Write Like You Own It

There was once an engineering leader who wanted his junior developers to learn to make better decisions. So he said, “Don’t bother asking me for a review. Whatever code you submit is going straight into production.” 

He found, no surprise, they were painstakingly thorough. I wrote about it for him and have never forgotten the lesson.

Fast forward. We at Fenwick sometimes struggle to get clients to review our creative work. I suspect we are not alone in this and it sometimes creates spectacular delays. One project that should have taken 10 weeks took 10 months. In another, articles took an average of 63 days. In both cases, the projects resembled atoms—99% empty space. Days of work followed by months of silence. 

You can try to hasten those reviews by setting what we call containers for feedback, which gives the request a helpful structure: “Please review for ideas, not grammar. This will only take 10 minutes.” But that doesn’t always work. No matter how small the ask, it is still an ask and some people are busied into such a vegetal state at work that anything is too much.

Which led to the question, why must the client review at all? 

I sat on that thought for a long while. What if everything we produced was good enough to go straight to production—just like those junior engineers and their code? If we see our writing live on the client’s website two hours after submission, which does happen, shouldn’t we say, “Good, I stand by that”? This invites a very different sort of thinking than most creatives are used to. It demands a more stoical, self-arising energy, and stronger executive function. After a small try, I was hooked.

So we minted a new principle: Strong Defaults. It requires that anything we submit be good enough to be the final product. It often is. And further, we don’t wait for the client to review. We give them a review window and say, “If we don’t hear back by Wednesday, this material is locked and we’ll proceed.”

Our clients can toggle Strong Defaults on or off during kickoff. The idea of it gives some of them vertigo—they think of their compliance team and say, "OFF, please." But that’s no issue. They accept any delays. It's always their choice.

Whereas about half our clients learn about Strong Defaults and grin—they realize we are freeing them from the cyclical servitude of redundant reviews. We are helping them reality-proof their operation so they can actually repeatedly publish. Because that's the goal, isn't it? What good is a timely article finished two months late?

Some content is better for it. Some is not. But it unleashes us to keep the ideas flowing and sometimes, that's what's called for.

Principle

♟️ Strong Defaults
We believe defaults are powerful. We always craft our default offerings with care because we know sometimes, the client won't review and our first draft will be final. We prepare for that, and build our programs to succeed despite delay, powered by nothing more than our best judgment if need be.

How to apply today’s story

Pick a reviewer in your life and give Strong Defaults a try. Instead of waiting for approvals, give them approval windows. See what changes in you and your reviewer.

In the next issue

Why we limit reviews to 1-3 people. 

Inside Fenwick

One day soon I can imagine clients reviewing most of our work in Figma, not Google Docs. That's because it's become so easy to mock things up there, it'd be crazy not to show clients a preview of the finished work.

Give it a try: Use this template for LinkedIn posts and profiles, and this plugin to convert web pages into editable Figma files. Thanks Chloe Phan for the tip.

In other news, this is our 100th newsletter issue and Caroline has encouraged me to share an early issue below, from 2017, as a sense of how far we've come. It's only just found itself, really. I'm excited to share the new name soon. 

Worth reading

$25 to be featured in The New Yorker. It works because they didn’t want it.

American. There WeTransfer goes again, doing important stuff.

Teach your team to own. “The problem was bigger than occasional slowdowns during sick days. It meant that people responsible for driving millions of dollars in revenue didn’t know how to write a call-to-action that could convert."

50 lessons from marketing leaders.

We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model. A simply epic read. Soaring analogy and I am a cognitive-bias junkie to whom this had never occurred. 

Risky marketing. Strong point, strong writing.

Runway. What a novel website. 

Design Gal. Another, actually oddly similar.

More sites. Who wore it better? Burger or burger.

Did you know A24 sells its screenplays in beautifully designed bound books?

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