Hello World!

Hi everyone! 👋 It’s good to be here. It’s good to be writing.

In June 2022 I attended LeadDev London. In its opening talk, Vitor Reis said, “Writing is thinking”. From the second row, I was internally screaming, “YES!!!!”.

Since I started my career, I have always cared about technical documentation. Nevertheless, I’d fall short of documenting processes, ideas, ToDos, and other valuable data. But at some point, I realised the tremendous impact of writing and writing often. Since then, I’ve become quite passionate about writing. 

This understanding came organically in two ways. On the one hand, I started to see the organisational impact writing can have: how it can preserve ideas and decisions for future consumption, how it can help teams feel at ease in shared knowledge, how it can create clear comms to minimise the impact of org reshuffles, and the list would be endless. I also witnessed, more times than not, the effect not writing can have, and it wasn’t pretty.

On the other hand, I started to do it more and more for myself. One year ago, I began to keep a series of “Morning thoughts” at work. I’d share them weekly with my manager before our 1:1s, and they became excellent conversation starters. But apart from that, they mainly intended to inspect my thoughts and ideas. And actually, the notion page on which I kept them would have at the very top a reminder for myself inspired by this quote:

The German writer and philosopher Friedrich Schiller believed in ‘withdrawing the watchers from the gate’. To be more creative, he suggested that we need to let our stranger, slightly crazy ideas get a hearing. We must not reject too soon. Later comes the business of selecting, ordering and polishing. But creativity involves being unusually willing to entertain the ridiculous and the fragmentary.

The School of Life

With this realisation of the importance and impact of writing came an enormous appreciation for the skill of writing. I’ve become a big fan of people in our profession that do it well, like my dear colleague Mattia Battiston with whom I had the privilege to work or, in the wider tech space, Gergely Orosz author of The Pragmatic Engineer.

And, modestly and little by little, I’ve been trying to improve my writing. 

And that is why I’m starting this blog. It will also be my first attempt at writing for a bigger audience than just one organisation and its members. I’ll be writing about topics I’m passionate about, chiefly leadership and organisations. Hopefully, you will find some lines in this blog inspiring or insightful. And if so, do let me know as it will probably make my day to know about it 🙂

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_{Photo credits: Notebook and coffee photo by Bookblock on Unsplash; pencil and notebook photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash.}