Confession of a Blogger: Writing for Myself

Illustration of Adrian Segar writing, half-obscured by a curtainI have a confession to make. Though I’ve written over a thousand blog posts for this website, to be honest, I’m often writing for myself.

Writing for oneself is as old as writing itself. Writers have always written privately. Famous writers like Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. And countless amateurs like me, writing private journals not for publication.

Private journaling

There have been years in my life when I’ve journaled daily, struggling to record and make sense of my experiences. Journaling privately helped me uncover and process what I was going through. Eventually, I stopped journaling, but I kept what I’d written for a long time. Until, one day, I flipped through my journals and realized I didn’t need to keep them anymore.

Private freewriting

While trying to become a writer, I practiced freewriting for several years. Freewriting helped me realize that I could write, that I was a writer. I still have those journals. Though I wrote everything in them for myself, I published one story — “The Batch Fixer” — on this blog last year.

Writing for myself

Although this blog contains posts for anyone to read, I’m often also writing for myself. For example, my post earlier this month: “Nine practical tips to letting go in a chaotic world“; believe me, I’m working on them myself. My posts on meditation, listening, and facilitation are often attempts for me to understand and put into practice what I’m writing about.

So, while I’m sharing advice that you, dear reader, may find helpful, I’m also writing for myself.

A hat tip to my men’s group for the inspiration for this post. We are going on an outing to Emily Dickinson’s home. Dickinson’s only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems and one letter.

Becoming a writer

Becoming a writer: an illustration of a young black woman deep in thought, sitting at her desk as she begins to write her first book This is not another success story about becoming a writer.

Outwardly, I’ve succeeded. Since 2005, I’ve written three successful books on meeting design and facilitation and over 800 weekly blog posts on a wide range of topics. About half a million words so far. My books continue to sell, and this blog is the world’s most popular website on meeting design and facilitation.

What I want to share is my struggle to become a writer, in the hope that it may inspire at least one struggling writer to persevere.

Why?

Because…

• I suffered through a long period when writing a book seemed to be something I would never be able to do; and

• So many well-known writers imply that all you need to do is figure out how to organize your writing routine, whereupon turning out hundreds of words a day becomes no big deal. This is not true for 99.99% of mortals.

So here’s my story.

Write a book? You must be joking!

For the first fifty years of my life, I wrote very little. I went to a British school designed to cram students’ brains with what they needed to know to get into Oxford or Cambridge University. Choosing to be a physicist dictated that my English classes ended when I was 16 so I could exclusively study math and science.

In college, the only writing I did was lab reports, answers to physics questions, tests, and exams, and my Ph.D. thesis. Yes, my thesis was a book, but the required thesis style was so formal that it was easy for me to use the form.

My 1977 Ph.D. thesis

After a postdoctoral year at Tufts, I went on to manage a solar manufacturing company, teach college computer science, and develop a successful information technology consulting practice. I wrote what was needed for these careers, but nothing substantial.

And then in 2005, twenty-eight years later, I felt compelled to write a book about the new ways I’d developed to design and lead conferences that became what the participants wanted and needed. A dozen years of designing and facilitating these events, together with their enthusiastic reception, had convinced me that what I’d created was valuable and important.

I would never have become a writer if I had not felt this strong desire and excitement to share what I had stumbled upon with a wider audience.

Jerry Weinberg‘s Writing Lesson Number One states:

“Never attempt to write something you don’t care about.”

Jerry was right. I would need every scrap of my conviction about the importance of peer conferences to persist in what followed.

Trying to write

To my dismay, when I sat down in 2005 and attempted to turn my thoughts into a book, I was unable to write more than a few coherent sentences before giving up in despair.

It took me weeks to flush out the simplest outline. Even writing one small section of the book seemed a hopeless task.

I tried many things. I:

  • set aside time to write every day;
  • created a special place in my home to write;
  • tried dictating into an early version of Dragon Dictate.

Nothing worked.

I felt stupid and incompetent. Attendees loved my events! The most common feedback was along the lines of “This was so great! I don’t want to go to another traditional conference again.” And yet I was incapable of putting into words the why? and the how? of what I routinely did at the conferences I convened and led.

After months of struggle, I might have given up if I hadn’t participated in a five-day Writer Workshop led by Jerry Weinberg in New Mexico. Jerry’s workshop helped me experience and believe that I was a competent, creative writer who needed to keep writing to get better. I began to write spontaneously about interesting experiences I was having. (Here’s a piece I like that I wrote in twenty minutes: “The Batch Fixer“.)

Despite my boosted confidence, I continued to stumble to write my book. True, I was also working, scaling back my IT consulting business, but I had plenty of time to write. My difficulties were not caused by lack of time. Instead, I felt largely incapable of writing sentences that conveyed what I wanted to say.

Yet somehow, I persevered.

My struggle lasted two years.

Slow progress, eventually leading to triumph

In 2007, something changed. There was no blinding flash of insight. The change came about through practice man, practice. But, slowly, I began to be able to write in ways that didn’t cause me to throw up my hands in frustration.

It took another two years to complete the draft of my first book. I found a wonderful editor, Anne Lezak, who was incredibly encouraging. Towards the end of our working relationship, she told me I was a good writer!

Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love was published in 2009. It was recognized fairly quickly as an important book on meeting design. 18 years later, the book is still in print and people continue to buy it!

Today, I am not a great writer, but a competent and, I hope, sometimes interesting one. Writing has become easier for me, though I still struggle at times. I continue to post every week on this blog, something I’ve been doing since 2009.

Three lessons I learned that may be helpful to you

Avoid reading successful writers’ descriptions of how they work! Why? Because every writer’s journey and process is different. Mine was unique, and yours will be too.

Don’t spend too much time learning from others. There are hundreds of decent books about the process of learning to write. I have thirty of them, mostly purchased as a distraction from actually practicing writing. If you only read one, make it Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. If you’re writing nonfiction, also consider Jerry Weinberg’s Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method.

Seek encouragement. Jerry’s workshop was a life-saver for me. Join a writing group. (I didn’t, but the right one would have helped.) In particular, share your plans for the book with people and writers you respect. I had lunch alone with Jerry during his workshop. His enthusiasm for my conference design work was a huge boost. I also benefited greatly from Naomi Karten‘s kind encouragement both in person and via email. Find your own mentors and use them sparingly and with appreciation. They can be a big help.

Final word

During his workshop, Jerry took us to a local writer’s group. I’ll always remember his big smile when I announced there, for the first time in my life: “I am a writer!” Jerry had primed us to do this when we were asked about ourselves! I’m not sure I fully believed it at the time, but now I can say it with confidence.

“I am a writer!”

My wish is for you to be able to say “I am a writer!” and know it’s true.

The Batch Fixer

I freewrote The Batch Fixer contemporaneously on April 10, 2006, in twenty minutes while waiting for a flight at Dallas Fort Worth airport. Enjoy!
The batch fixer. A worried man wearing a rumpled business suit sits talking on a phone at an airport.He’s sitting four chairs to my left. All was quiet when I chose this little island of seats on a ramp away from the C concourse gates. No cell phones in evidence, though I didn’t expect that to continue. What I didn’t know was that in the following 15 minutes, I would hear the word “batch“ spoken by one person more times than I’ve ever heard it in my entire life.

I don’t know where he is from — my knowledge of American accents is poor. He has a problem that I slowly and painfully piece together over a series of phone conversations.

The customer had received a batch – 30 gallons sprayed on — and it was the wrong color. The customer had received a new batch, which was the right color, rejected the new batch because it didn’t match, and returned the new batch to the factory. The factory had called to say that there was nothing wrong with the new batch. Joe had done a wet test, on paper and wood. He’d confirmed that the old batch was incorrect in some way. The salesman, who, by now I had given the name, Harry, had talked to several people, who also talked a lot and found that they didn’t want to replace the old batch because the customer would find out that they’d been sent a color that they had already used which wasn’t correct.

So Joe was going to create a blend of the old and new colors and send it to the customer.

By this time, I have formed a firm opinion of Harry’s organization. People there have officially defined roles. They like to talk and are ready to justify why things happen the way they do and why this isn’t their fault. Poor Harry is the fixer, the guy that has to get a solution for his customer and keep everyone else happy too, especially his boss. As he places his calls with one person after another, I hear different facets of the story. More details for Carmen, requests to the unknown boss for directions, a steady stream of justifications, and next steps for Joe.

Harry is patient and doesn’t lose his cool for a minute. He talks through the layers of bureaucracy and responsibility, his nasal voice constantly overlaying his discussion of the old batch, new batch, wet test, drawdowns on paper and wood, the shorthand of his working life, a code in which he swims, only translating when necessary.

He has left now. The flurry of calls eventually petered out with a sense that the problem had been handled, contained, until tomorrow at least when he will meet with Joe and start another round of negotiations and persistent persuasion.

While this was going on, I felt insulated. I had been reading a book on improv — on adjusting to circumstances in the moment and riffing. And here was Harry, batching it, batch, batch, batch, and my mind skipped and reeled as the flurry of batch punches assaulted my ears, delivered into my brain, flummoxing me into a place of inability to grok my reading.

I could’ve moved, put on my headphones, or inserted my earplugs. I thought of doing this. And yet I stayed with Harry, oddly fascinated. I wondered whether what Harry batched would suddenly be revealed. Would he suddenly break character, crack, stand up and scream, swear under his breath? But he did not. He wheedled his way to a temporary solution and stalked off to his gate, the fixer doing his job — fixing the batch.

750 posts

750 posts My WordPress dashboard tells me I’ve written 750 posts since I began this blog exactly thirteen years ago. At least one new post every week since 2009. I have a few thoughts.

Surprise and delight

If you had told me back in November 2009 that I would be posting on this blog every week for the next 13 years I would not have believed you. I’d be sure that I would have run out of things worth saying. Yet I am still writing weekly posts — over half a million words to date! — with a healthy set of new ideas biding their time in drafts.

Did I underestimate my creative ability? Could I not see that my lifelong curiosity would guarantee the ongoing discovery of new things to write about? Did my initial difficulty putting pen to paper convince me that I’d never be able to keep up the effort to write something new week after week?

Probably all of the above. Educated in a Victorian-era environment, I was taught that creative people were artists and poets, not scientists like me. As a lifelong learner, I’ve always been curious and asked questions, so it turned out I will always be learning new things about the world and myself, some of which may be worth sharing. And after struggling for four years to write my first book, it was natural to assume that writing would always be hard for me.

So I’m surprised and delighted that I still have something to say. However, whether I would have kept writing continually since 2009 depends on an additional factor.

Gratitude

In 2009, about a million new blogs were started. As far as I know, no one was blogging about meeting design. There weren’t any obvious ways to let anyone know what I was writing about. Googling “meeting design” returned hits about meetings for designers. In 2009, this website received a mere 24,238 page views. Was I wasting my time?

Well, apparently not. The following year somehow brought in over 400,000 page views. The popularity of this website grew steadily, and it now gets about five million page views annually, putting it in the top one million active websites.  Not bad for a niche site on a topic that few people ever think about!

And this growth has come about from tens of thousands of folks who have visited, subscribed to, and linked to my posts. ~1,300 subscribers get an email whenever I post. Social media, especially Twitter, brings significant traffic. And search engines are no longer flummoxed by the concept that people want well-designed meetings.

I am so grateful. Grateful to you: my subscribers, the folks who share my posts, and the thousands of people who have purchased my books. Without your engagement, support, and continuous encouragement, I would have given up long ago.

And, of course, I’m grateful for the friendships that have grown between us, the in-person and online experiences we’ve had together, and the community that we’ve developed over the years.

Love

Speaking of community brings me to love. Yes, love. We don’t talk much about love in the professional sphere. Isn’t it a little unseemly? Expression of pleasure and happiness is okay, but being genuinely effusive about loving your work might be awkward.

And, sure, most of us—me included—have spent time or are still spending time doing work that we really don’t fundamentally love. Which is a shame, even if it’s virtually unavoidable.

I have been blessed with finding work that I truly love to do.

(No, not every minute of every day of course. Writing posts, for example, isn’t always the most pleasant activity when you’re driven to share something new just about every Monday morning.)

For the last thirteen years, designing and facilitating hundreds of events, writing books that have influenced how meetings are thought about and held, and sharing a growing body of (now) 750 posts have been a privilege and a pleasure!

I love what I’ve done, the community that has made it possible, and the possibilities of an unknown future.

What more could I want?

I love you all.

Meetings are a mess—and how they got that way

meetings are a mess: a screenshot from Apple's famous "1984" commercial of uniformed men sitting on benches, staring forwardsMeetings are a mess. Let’s explore that.

Broadcast is the hundreds-of-years-dominant paradigm for sessions, conferences, and meetings. Most of the time, one person presents and everyone else listens and watches. Why?

“Things are the way they are because they got that way.”
—Quip attributed to Kenneth Boulding

I think there are two principal historical reasons: one shaped by technology, the other by culture.

How technology shapes our system of education

Perhaps you’re thinking: Technology? Isn’t technology a relatively recent development? How could technology have influenced how we learned hundreds of years ago?

To answer these questions, let’s take a journey back in time. It’ll take a while, but stay with me! I’ll shine some light on some rarely-examined foundations of our current educational paradigm.

Understandably, we tend to think of technology these days as material devices like cars, printers, and smartphones or, increasingly, as computer programs: software and apps. But this is an incredibly restrictive viewpoint. Such a definition of what is and isn’t “technology” is far too narrow.

What is “technology”?

“Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.”
—Alan Kay, at a Hong Kong press conference in the late 1980s

An older reader will immediately recognize a typewriter, but a child might stare in puzzlement at a 1945 Smith-Corona Sterling. A device found on a table at a yard sale appears to be a piece of rusty sculpture until a Google search reveals it’s a ninety-year-old cherry stoner. By Alan Kay’s definition, anything made after you became aware is technology. Anything really old, we don’t even recognize as technology!

This worldview exists because human beings are incredibly good at adapting to new circumstances. Such an ability greatly increases our chances of surviving a hostile and treacherous world. But there’s a downside. When we start making changes to our environment by making useful things, what was once new becomes a part of our everyday existence. In the process, what was formerly new becomes largely invisible to our senses, focused as they are on the new and unexpected. As David Weinberger remarks: “Technology sinks below our consciousness like the eye blinks our brain filters out.

A wider definition of technology

So let’s adopt a wider definition of technology and see where it takes us. I’ve been influenced here by Kevin Kelly, in his thought-provoking book What Technology Wants.

Technology is anything made to solve a problem.
—Adrian’s definition, a paraphrase of Wikipedia’s definition of technology

This definition is useful because it opens our eyes to technology that we have been using for a very long time.

Science, writing, and language

For example, by this definition, science is technology! Science is just a way that we’ve invented to understand the patterns we notice in the world we live in.

Science is old. Writing is older; it allows us to communicate asynchronously with each other.

Writing is technology!

And oldest of all—we don’t know how old—language is technology. Every culture and tribe has its language it has invented to solve the problem of real-time communication between its members.

These technologies are so old that they are invisible to us. They are part of our culture, the human air we breathe. Language, writing, and science are tools outside our conventional, narrow-scope view of technology. We instantiate these tools using invented conventions: sounds, gestures, and symbols. These sounds, gestures, and symbols, however, are secondary features of these ancient technologies. Ultimately, language, writing, and science are primarily about human process.

Human process technology

Human process has become the most invisible technology. It is inexorably and continually built into every one of us by our culture, starting the moment we are born, before we can speak, write, or reason. Our culture teaches us throughout our lives the signs, sounds, and movements that signify. We are superbly equipped to learn to speak, write, and think before we have any self-awareness of what we are being taught.

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
—Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Our awareness of the processes we constantly use to learn and make sense of the world and to connect with others is minimal. It’s like breathing, largely automatic and unconscious. As a result, the old process technology that we adopted for practical purposes long before recorded history continues to shape our lives today.

Think for a moment about the impact of language on our species. Before language arose, we had no way to transfer what we learned during our all-too-brief lives to our tribe and following generations. “These plants are safe to eat.” “You can make a sharp spearhead from this rock.” “Snakes live in that cave.” Every individual had to painfully acquire such learning from scratch. Language allowed parents and tribe elders to pass on valuable knowledge orally, improving survival and quality of life

Similarly, the later development of writing made it possible to share, physically transfer, and expand a permanent repository of human knowledge. The evolution of the process methodology of science enabled us to design experiments about our world, codify the patterns we discovered, and turn them into inventions that transform our lives.

The effect of technology on education

Now we’re ready to consider the effect of the historical development of language, writing, and science on education. For almost all of human history, language was our dominant mode of communication and our single most important educational tool. If you wanted to learn something you had to travel physically to where someone knew what you needed to learn and they would then tell it to you. Eventually, schools developed: establishments for improving the efficiency of oral communication of information by bringing many students together so they could learn simultaneously from one teacher.

Language reigned supreme for millennia, thus becoming an invisible technology. Only when writing became established it was finally possible to asynchronously transmit information. By that time, the model of the single teacher and multiple students was buried deep in our collective psyche, and, to a large extent, the book paradigm mirrored the language process since most books were written by a single expert and absorbed by a much larger number of readers.

(The very word lecture beautifully illustrates the adoption of old models that took place during the development of writing. The word is derived from the Latin lectūra which means—to read! The first books were so rare that a group who wished to study a book’s content would have someone read the book out loud while the others copied down what they heard.)

Even science started as an individual enterprise. The early study of “natural philosophy” by Socrates, Aristotle, and others used an oral teacher-student model. Although science today is largely an intensely cooperative enterprise, we still see considerable leftovers of the older invisible technologies in its societal organization: prescribed progressions towards mastery of fields, formal paths to tenure, the format of academic meetings, etc.

The effects of invisible technologies

What are the effects of these powerful invisible technologies on our educational archetypes? Technologies like language, writing, and science are thousands of years old. So it becomes very difficult for people to consider learning models other than broadcast. Even though other models may be far more appropriate these days.

The earliest organized religious schools are a few thousand years old. The oldest non-religious universities began nearly a thousand years ago. For centuries, oral learning was the predominant modality in what we would recognize as schools. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century that a significant number of people were able to learn independently from books and newspapers, which are, of course, still a form of broadcast media.

Even though the invention of inexpensive mass-printing revolutionized society, the old broadcast teaching models were sunk so deeply and invisibly into our culture that they have persisted to this day. When you are taught by broadcast by teachers who were taught by broadcast it is not surprising that when you are asked to teach in turn, you employ the same methods. And this ancient cultural conditioning, which we are largely unaware of, is very difficult to break.

As adults, when we create a meeting we are thus naturally primed to choose a broadcast paradigm for the “learning” portions. As a society, we are mostly unaware of our conditioning by past centuries of broadcast learning. And when it is brought to our attention, it is still very difficult for an individual to break away from the years of broadcast process to which he has been subjected as a child.

The process we’ve been using for so long inhibits our ability to consider alternatives. But the quantity of “knowledge” that we currently expect adults to possess also plays a role. This leads us to the second reason why broadcast methodology infuses meetings.

How culture shapes our system of education

For most of human history, learning was predominantly experiential. Life expectancy was low by modern standards and formal education nonexistent. Even after schools began to become important institutions, curricula were modest. In the Middle Ages, formal education of children was rare; in the fifteenth century, only a small percentage of European children learned to read and write, usually as a prerequisite for acceptance as a guild apprentice.

Up until around a hundred years ago, advanced education was only available for a tiny number of students. The expectations for those entering university were laughable by today’s standards. Isaac Newton, for example, received no formal mathematics teaching until he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661. Students didn’t routinely learn algebra, even at university, until the eightieth century. In the Victorian era, secondary school students mastered the “three R’s”—reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic—plus perhaps a few other topics like needlework (girls only), geography, and history.

The drivers of education

The need for jobs has driven education since the birth of apprenticeship programs in the Middle East four millennia ago. Apprenticeship remained the dominant model of education until the advent of the Industrial Revolution when apprenticeship no longer matched the growing needs for workers just-enough capable of handling repetitive work plus some with specialized new trainable skills like bookkeeping and shop work. A period of emphasis on career and technical education ensued. Once formal education became a social and legislative requirement for a majority of children, curriculum wars erupted between the conflicting goals of content and pedagogy. These wars have been with us in some form ever since.

Whatever you think about the relative merits of “traditionalist” and “progressive” approaches to education (see Tom Loveless’s The Curriculum Wars for a good overview), the key cultural reason why broadcast methods remain firmly embedded in our children’s education is the sheer quantity of knowledge that society—for whatever reasons—is determined to cram into young heads during formal education. As the brief history above illustrates, we now require young adults to absorb a staggering diversity and quantity of topics compared to our expectations of the past.

As a result, there is no way to teach this added knowledge experientially in the time available. It took centuries for some of our brightest minds to formulate the algebra that today we routinely teach to eleven-year-olds! While we have probably developed better paths and techniques for sharing this educational content, any increased efficiency in delivery has not kept pace with the massive increase in expected knowledge mastery.

Why meetings perpetuate broadcast education

It is this significant cultural imposition that requires us to use primarily broadcast methods to educate our young in school. The mistake we make is to assume that the broadcast learning we received as kids should continue into adulthood. This is why meetings continue to concentrate on broadcast learning modes. Every one of us is conditioned by an overwhelming exposure to broadcast teaching in our youth.

Receiving specialized adult learning from an expert made sense for human history up until the industrial age. Now that information is moving into systems outside our brains, we have an urgent need to use adult learning modalities that do not concentrate on packing information into our heads. Instead, we’ll find that most of what we need to learn to do our jobs today is based on working informally and creatively with novel problems with solutions that need just-in-time information from our peers.

We find it hard to stop conference lecturing because it’s the dominant learning modality during our formal education before adulthood. Being taught in school, however inefficiently, via lecture about the amazing things humans have created, discovered, and invented indoctrinates us to believe that lecturing is the normal way to learn. That’s why we continue to inflict lecturing on conference audiences. It’s what we’re used to. Sadly, we’re mostly unfamiliar with alternative and more effective learning modalities that are more and more important in today’s world.

Yes, meetings are a mess!

If you’d like to read more about the ideas shared here, and also learn about how to make meetings powerful places for learning, connection, engagement, community-building, and action, check out my book The Power of Participation.