Writing Solidifies, Chat Dissolves

The important decision gets made in Slack — ten people, fifteen minutes, back and forth, emoji votes. Three months later, a new hire asks why the system works this way. Nobody remembers. The conversation scrolled away. The context is gone.

Chat is where institutional knowledge goes to die. Decisions made in real-time lack permanence and nuance. If you weren't in those fifteen minutes, you missed the entire thought process.

Writing forces clarity. Hand-waving fails on the page. The argument must stand on its own. A proposal, a memo, a design doc creates a permanent record — the future hire who joins six months from now can read why a decision was made, and the person in a different timezone can absorb the reasoning on their own schedule. The quality of the writing reflects the quality of the thinking, and the inability to articulate something clearly in prose often signals a gap in understanding.

That clarity has a prerequisite: simplicity. When writing for work, the instinct is to reach for authority — formal language, complex sentences, hedged claims. But complexity is friction. The goal is for an idea to reach the reader without them having to work to extract it. Simple writing travels further. It's easier to read, easier to share, and easier to remember.

Quick questions belong in chat. Lunch plans. "Where's that file?" Fleeting coordination. But when decisions matter — when choosing an architecture, defining a process, making a trade-off — write them down, and write them plainly.