I can write so you must read

The above statement is obviously wrong but this is really what is happening in a lot of places. It was brought to my attention by a great writeup on Fight the Bull called FYI: I am useless. The general point is that while it has been hard to write something up for others to read a long time ago, a real effort was put into it. Now, writing something down is a lot easier, especially in eMail. Blogging makes you aware of the importance of saying it right but it’s still damn easy. All this pushes the “problem” to the recepient. This actually goes beyond the idea of information overload. It’s also that we often don’t share our tacit knowledge too easily, rather just sending around a short blurb of codified knowledge which is just a tiny subset of out tacit knowledge and requires a big effort on the part of the receiver to make into real usable knowledge. eMail is just for sharing information, it’s not for sharing experience. But as experience is something that needs time and interaction to convey we tend to use eMail and just push in all the information we believe is needed to give the other side the experience and often we even forget that. We forget that we have a lot more information in our heads that in the lines we wrote. Years and years ago, someone would have taken great pain in writing down exactly what they thought and how they felt. Now, as the title of the Fight the Bull post says, we often just say “FYI…” For a good atmosphere, good learning, good interaction, you really need to pay attention to that.