Writing as fuel for Jewish idea development
Writing as fuel for Jewish idea development
How writing can be institutionalized as a mechanism to encourage autonomy and completeness of thought to address the hard problems our community faces
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Part of the theme of this Substack thus far has been to underscore and not minimize the depth of challenges that exist in a variety of Jewish institutions. Changes in demographics, technology, and attitudes toward community vs the individual among other factors create an environment that is hard for many Jewish organizations to compete in. My attempt has been to put forward frameworks or ideas often borrowed from other industries to analyze how they might be applied to the uniqueness of our institutions. Perhaps obviously, none of the suggestions made are usable off the shelf and all require many layers of additional thought to assess their merit and iron out their application.
The currency of our future are new ideas. There are two pathways to evolve new ideas - Individually or in a group. The evolution of an idea in a group setting involves some measure of discussion with others. This could be a 1:1 conversation, an email chain, or a larger group conversation. The evolution of an idea by an individual could involve a single person dreaming up an idea, sleeping on it, thinking about it in everyday life, and perhaps playing with that idea on paper or in some other creative medium.
Many organizations in both the for profit and nonprofit worlds are biased toward group evolution rather than individual idea evolution. There are many plausible explanations for why this is the case from meeting oriented cultures, to a level of joy we get from debating ideas with one another, to a perceived lack of time to think outside of meetings, to a cultural bias towards buy-in which in turn requires conversations.
One way I’ve observed business organizations force individual ideation is through built-in processes that become part of their culture. These processes are a requirement to advance ideas to their next stage and become a critical means of forced individual thinking.
Below are 2 types of mechanisms I’ve observed. It’s important to note that these are intended to be mechanisms used for internal idea evolution and subsequent conversations and not necessarily reflective of the types of tactics one would present to a board of directors. These are proposed tactics for Jewish professionals to cultivate inside of their own organizations. Some of them may apply to certain types of lay leader conversations, but are beyond the scope of the arguments presented here.
2 ideation processes
1. Pre-read memos
The company most well known for popularizing meeting pre-reads is Amazon. Jeff Bezos famously remarked that their mandated “six-page narratively-structured” memo was the “smartest thing we ever did”. The way it worked is that for most meetings the meeting owner was required to produce a multi page memo that reflected their thinking on a particular topic. Amazon didn’t stop there and adopted another extreme tactic. At the beginning of the meeting everyone was required to sit in silence for a period of time reading the memo. The expectation was that people wouldn’t have read the memo ahead of time due to time constraints, but that reading the meeting owner’s framing and thinking was a far more valuable way to download the idea rather than have that meeting owner present it. The thinking went that not only was presenting less efficient, but it leaned on the presenting abilities of the meeting owner rather than their thinking process, which was the main asset for the group and organization.
While many rightfully believe that Amazon’s strict culture around pre-reads and the way they are implemented is extreme, the benefit for the meeting owner seems to hold water. In “The power of writing it down: A simple habit to unlock your brain and re-imagine your life” the author Allison Fallon argues that when we write down our thoughts and ideas, we are forced to slow down and think more deeply about them. This can help us to clarify our thinking and to develop a better understanding of ourselves and our world. While this book goes into a variety of reasons for writing down emotions and other deeper personal thoughts, the argument for topical reflection resonates.
Applications for Jewish institutions
I’m not sure this idea requires much interpolation. Similar to for profit business organizations, Jewish institutions evolve based on the thinking of individual ideas combining with debate from groups of people to eventually establish consensus. We have a long tradition of spirited debate, but how might we think about shifting the scales toward written ideation and deeper individual thinking?
Instead of powerpoint, agendas written into emails, or nothing, what if we adopted a stricter stance on writing down individual thinking?
What if there was an expectation that for meetings that go 60 beyond minutes some kind of memo was required? How would we classify the types of meetings that this would be most valuable for?
What if we set a cultural expectation that pre-reads should be sent 24 hours before a meeting and that participants should carve out 10 minutes to read them?
An institution who took this seriously would need to come up with their own version of what a pre-read means and implement it in a way that felt comfortable for them.
The point is that this forced mechanism could encourage thinking at a level of depth appropriate for the types of hard problems we need to solve in the Jewish community, and do more to focus our meetings on evolving the content rather than simply downloading on it.
The hard part is the cultural shift required to instill an idea like this. In essence a leader is asking a segment of people to shift how they spend their time and focus on a medium of thought that might be uncomfortable for them. This isn’t easy, but does serve as one mechanism of moving the dial from group-think to deep individual-think.
2. Standardized “product briefs”
This concept is taken from the field I was part of previously, product management. Product managers are responsible for combining ideas, customer data, and competitive analogies to assemble actionable strategies and sell them to management before working with engineers and designers to implement them.
A very common tool that organizations mandate their product managers use to pitch new investments is something called a product brief. A brief typically comes with standard sections such as: Problem we’re trying to solve, description of target audience, customer data gathered, resources required, measures of success, and risks. A brief is used as both a consensus building document with executives as well as a handoff document to designers and developers to understand the “why” behind the feature. For business executives the brief serves as a jumping off point for debate on the merits of a particular feature. For designers and engineers the brief clarifies the thinking behind an idea, gathers their unique functional feedback, and then serves as a permanent record of the assumptions behind a particular idea.
Similar to a pre-read memo a significant amount of the value behind a brief is the forced structured thinking it requires a product manager to do in advance of conversation and debate. It uses structure to ensure completeness, but it also gives the product manager a pallet to refine their own thinking. Effective product management leaders set up a precedent with how they poke holes in a brief that creates discipline among individual product managers and sets an expectation of rigor.
Applications for Jewish institutions
The reality is that Jewish institutions are like for profit organizations in that they have a finite amount of resources that they attempt to allocate according to their priorities.
The goals of any written process to validate certain investment types are:
1. Give employees a forum to express their ideas and clarify their own thinking.
2. Make sure of the ‘bigness’ of new ideas in order to maximize their yield.
3. Reinforce the connection between ideas and the organization’s strategy.
Here are a few everyday examples across 3 organization types that might lend themselves to a brief:
JCC - Imagine a fitness lead who believes that the JCC needs to respond to the pickleball craze and develop a program of their own. The purpose of a brief in this case is not necessarily to clarify a financially significant investment for the JCC, but instead to force the fitness lead to think “big” and articulate the scope of an idea like this. The brief could answer strategic questions like: What are the characteristics of the best pickleball centers? Does this allow us to pull in a new demographic or cater to an existing one? What level of instructor expertise is required to do this in a way that meets customer expectations? These types of questions are not the ones a fitness lead might be accustomed to answering, but executives could use this exercise as a professional development opportunity for the fitness lead who might not be used to articulating their thinking in this way.
Social Service Organization - Imagine a soup kitchen manager who wants to make the case to expand the capacity of its dining area. This manager has a meeting coming up with senior leadership and wants to effectively make their case. The value of a written document in this situation is for this person to individually explore the pros and cons of this decision. There are likely multiple dimensions to making this decision including expansion of mission, the capital cost, the increased operating cost, 2nd and 3rd order impacts of expanding capacity, and improving the case for funders, among others. If these types of decisions come up frequently there might be merit in creating a template or a brief. If these decisions are less than common, perhaps a template is not necessary and it’s sufficient to set an expectation that the preparation to present a concept like this at a meeting should involve a pre-read.
Day School - Imagine an admissions lead who believes the organization should be investing in a staff person dedicated to community events. A brief could articulate the importance of community events in the day school funnel, present data on the time they require from administrators, and talk about how they build community among current and prospective parents as a means of mission reinforcement. Again, the answer to hire this person might be obvious to the school head, but the point in the brief is to force completeness and bigness of thinking.
Conclusion
The takeaway should not be that for-profit institutions flawlessly integrate processes to ensure deep strategic thinking inside of their organizations. I’ve been part of 4 companies over the course of my career and I’ve seen countless examples of a push inside of each to instill a level of autonomy that allows people at any level to submit and evolve ideas. Most of those efforts involved a structured process for writing up ideas. I’ve also seen companies I’ve been part of adopt some modicum of the pre-read idea.
I would say that 80% of these efforts have failed. The cases that have succeeded have been ones where the leader of the organization deeply believed in the importance of these mechanisms to generate the benefits described above and was committed to a longer term process of refinement. In most cases there is an acknowledgement of the potential benefits and a good willed effort to reinstate processes that involve writing, but a lack of will to stick with them over time.
Writing it down is not a cure-all for solving problems of depth, but there is strong logic behind creating a forcing function to allow individuals to explore their own creativity for the benefit of our organizations.
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The Business of Jewish is written by Boston based consultant Ari Sussman. Read his other articles here: