As I’ve been talking with companies about why they should be blogging (demonstrate expertise, SEO, project management, knowledge management) one reason struck me the other day as probably THE best reason to blog:
Blogging Makes You Smarter
It will make you, your employees and your entire organization smarter.
If you think about the creative process, we go through 4 steps:
Generating, Conceptualizing, Optimizing and Implementing.
The funny thing about these is that nobody is good at all 4. We are usually really good at one, okay to pretty good at one or two and usually suck at need to improve on at least one. That doesn’t mean that we can’t do all 4 well, it just means that we are naturally better at some than others.
Generating is the stage where we come up with the initial idea. These are your “idea guys.” These people never have shortages of ideas and some of them are actually good. Most of your marketers live here.
Conceptualizing is where we create the “big picture,” the “30,00 foot view.” Its usually here that we fight over the right analogy. We take the idea and start to shape it.
Optimizing is where we start to pull in our facts. This is the “practical application” phase. This is where your accountants and engineers live. You can’t have enough facts and data for these guys. This is where planning starts.
Implementation is where the rubber meets the road. Enough talk, lets go out and do it. This is your sales department (hopefully). Now that we have the idea, what it looks like and the details to implement it, it’s time to see if it flies.
Writing takes all 4 of these phases and no one is really good at all of them. I love phase 1, I could live in a think tank brain storming all day. I also enjoy phase 2, creating the possibilities of how an idea would work. I suck at need work on phase 3 (although I am constantly getting better), I make it a point to surround myself with these types of people. I’m even good at phase 4, I enjoy executing on ideas that I’m really excited about (assuming that they survived phase 3).
When you write (write well at least) you have to go through all 4 of these phases. When you blog you have the additional challenges of doing all of this and keeping your idea short and concise (and hopefully understandable). To be a blogger you have to do this consistently.
As you and your organization learn new topics, blog about them, share them and collaborate on these ideas, you collectively become smarter. Your team will be able to recall and apply the ideas better because they have internalized them, processed them and applied them in writing.
I know for me that even if no one was reading this blog, I would continue to do this because of the personal benefits I see, and I bet most bloggers would agree. If you look at the great leaders and innovators they all did this in the form of a personal journal or letter writing. Blogging is just the 21st century version of that.
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