The surprising power of a technical document written by experts

Good technical writing can have enormous influence. In my last blog post, I wrote about how technical reports written by management consultants can be used to support implementing a change program inside of an organization.

People underestimate how influential such technical document can be. They have to be written by experts to be effective, and management consultants are really just mercenary “experts”, but they aren’t the only type of experts who can write influential documents.

I was recently listening to on an episode of the Ezra Klein Show, where climate scientist Kate Marvel was being interviewed by (guest interviewer) David Wallace-Wells, when I heard another example of this phenomenon.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript (emphasis added):

(Marvel) And in, I want to say 2018 because that was the release of the U.N.‘s 1.5 degree Special Report — which, mea culpa, I was grouchy about.

I thought it was fan fiction. I thought, well, there’s no way we’re going to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Why are you doing this? And oh, boy. What the world needs is another report. Great. Let’s do that again. And for reasons that I don’t understand, I was so wrong.

I was so wrong about how that was going to be received. I was so wrong about how that would land. And it started something. Now —

(Wallace-Wells) The same year that Greta started striking, the foundation of XR, the sit-in of Sunrise.

(Marvel) Sunrise. To talk about tipping points, that’s not something that I was able to anticipate. And now, I almost never get asked, is it real? I almost never get asked, well, what does climate change mean and why should I care? Instead, I get asked the really good questions about uncertainty, about what’s happening, about how we can prepare, about what we can do.

The irony here is that Marvel is a scientist, a professional whose primary output is technical documents! And, yet, Marvel didn’t recognize the impact that a technical report could have on the overall system. It didn’t actually matter that it’s not possible to limit warning to 1.5°C. What mattered was how the document itself ended up changing the system.

Don’t underestimate the power of a technical document. Like any effective system intervention, it has to happen at the right place and the right time. But, if it does, it can make a real difference.