply another form of social media. Where else can you publish thought-provoking, idea-soaked content with a personal voice and transparent tone? Few forms of content do more to build relationships, increase visibility, and spur interaction than a well-written blog. After all, not to call attention to myself, but MindTouch did name me #1 most influential in tech comm this year – not for my content strategy, or for any books I’ve written (which I haven’t), or for a preponderance of tweets, or for speaking engagements, or webinars, but rather for my blog.

And yet, ironically, having a blog nowadays doesn’t have nearly the impact it used to. Now pretty much everyone has a blog, even though they may not post to it more than quarterly. And the quality of the posts? If it’s a blog, it seems you’re allowed to drop the quality several notches. You don’t even need to proofread or spell check your content, really. It’s just a blog. Synonymous with blah.

In one session, Erin Kissane presented a session on “Ideas Worth Stealing.” She looked at innovations in writing and reading. Near the end, she mentioned a new site she has developed called Contents. Contents is an online magazine focused on content strategy.

From what I can tell, the style follows a similar approach as A List Apart. The site runs on WordPress, has a weekly publishing schedule, favors longer articles, probably includes an editorial workflow, has a list of regular contributors/editors, and is packaged in a responsive theme (making it mobile/tablet friendly).

Now, in looking at Contents, how is it really different from a group blog? One point Kissane made during her presentation is that lines and boundaries of content are blurring. What does it even mean for a book to be a book, now that you have mobile versions, online web versions, flipbooks, and so forth? What defines content as a book in this digital age? How does a blog post differ from a magazine article? Maybe it’s better just to refer to it all as “content.”

I like Kissane’s style, and I definitely welcome the new Contents magazine. I just don’t want us, in all this talk and praise of content, to forget about blogs.

Vivid = Verbal + Visual Interdependence

Let’s switch gears a bit. Another major focus during Confab was the emphasis on adding visuals to content. Dan Roam gave one of the most energizing keynotes I’ve listened to for a while. It was one of those keynotes where something clicked inside of me.

I used to be more gung-ho for visual illustration (see my 10 post series on visual imagination). During Dan’s presentation, I kept thinking back to my post on VITA (Video – Illustration – Text – Action) as my answer to the evolution of how one should do help content.

Somehow, in the busy-ness of life, I’d forgotten about the importance of visual content. Dan Roam reminded me of what I’d forgotten. Thank you, Dan. I was also pleasantly surprised to find a complimentary copy of Dan Roam’s latest book, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work in my free Brain Traffic tote bag. (The conference staff really knows how to put together a nice conference.)

Dan’s main premise is that you must combine the verbal (words) with the visual (pictures) to make your ideas vivid (hence the acronym).

I also attended a session on comics by Kevin Cheng. Comics are just sequentially told visuals, usually in story form. Kevin continued some of the points Dan made, but applied them in different ways.

If I were to combine more visuals with my writing, the appeal of my content would triple. The tragedy of tech comm is that we’ve focused too much on authoring efficiency over the past decade, rather than trying to solve the problem of why so many users find help useless. If help were more visual (and I’m not just talking about inserting more screenshots), both with the illustration of concepts and with videos, I think users would welcome help material, arms wide open.

By the way, I think some of Roam’s ideas about connecting text with visuals ties back to Robert Horn’s Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. More on that later (when I finish reading Blah Blah Blah).

On the Ride Home

On the ride home, I thought I was done with Confab, but the flight attendant saw my Brain Traffic tote bag and, somewhat stunned, asked, “What’s that about – Brain Traffic?“ I thought a minute, and then said, “It’s a writer’s conference.” (Who wants to explain content strategy to a flight attendant?)

Well, it turns out the guy sitting next to me was a Confab conference attendee, returning to Colorado. We chatted for about an hour. He had a lot of great insights and feedback about the conference. One of his criticisms was a lack of dissent during the conference. Few people disagree about anything, he noted. And you know what? He’s right. I’m starting to get sick of tweets and blog posts that do nothing more than agree, praise, repeat a quote, and bemoan how others in their organization don’t get it.

What exactly would you disagree with, I asked? He mentioned Ann Rockley’s talk on governance. In the web publishing world of his clients, implementing a governance board that meets regularly to review content guidelines would be something his clients would downright laugh at. They have a need to publish immediately and regularly, without any kind of structure that introduces more bureaucracy into the system. Many of these companies aren’t big enough to merit a “governance board.”

He also pointed out that the idea of writing once and publishing everywhere was a flawed idea. You can’t publish the same content that was intended for a blog post in a white paper, a tweet, and a brochure, he explained. Different forms require a different emphasis, style, and approach. To think that you can create content that can live everywhere and anywhere because you’ve tagged it intelligently is nonsense. It doesn’t fit the world I live in.

We then got to talking about some of his projects. He is in fact a bonafide content strategist, and has begun his own company doing content strategy. He quit his regular job to do this, and has had good success so far, since the competition is scarce in his area.

With one of his clients, he explained that they publish regular blog articles to attract new readers. Readers are pulled in by the blog articles, and they are then presented with contextual links for the services the client sells. He said it has been a very successful strategy for the client. He didn’t think blogs were passé, and he was a little surprised that blogs didn’t receive more attention at the conference (though he hadn’t considered this until I pointed out their absence).

Concluding thoughts

Overall, Confab is an excellent conference. Other attendees compared it to conferences put on by A List Apart. I walked away with a lot of insights and ideas, and I have been very open in this post. In the coming weeks, I’ll try to post some notes from sessions I attended.

If this conference weren’t back to back with the STC Summit, I would recommend that more technical writers attend it. If you’re interested in learning more about content strategy, I recommend that you attend the Content Strategy Workshop that dovetails with Lavacon in the fall.

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15 Tips for a Successful Conference Experience

Tom Johnson — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:56:11 +0000

Tips for a successful conference experience

The STC Summit takes place in a few days. If you monitor the #stc12 twitter stream, you can feel the excitement of the conference attendees. I’ve been to at least a dozen conferences over the last seven years or so, and I’ve accumulated a few tips that have helped make my conference experience better. Here are my top 15 tips for a successful conference experience.

1. If you want to sightsee, arrive early.

Usually once the conference begins, you won’t have time to see all the noteworthy places in the city, so if you do want to sightsee, arrive a day early. Conference sessions take place during the day, and in the evenings most of the tourist sites are closed.

2. Get lost in the city, since you have GPS on your phone.

When you do venture into the city, feel free to get lost, always knowing that you have GPS on your phone and can navigate yourself anywhere you need to — at least until your battery runs out. Yelp and other “what’s nearby” apps will help you find stores and places wherever you are.

3. Wear running shoes.

People do a lot of walking at conferences, and it always surprises me to see women wearing high-heel shoes, or men wearing dress shoes. Take along your favorite pair of running shoes or some other comfortable shoes. Not only will you walk all over a conference center, you’ll also walk around the city. Feeling comfortable can put your weary traveler’s body at ease.

4. Put a QR code on your business card or badge.

I’ve never done this, but I would like to. A QR code (like the one on my About page), can provide contact details and other information on someone’s phone when they scan it with a QR reader. Business cards shuffled around typically get lost. If you make it into someone’s mobile phone, however, you have a chance of being remembered.

5. Go with a problem you’re trying to solve.

Write down several problems you’re trying to solve before you get to the conference. This will give you purpose. If you do nothing else, follow this tip. When you browse the vendors, interact with other attendees, and listen to the sessions, keep your problems/questions in mind. They will ground your conference experience with a purpose. This purpose will help your interactions with others be much more meaningful.

6. Pick sessions based on speaker profiles.

Popular, well-known speakers are popular for a reason — they’re usually pretty entertaining. Even if the subject doesn’t entirely align with your interests, a good speaker can make any topic interesting. Unless a session has a specific appeal to you based on the topic, attend the sessions with the most well-known speakers. This rarely leads to a disappointing experience.

7. When it doubt, pick the session in the biggest room.

If all sessions seem equally dull, pick the session taking place in the biggest room. Conference organizers know which sessions will be the most popular, and they allocate room sizes accordingly.

8. Listen for the non-session insights.

Although you may think the sessions themselves will provide the learning during the conference, the more significant learning takes places in more subtle ways. Listen for the non-session insights, the ideas that randomly pop into your head. These insights may arrive during a session (even when the session is about a different topic), during session breaks, at lunch, in your hotel, etc. Be on the lookout for them and recognize that these non-session insights are probably your greatest learning value.

9. Monitor and use the conference hashtag.

If you’re new to Twitter, make sure you know the hashtag others are using during the conference (for example, #stc12). Use Twitterific or some other app to monitor tweets. You can also add a keyword to the hashtag, such as “#stc12 dinner” and filter tweets that way. In your tweets, rather than parroting speakers or always expressing praise, try to communicate insights, comments, or opinions.

10. Publish your notes as blog posts.

When you return to your office, your colleagues will want to know what you’ve learned. The notes you took during sessions will quickly fade. Try publishing your notes as blog posts. Taking notes will keep you more alert during sessions, and you can refer to your posts when others ask questions. Although most people take notes during sessions, few publish them as blog posts. When you do publish your notes as posts, no doubt you will reflect and evaluate what you’re learning in a more critical way. This reflective element is yet another aspect of learning.

11. Ask questions even if you feel uncomfortable asking them.

Undoubtedly you’ll be in one or more bad sessions during the conference, kicking yourself that you decided to attend that session. The speaker drones on, teaching the PowerPoint more than the audience, going in directions that bore you, and generally giving a poor presentation. When this happens, it’s likely that 75% of the other attendees are feeling the same way.

You can change the flow of a bad presentation by asking a question, even if it goes in a slightly different direction than the speaker’s slides. Remember my recommendation above — to go to conferences with a problem to solve? Now is the time to unpack that question and salvage your session time.

12. Learn the art of starting a conversation.

Meeting other people is part of the conference experience, but many of us are shy introverts. Here are a few simple questions you can use to immediately start any conversation:

What did you think of that session?
Where are you from?
What do you think of the conference so far?
What session are you planning to attend next?
What do you do at your company? (Refer to their nametag.)

These ice-breaker questions get somewhat trite after a while, but they begin any conversation. After breaking the ice, move into the questions you really want answers about (as explained in the “Go with a problem you’re trying to solve” section).

13. Learn the art of ending a conversation.

When you’re trapped in a conversation that you can’t escape (for example, at a tweetup or other networking activity), there are several ways to get out of the conversation. Try these escape clauses. Begin, “Well, it was nice meeting you,” followed by –

I think I’m going to mingle around to the rest of the place.
Do you have a business card?
I’m going to get some more food.
I think I recognize someone over there that I want to say hello to.

If none of these work, just stop talking. The other person will probably terminate the conversation for you.

14. Learn euphemisms to describe less-than-satisfying sessions.

When you attend a session that sucks, rather than saying it sucks, or coming across as a sour grape, try describing the session in a more euphemistic way:

The speaker seemed really nice, but the session wasn’t my favorite.
I’m interested in the topic, but I didn’t take many notes in the session.
I think the speaker was a little tired.
The session wasn’t what I was expecting.

15. Bring back toys for your kids.

While you’ve been at the conference, your patient spouse and kids have been feeling what it’s like to live without you. It’s nice to bring back some presents to show you thought of them while you were gone. If you have little children, stop into a toy store and pick up some simple gifts, such as toy cars, bracelets, books, dolls, or other items. The gifts don’t need to reflect the city of the conference. Simply bringing something back is usually enough to get the message across, which is Hey, I thought of you while I was gone.

Those are my tips for a successful conference. If you have any tips to add, or feedback about the above, please let me know in the comments.

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How Character Drives Story — Book Review of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder

Tom Johnson — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:08 +0000

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, published in 2011, is a story about a pharmaceutical researcher’s attempt to make sense of her lost colleague, presumably dead in the Amazon, while wrestling with a domineering academic professor who refuses to communicate updates about her research.

The book begins at a slow pace but, as Janet Maslin notes in her New York Times review, the story catches fire when the narrator, Marina Singh, meets up with Annicka Swenson, the mythic professor of Marina’s past.

Dr. Swenson, a medical professor specializing in reproductive endocrinology, has gone to the Amazon to live with the Lakashi — a tribe of indigenous people where the women can continue bearing children throughout their lives (this is not necessarily an advantage). Dr. Swenson’s goal is to find out the secret of their fertility and develop a drug for Vogel, the pharmaceutical company sponsoring her research.

The Vogel CEO, Dr. Fox, is eager to receive an update about Swenson’s research, but she is out of touch in the Amazon, and it has been 26 months since she last communicated with Vogel. Meanwhile, Vogel continues to spend a ton of money supporting the effort.

Dr. Fox sent one employee, Anders Eckman, to seek out Dr. Swenson, but Anders, a jungle novice, contracted a fever in the Amazon and presumably died. Dr. Fox decides to send another employee, Marina, a former student of the mythic Dr. Swenson, and also his mistress, to locate Dr. Swenson and get an update about the research.

That’s the basic plot, which I could unravel in more detail, but it’s not the purpose of this post. The true purpose of this post isn’t even a book review, but rather to take an element of the book and incorporate it into my own writing, to review Patchett’s most salient fiction technique and reflect on it.

What’s my takeaway from State of Wonder? Character. Barbara Bovender, a Bohemian hired to look after Swenson’s apartment in Manaus, describes the character of Dr. Swenson to Marina as follows:

“Once you understand Annick [Swenson] you know there’s nobody like her. I was thinking that maybe you hadn’t been around her in a while, or you’d forgotten. . . . She’s such a force of nature. Her work is thrilling, but really, it’s almost beside the point. She’s what’s so amazing, the person herself, don’t you think? I try to imagine what it would have been like to have a mother like that, a grandmother, a woman who was completely fearless, someone who saw the world without limitations” (p.96).

In Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of State of Wonder, Maslin notes that it’s the introduction of Swenson in context with Marina that brings the book to life:

Not until Marina comes face to face with Swenson does this unexpectedly meandering novel find its focus. In books like “Bel Canto” and “Run” Ms. Patchett found amazing ways to coax unrelated elements into magically coherent narratives and make them all matter. But in this case, it is Swenson who is far and away the book’s best-realized character. And the reader drifts past many so-so secondary figures and generic tropical scenery before her presence is really felt.

When she does appear, so does this book’s central issue, its unresolved rivalry, its beating heart. And she is worth the wait. Here is the dragon of a teacher who lurks somewhere in every student’s academic history, and whose cruelty and exactitude are inseparable personality traits. (Will Perilous Trek to Amazon Reveal Heart of Darkness?)

Dr. Swenson is domineering in intelligence and risk. She’s a researcher that sees past ethics to embrace the scientific method to the extreme. Her work consumes her life and environment. Her demeanor, in relation to everyone around her, comes off as straightforward, insensitive, directorial – but colleagues respect her because of her knowledge and intensity. In fact, they fear her. She has even trained the natives to passively submit to the needle pricks and cotton swabs to required for testing and drug development. Engaged in her life’s work, Dr. Swenson sees no bounds – she will forego any reports that impose on her time, ignore inquires from the CEO, cross ethical boundaries to carry out her own human experiment, and continue forward with her work without regard for the emotions of those around her.

Dr. Swenson’s students both worship and fear her, and somewhere in that emotional slip-knot, the story grows. That’s the real story – the encounter of an unconfident student with her mythic professor. The interaction provides a depth of emotion and conflict. At times one feels awe, other times repulsion, for the legendary Dr. Swenson. She gives the book life.

Now, overall Patchett tells a good story. It starts slow, but once Marina gets to the Amazon with Swenson, the story pulls you in. The book doesn’t reach an intensity of plot or intricacy ideas that would make it a classic. The plot remains a bit too safe. The story never climbs up to a level with enough energy to keep me up past midnight. Even so, the book is satisfying. The development of the Dr. Swenson character allows it to achieve the impact it does.

It seems that fiction needs not only well-developed characters to provide interest, but characters that are larger than life. And yet, in developing larger-than-life characters, writers can’t exaggerate the characteristics and actions too much or the characters will lose a sense of realism. Perhaps this is the art – to achieve a perfect balance, developing a larger-than-life character without resorting to exaggerated, overdone strokes that fail to meet the reader’s the suspension of disbelief.

With Dr. Swenson, I never felt her actions or thoughts were unrealistic. Yet they were extreme enough and purposeful enough to draw me in. And it is precisely this character that makes the book worth reading and reviewing.

If you would like to listen to Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, you can download it from Audible here or buy it on Amazon.

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Q&A: What should my major be for a career in technical writing?

Tom Johnson — Sat, 12 May 2012 16:47:02 +0000

I received the following question from a reader:

I’m a 20 year old college student and I just finished up my first year at a local community college and I was wondering what my major should be if I want to become a technical writer when I eventually graduate. Right now my counselors have me majoring in General Science (b/c my dream job would be to work as a writer at Scientific American) but I’m wondering if that’s the right path I should be taking. I’m new to this site but I’ve already found a wealth of great information by just browsing about. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

If your dream job is science writing, follow a science major. Remember that having skills to write is only one element of technical writing. Knowledge of the domain you’re writing about (for example, science) is equally important, if not more.

That said, I don’t know of many science-writing jobs. There are far more jobs for technical writers in the software industry than anywhere else.

If I could go through college again and choose my major once more, I would probably still choose English literature with an emphasis in creative writing, but also add a secondary major in graphic design. Reason being, the combination of graphics and text make an excellent combination.

Why not computer science? Well, the software I write about isn’t something that a degree in computer science would have necessarily prepared me for. I don’t have a strong interest in documenting APIs, so the more advanced computer programming knowledge might simply be lost on me.

Another possible route for a major would be to ditch writing altogether. If you already have good writing skills, pour your mind into science classes and write on the side. Become an Isaac Asimov. Knowing John Donne’s poetry and Charles Dickens’ plots won’t necessarily help in a career in technical writing anyway.

Whatever your major, technical writers are lifelong learners. Most professional technical writers fell into the profession from meandering paths. Some were anthropologists, others teachers, or philosophers, physicists, and botanists — you name it. They’ve all managed to develop the skills they needed to excel in the field. So does it really matter what your major is? Not really. Learn to think critically, ask questions, write well, and be patient. Those attributes will do more for your career than any specific major you choose.

—————

Photo from Flickr by Herkie

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Trying New Things, Changing Interests

Tom Johnson — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:55:49 +0000

It’s interesting how new things sometimes sneak up on us. I’m 36 years old, which means I’m past my exploratory twenties. It fascinates me how I’ll be perfectly content in one way of life and then suddenly find another.

My wife, Shannon, seems to follow the same path as well at times. About six months ago, she discovered yoga. Shannon has never been so fully engaged in any activity like this (other than reading, which she’ll do all night). Now she goes to yoga about three to four times a week. At her encouragement, I tried yoga — in our living room following a DVD, mostly because I wanted to do some stretching. I learned that yoga is much more than stretching. It involves difficult poses and movements — more than I had the energy for.

Like Shannon and her discovery of yoga, I too have discovered new things. Since I started biking to work, I’ve gotten into cycling more. Last week I biked 97 miles. My commute is 11 miles each way, if I go the regular route. If there’s a headwind, it takes about an hour. If there’s a tailwind, it takes about 40 minutes. Winds are strong in Utah, so they aren’t something to underestimate.

I’ve made quite a few additions to my bike since I first brought it home from my dad’s house in Florida: new pedals and toe clips, a pump, pannier bags, and new tires. I’ve supplemented the gear with cycling clothes as well — padded bike shorts, bike gloves, sports shirts and pants, wind breakers, and so on. I’m now on the lookout for a helmet mirror and a screaming yellow cycling jacket.

While searching for cycling tips, I came across a really interesting guy on the Internet: Durianrider. At first, I just thought he was just a cyclist, and I listened to his tips for riding, which include techniques like hydrating, using clipless pedals, sleeping longer at night, and so on. But it turns out Duranrider is much more than a cyclist. He’s a major health activist and has more than 400 videos online, many of them very blunt, like this one.

Durianrider is a strong proponent of the raw, high-carb vegan diet, and so he eats something like 30 bananas a day (mostly in smoothies, I think). His philosophy is that you need to eat carbs to have energy. Despite the fact that other diets, such as the Paleo diet, dismiss carbs, Durianrider says you have to eat carbs to have energy to lead an active lifestyle. He says you must eat, but you must eat the right foods — plants, fruits, and other real food. Anyway, I am more and more fascinated by the way diet affects life. Mentally I align with everything Durianrider says, but food is a lifestyle choice, and it’s sometimes hard to change that lifestyle to change the food.

Biking to work has another side effect: audio books. I have about an hour and a half each day to listen to audio books, and I really enjoy listening to fiction. I just finished The Eye of the World, a fantasy book by Robert Jordan that has a cult following so much than JordanCon is a conference dedicated to his books.

After The Eye of the World, I needed a break from the fantasy genre, so I’m currently listening to State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. It’s about a scientist who goes down to the Amazon to study a tribe of people where women bear children throughout their life (until they die in old age). The scientist who goes to study this tribe — ultimately to create a fertility drug for post-menopausal women — doesn’t communicate her research for more than two years, so another employee is sent down to persuade her to return. That employee dies of a fever. Another employee is sent down, this one a former student of the scientist. When she tracks down the scientist in the Amazon, the scientist turns out to be nearly mythic in her dominating character — and her research takes an interesting, ethical turn.

I enjoy fiction. It’s the story element I like. I could probably make better use of my time by listening to recorded sessions from the previous STC Conference and similar conferences, but I would rather listen to a good story than be in learning mode while I’m commuting.

One effect of listening to fiction rather than industry-related podcasts is that I have fewer technical-writing-related posts. In fact, I fear that I have cooled off a bit with my blog. I seemed to have more energy to write about a year ago, and now it seems like a struggle to get more than two posts out in a week. I am still learning, always learning, but maybe I’ve fallen into a mode of knowing enough to get by. I’ve got a life outside of my work, and I’m content to not be so visible. I am still driven to write, but maybe I’m just getting older, and once I put the kids to bed, I’m ready to move into escape mode.

A couple of months ago, I went through a cooking phase. I’ve never been one to cook, but I started cooking about two meals a week. I made all kinds of soups — split pea soup, celery soup, chili, ten-bean soup, and more. I learned to steam vegetables. I ate spinach every way it could be cooked and consumed. I once cooked tamales. It turns out that I kind of like to cook. And I like having some autonomy in the kitchen. One has to be allowed to make mistakes.

Although yesterday I made a variation of a three bean salad, and added the vinaigrette (whatever it’s called) from memory, I sort of phased out of cooking. My wife is a much better cook, and she agreed that she would rather have me do handyman tasks (if I preferred that) instead of cooking. Well, I am not much of a handyman, but I did make a sandbox for the kids this weekend (with my wife’s help). The kids absolutely love it.

I’ve wandered around in this post, but my point is this: interests change. Who knows what may strike me in a year. Maybe I’ll suddenly take an interest in kite flying, or oil painting. I prefer to keep an open position about life. My blog sometimes reflects this variety. Recently I’ve been in a wiki phase. Previously I’ve been in WordPress phase. And in a podcasting phase. I also went through a fiction writing phase, and a family journal phase. (I am still in a grapefruit phase.)

How does one stay open to accept new experiences? How do you keep from cutting yourself off from new ideas? Does a constantly changing set of interests lead to a shallow character and amateur skill set? I’m not sure. All of the interests I’ve mentioned in this post — biking, audio books, healthy eating, cooking, and so on just sort of emerged, without my seeking them out. Certainly we change. Sometimes it’s subtle, and other times not so much.

Right now I’m watching soccer, the famous Ronaldo at Real Madrid. I’m not a soccer player, and I barely understand the rules. I would like to see them score more. But overall, I am intrigued by this sport, which is not so popular in the U.S. but wildly popular nearly everywhere else. Perhaps one day you will see me at a park practicing my goal shot.

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Book Review: Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson

Tom Johnson — Wed, 09 May 2012 01:31:59 +0000

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson, is a fantasy trilogy that takes you into a world where the characters can “burn” metals inside their bodies to give rise to certain powers, such as increased strength, the ability to push and pull other metals, an enhancement of the senses, or the most potent of all, the ability to see several seconds into the future (critical for fighting).

Mistings possess one of the nine powers; a mistborn possess all nine. (For more information, see this Allomantic Table of Metals.)

The protagonist, Vin, is a young girl, an orphan thief, who doesn’t realize she possesses these mistborn powers until she meets her mentor, Kelsier. Kelsier recruits Vin along with other crew members to overthrow the Lord Ruler, a despot who maintains his power, in part, through a sharply defined class system between noblemen and skaa.

Mistborn has been one of my favorite books to listen to this year. The system of magic — burning metals (called “Allomancy”) — gives rise to a fascinating world, one that mixes innate capabilities with class and mystery.

The Mistborn trilogy is a classic and highly regarded in the fantasy genre. It’s full of action scenes, intricate plots, and compelling characters. The book is appropriate for any age. (My 10-year-old daughter listened to two of the three books.)

I hadn’t really listened to fantasy novels before Mistborn. The closest book was J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. With Mistborn, I realized that I like fantasy literature. For example, after finishing the book, I decided to listen to Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World — a series that Sanderson finished on behalf of Jordan (because Jordan died around book nine, before finishing the series).

To learn more about Mistborn, see the Mistborn page on Brandon Sanderson’s site.

To listen to an audio version of Mistborn, download Mistborn from Audible.

Stuck in a system

Tom Johnson — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:24:39 +0000

I’ve been reading Sarah Maddox’s new book, Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate, and have been impressed. I enjoy the energy and speed in Sarah’s writing. If you’ve read her blog before, her book has the same tone.

This is not a book review, because I’m not yet finished with the book. But it doesn’t take too many pages to come to some realizations worth noting. My primary realization: I wish I had a Confluence wiki rather than a Mediawiki wiki. I intend to explore Confluence some more. After reading the chapter on installation, it seemed easy enough, so I am uploading the bin file right now and will attempt to make it work with Linux commands on our team server (I don’t know Linux, sorry, so I’m really relying on the Sarah’s documentation here).

While that bin file is uploading, let me elaborate on what I think is a larger problem. I think vendors all too quickly forget how hard it is to change systems. I didn’t choose Mediawiki. I didn’t choose Joomla. I didn’t choose SharePoint. I didn’t choose Author-it. I didn’t choose many of the help authoring tools that are at my disposal. What’s on “the menu,” what’s “off the menu” — many times decisions are made by others.

But regardless of how one gets saddled with a tool, the longer you use it, the more difficult it becomes to break free of it. For example, our blog for our tech group runs on Joomla. Why? Because the developer who initially set it up was familiar with Joomla, and it works well as a content management system, which was its initial purpose. Other developers coded a community framework into Joomla, adding a custom extension. This extension was integrated into other systems, such as JIRA. And then other developers hacked in some blogging features we needed, such as tags and comments.

The other week we discussed a redesign for the site, and several of us felt that if we wanted to switch from Joomla to WordPress, now would be the time. However, after some discussion, it was decided that the cost would be too high. Developers would need to almost reinvent a dozen customizations and integration points. It would be easier and cheaper just to stay with our existing platform.

One could say the same about our wiki platform. Mediawiki was free. Some helpful extensions integrated nicely with our user database. Others added a WAM (web-access-management) component to enable single-sign-on, and little by little, it was made to work well with our other systems. Now Tom comes along and tries to make it work for documentation, but alas, Mediawiki handles documentation poorly. Most notably, its lack of content spaces makes it highly problematic. I noted in a previous post — Subpage Titles on Wikis — Challenges, Conventions, and Compromises — the problem of having all product information in the same space. If all of your product information lives in the same space, then page titles, search, and navigation all become problematic.

I won’t go to the trouble of re-articulating all the issues here. My basic point is this: As I learned more about the way Confluence provides so much customization around spaces — you can skin a space, you can provide different versions in different spaces, you can customize rights for different spaces, and so on — I started to feel jealous and then eager to experiment with this other wiki platform.

But herein lies the problem, and it is a universal problem, not just with IT. Once you’re stuck with a system, knee-deep integrated into your environment, how do you get out of it?

For example, suppose you decided to purchase a heavy-duty enterprise wide help authoring system, one that costs more than $100K. About a year into the solution, you start to feel that it’s the wrong direction. But you’ve already spent all your money on that solution, and your manager won’t be too happy to learn that all of this money was in vain, that another solution was better, cheaper, simpler, and easier. Do you keep going down the original path, because you’re already so invested in it? Should you simply try to “make it work,” because you’re three-quarters of the way across the river, and it’s silly to change horses mid-stream?

Or do you jump off that horse, swim back to the original side, and beg for money to buy a different horse, one that swims much better, and then attempt to re-cross the river? Further, suppose you’re not the only rider on the horse. Instead of the main rider, you’re a feeble child, dependent on a parent to influence for decisions? (That is often the case in an IT organization. The technical writers don’t have the bank account information for their organization, nor the free will to spend it.)

This scenario reminds me of a conference presentation I once attended on project management. It was called The Abilene Paradox. Basically, it’s a big analogy about why projects fail, and the collective mentality that supports failure. The Abilene Paradox was depicted in a video showing a group of people sitting around on a Sunday afternoon, trying to decide what to do for dinner. The father in the family says, “Well, we could go to that old diner in Abilene.” Abilene, a small city in Texas, is about 50 miles away, so it’s no small journey.

No one wants to go, but no one has a better idea, and before they know it, they all pile into a hot stuffy truck and travel 50 miles down an old highway toward Abilene. The whole way there, almost no one talks, because no one really wants to go there in the first place. When they reach the diner in Abilene, they order dinner and have a meager conversation, and then get back in the truck and drive home.

The trip takes most of the afternoon and evening, and later they start talking about why they decided to go to Abilene. It turns out the father suggested the trip in jest, not really thinking they would go. But when others agreed, he decided to agree as well. Everyone chimes in about how he or she never wanted to go but went along with it because he or she thought the others were behind the idea.

The paradox is that you have a group of people all behind a decision, working to see it through, when in fact none of them actually wants that decision.

How can you get out from under the Abilene paradox? How can you buck off ineffective systems and install what you really want, even when you’ve sunk so much money into an existing solution?

I’m not sure, but that is the crux. When you walk down vendor halls at conferences, and a salesman shows you how slick his or her tool works, it’s not that I’m not open to the idea. The tool probably does work better than the tool I’m using. It’s probably more efficient, more flexible, and better suited to the task. But the cost of switching, and moving in another direction is … oh… so… hard.

In discussing the difficulty in switching solutions, my colleague pointed out to me the theory of “sunk costs.” The basic idea of sunk costs is that however much money you’ve sunk into something, that money should not affect future decisions because the money is not recoverable. But the fact that you’ve already sunk money into a solution persuades you mentally to believe that it was the right solution, even when it wasn’t.

The Wikipedia entry on sunk costs has a great story to elaborate. The idea is that if you’ve sunk a lot of money into a solution, you’re more apt you are to believe it’s the right solution:

In 1968 Knox and Inkster, in what is perhaps the classic sunk cost experiment, approached 141 horse bettors: 72 of the people had just finished placing a $2.00 bet within the past 30 seconds, and 69 people were about to place a $2.00 bet in the next 30 seconds. Their hypothesis was that people who had just committed themselves to a course of action (betting $2.00) would reduce post-decision dissonance by believing more strongly than ever that they had picked a winner. Knox and Inkster asked the bettors to rate their horse’s chances of winning on a 7-point scale.

What they found was that people who were about to place a bet rated the chance that their horse would win at an average of 3.48 which corresponded to a “fair chance of winning” whereas people who had just finished betting gave an average rating of 4.81 which corresponded to a “good chance of winning”. Their hypothesis was confirmed: after making a $2.00 commitment, people became more confident their bet would pay off. Knox and Inkster performed an ancillary test on the patrons of the horses themselves and managed (after normalization) to repeat their finding almost identically. (See Sunk Costs.)

Sunk costs present another challenge in getting out of a system. When you’ve sunk money into a solution, you’re less likely to see the problem in an unbiased way. The sunk costs blind you with a myopia to see the solution you’ve purchased as the superior one.

Clearly the best way out of these situations is to avoid them in the first place. Before you agree to a tool or other system, evaluate it in depth. Do research, pilot tests, interview other people who have bought the product, and so on.

However, no matter how much research you do, chances are you won’t fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of the system until you’ve actually used it in a real scenario. And to really put a system to the test, you need to use it against a real project, with real users. That kind of pilot testing may take months, maybe even a year. By that time, the tool landscape may well have changed so that your initial evaluation is no longer current. An entirely new set of variables may be in effect.

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Asking questions is more important than finding answers — why?

Tom Johnson — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:56:23 +0000

This week, as I was riding my bike to work and listening to Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World (a classic fantasy/adventure book), one of the characters — was it Bayle Domon, the pirate? for the life of me, I can’t remember, nor can I find it, but he says something like this to Rand, one of the protagonists:

Sometimes asking questions is more important than finding answers.

This sentence rang instantly true in my mind. I have been trying to figure out just why.

Asking questions seems to drive creativity. It cultivates an open mind. The questions we ask lead us to new knowledge. Questions drive us to answers we never thought to consider until we asked the question.

Of course one cannot simply ask question after question, without giving any thought to answers. Such a method seems insincere in the question-asking. But rather questions lead naturally to a consideration of answers, which lead to more questions, which lead to more answers, which lead to more questions. The two move back and forth, like a lumberjack’s saw at an old oak tree, sawing through the rings with each back and forth motion until you reach the core.

Not all the questions may be worth exploring, but for every dozen, there’s a golden one that causes us to wonder. The question moves us into an idea or answer we hadn’t yet explored. The golden question cuts through several rings at once. It takes a bit of meandering until we find the question, but once found, it holds us with wonder.

Satisfaction from questions

Is it really the answer, often unattainable, that satisfies, or is it the question itself that is the appeal?

To come back to Captain Domon, he says:

No, lad, it no be the treasure that makes for seeing the world. If you find yourself a fistful of gold, or some dead king’s jewels, all well and good, but it be the strangeness you see that pulls you to the next horizon (p.339, The Eye of the World).

In the same way, questions are ships that sail us into unfamiliar territory. It’s the strangeness of the question that compels us forward, not necessarily the answers we find.

Not every question needs a meaningful answer. Part of the mystery of life is that answers are so slippery, so frequently absent. If answers were straightforward, life would hold little interest.

Dangerous territory?

When explored in the abstract, the idea of asking questions seems benign, but as soon as you go down this path, it leads you to a mentality of questioning, and that mentality can be uncomforting. Obedience to authority, submission to the “right way” of doing things, conformity to a specific morality — all of this behavior can rattle and crumble when you start questioning everything around you. Questions can be like earthquakes, making people who thought they walked on stable ground suddenly look for shelter.

Despite discouraging environments, our very nature suggests we should question. Humans are, at the core, introspective and curious. It’s what separates us from the animals. Our intellect is not merely a cleverness to build tools, but an intellect that comes from the questions we ask. If it defines our nature, why should we shy away from asking questions?

Questions and ignorance

When we start asking questions, we often come to realize how little we know. The most mundane, taken-for-granted topic can turn upside down with the right question. What we frequently forget is how little we know. It’s only when we start asking questions that we recognize our lack of knowledge. The most basic, almost fact-like idea can seem perplexing with the right question.

Interact with any child who starts asking you questions about simple things, and it becomes apparent we don’t have answers. We don’t have answers, yet we forget that we lack the answers. It’s not until the child asks the questions that we realize we don’t have the knowledge; we have only learned to act and operate with assumptions and seemingly obvious but ultimately missing information. Our acceptance of a life without answers is a learned rather than innate behavior.

Methods of questioning

Asking questions is a good strategy, but is there a methodology to questions that would yield better insight? You can develop an Aristotelian method for asking questions, comparing and contrasting, probing definitions, looking toward analogies, asking questions about classification, and such (see Aristotle’s Rhetoric). Following a heuristic for investigation like this might provide a strategic starting point for analyzing any topic.

The journalists’s handy toolbelt of who-when-what-why-where-how questions also provides a powerfully simple way to dig into a topic. But even the random questions, the ones that seem to come from no method, often lead to interesting insights. One doesn’t need a PhD in philosophy to ask a question. A five-year-old can ask as good a question as a tenured philosophy professor.

Writing and questions

I once had a discussion with someone thinking about starting a blog. He said he had counted up all the ideas he could write about, and calculated that after 28 posts, he would run out of things to say. The secret to writing is to ask questions. As long as you can ask questions, and reflect upon answers, you can never have enough space to write all your thoughts.

Writing is merely a tool for thought. It is a way to extend fuzzy ideas into intelligent constructions, building up a framework of ideas one sentence at a time. In writing we see what we think, and in seeing, we think about what we see. The two activities build on each other.

If writing is an exercise in thought, what method does thought itself follow? If you break it down, we often think in terms of questions and answers. Questions form the basis of our thoughts. We write out the answers, and generate new questions from the words we’ve written.

Technical writers and questions

Of all professions, should not a technical writer be full of questions? We must unravel how things work, not only for us, but for users in different situations. The more questions a technical writer asks, the more thorough the documentation will be.

In Ginny Redish’s Letting Go of the Words, Ginny encourages a question-and-answer dialectic with an imagined reader. What questions might a reader have? Think of the questions, and seek out the answers. It’s a brilliant strategy, a conversational game of the mind. Questions drive content. The content leads to more questions.

Swimming in a sea of questions, the technical writer’s job is anything but boring. The technical writer explores the interface with experiments and tests, exploring by trial and error to see what answers each question holds. A technical writer is a scuba diver under water, curious about each shape and color and movement ahead, curiosity and wonder propeling the diver forward.

Of all the tools a technical writer uses — graphical tools, help authoring tools, video recording tools, page layout tools — the most powerful tool is the question.