Recently I moved areas and roles. Everything is new and I’m having to figure out what to spend time on. One of the first things I’m focussing on is blogging. If you’re part of the teams I work with, you’ll have heard me say things like:

“This sounds like great blogging material”

“Have you thought about putting this in a blog?”

“You should really write a blog about this”

“Have you seen this awesome blog by xyz?”

“This is great, you should share that with the wider $company”

But why do I focus so much on internal blogs?

Here’s a snapshot of my reasons and some hypotheses I have.

The obvious reasons

• To practice writing. Over time you’ll get better and faster at writing blogs. It’s easier to start earlier in your career.
• Blogging helps you translate something into language that people outside your immediate team can understand.
  • Hypothesis: Blogging will improve your communication skills and help with your career.
• Blogging scales and your blogs will outlive your time at $company
• Blogs give you something to look back on in a few months or years.

The not so obvious reasons (my favourite kind)

• Verify understanding and improve learning. Our brain loves to trick us into believing that we understand things that we don’t quite understand. Writing something down in your own words is a test and you’ll actually learn and remember it much better.
• Blogging is challenging. It takes guts. You definitely have to be brave enough to put yourself and your thoughts out there. Getting out of your comfort zone is important. 
• Blogging gives you permission to pause and reflect. It’s so easy to float down the river of Jiras and Slack messages forever
  • Hypothesis: Blogging as exposure therapy. We all have FOMO on delivery work, mobbing sessions, etc. Blogging teaches people that pausing and leaving the busy delivery river for a while isn’t that bad. As a consequence bloggers will start doing other reflective/growth/strategic/reciprocal activities.
• You do something selfless. (Not all posts are like that but some definitely are.) You put time and effort into helping other people and the wider company. This is my favourite reason. I consider that a crucial ingredient of our culture. It sends a signal that this (doing stuff that benefits other people) is something we do here at $company.
  • Hypothesis: Writing blogs (for other people) results in more reciprocity
  • Hypothesis: Writing blogs (for other people) encourages other beneficial collaboration on bigger and harder problems.
• Create a learning organisation and a core ingredient to create a curious and safe  environment..
• Blogging increases your Luck Surface area. That concept is something Logan Mortimer taught me. It goes like this:

The Surface Area of Luck, or your chance of being lucky, is equivalent to the action you take towards your passion, multiplied by the number of people you effectively communicate your passion and activities to.

Put simply: Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling.

Surface Area of Luck

• Internal blogging as a gateway drug to external blogging (for the company blog for example)
  • Helps your personal brand
  • Helps attract talent
• And lastly Visibility. Visibility matters. Nobody tells you, but it matters. Here’s a quote from the Staff Engineer book:

And another quote with some examples including my enthusiastic annotations:

Easier beginnings

Often people don’t know where to begin or even what to write about. From experience, a small nudging comment like:

• “This sounds like great blogging material”
• “Have you thought about putting this in a blog?”
• “This is great, you should share that with the wider company”

is often enough to remove the initial friction and unblock people. Try it. Happy nudging.