It’s a phrase we may have heard, but many of us ignore it. Thought to have been coined by American aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson and widely adopted by the engineering industry, the principle is that most systems work best if they’re kept simple rather than...
“To err is human, to forgive divine”, wrote Alexander Pope in 1711. We all err at times in our writing. A typo here. A misspell there. A slide into the passive voice. A run-on sentence containing too many ideas. But this headline is an err too far....
The SIS is asked to approve this revised paper on the XYZ implementation plan for ABC. The context paper is closely aligned with the ABC Plan and the XYZ initiatives in the XYZ Plan. While I’ve changed the acronyms to anonymise the source, I recently had...
According to the World’s Simplest Brands study (by Siegel+Gale), simplicity is the answer in an increasingly complex world. Brands do better by keeping things simple. The simplest brands perform better on the stock market, can charge more for their services/products...
Do you receive loads of long-form organisational comms? By that, I mean screeds of wordy jargon, impenetrable narratives, and a lot of background information that you don’t need? It’s all too common and oh-so-fixable. Here are three simple...
Bad writing wastes time. How many senior leaders spend too much of their day ‘red penning’ poorly written briefs and copy-editing case studies? The cost of poor writing is profound, particularly in the public sector, when communities and stakeholders can...
