"What's a camel? A horse designed by a committee."
-- Old but frighteningly accurate saw
Writing by committee is one of the worst mistakes in communications, and one that most always grows from the best of intentions. The well-meaning PR manager circulates drafts to all the major content providers, and to the executives who may lend additional comments. Their goal is to ensure that the document is accurate and expresses the company's key messages. And if everyone in the process concerned themselves with just those issues, life would be good. The company's writing would be short, punchy, and coherent.
Okay, now say goodbye to Oz. It's back to the real world. The lead engineer packs in 400 words of speeds and feeds that Thomas Edison couldn't understand on his best day. The CFO, who doesn't really even have a stake in this release, remembers that he's the most elegant writer since Voltaire and "wordsmiths" the lead until it's denser than frozen Georgia clay. The product marketing manager changes every "said" to "commented." And the evening before the company is supposed to issue the piece, the CEO says the focus is all wrong and orders a major rewrite.
What began as a conscientious effort to ensure accuracy and executive buy-in yields rambling, incoherent writing with jerky narrative flow and poorly expressed key messages, all produced at the cost of last-minute scrambling that usually causes mistakes. Never mind that this scenario gives writers revenge fantasies that would gag a vampire. The more important point is that writing by committee makes your company look small time, if not outright scatterbrained. Words, phrases and sentences are often inserted with no regard for context.
In the not-so-distant past, we worked with a client to draft a release about a product upgrade. Our original two-and-a-half page draft emphasized the product's benefits to customers in non-technical language. When it went through the client's approval mill it came out with fewer original parts than the USS Constitution, and way less aesthetic value. Look at what happened to the lead paragraph. The before and after have been altered to protect the guilty:
Before:
Excelsior Corp. today released a new version of its Excalibur Web development suite that makes order processing and delivery almost 200 percent faster than the current generation of e-commerce technology. Excalibur 5.0 provides companies with a customer service advantage over competitors by processing and shipping thousands of orders in minutes, rather than the hours that traditional Web commerce systems need.
After:
Excelsior Corp., the leading provider of intelligent, out-of-the-box Web commerce applications for the retail, manufacturing, health care and financial services industries, today announced the availability of its industry-leading Excalibur 5.0 Web development suite, which features cutting-edge functionality such as support for symmetric multi-processing, higher transaction throughput, and Microsoft-compliant development tools that promote optimal Web commerce application design and performance through compliance with industry standards.
The first version might not have been fresh off the Muse's pen, but it was direct and benefit-oriented. A reader could tell why they might be interested. In the second version, you can almost see where different camps weighed in: marketing with high-level positioning; engineering with technical details, etc. The point isn't that we're smarter or sharper than our client was; they were both. The point is not that they were a bad company; they weren't. But they didn't know how to speak one voice. They wrote by committee. And yes, just in case you're curious, it got worse as you read deeper into the release.
The solution is easy from a practical standpoint, though it can be difficult politically. One person in the process has to have final say – authority to tell the others that this is going, and this is staying, and it's being returned to the writer with instructions to smooth over the rough spots. This person is, ideally, a competent writer or at least an organized thinker who is either in the executive management team or has their support. Along with the company's PR machinery, this person is responsible for making sure the document's major stakeholders have a chance to weigh in early and that their points are addressed. The goal is to make sure everyone's input has meaningful effects – not to just cut people out for expediency's sake. Some political skill wouldn't hurt either, but the ultimate goal is to represent your company with quality writing. Or, as the quote at the top of this article suggests, you can lope along on a camel while your competitors ride horses.
Posting from a frustrated writer on the Web site "Stone Soup:"
The document is due out on Wednesday, but we haven't a $*@#% chance of meeting the deadline, as everyone is seeking the perfect document. Some people cannot let go, especially when they know they have the chance to keep going. And going.
- Mike McGrail, Director & Senior Writer
