Wikis: a place to just answer the question

How many times have you emailed a colleague and found that they’ve side-stepped answering your question in their reply?

Say you ask several questions in your email but they just gloss over some parts in their reply. Bullet listing or numbering your points in an email is tiresome to write and is at the very least its jolting to the eye, if not downright rude. Its also painful to reconcile what has and has not been handled.

Email is structured somewhat like this:

…. Question A… …Question B…
… … … Question C…
… Question D…

…. Answer A… …Answer C…
… Question 1…
… Answer D… Question 2

Followed by:

…. Answer A… …Answer C…
… Question 1… Answer 1
… Answer D… Question 2

It looks complicated because it is. But its typical of an interchange on an email thread.

Being complicated means its a pain to follow and inefficient to catch up retrospectively. (Do you read the thread from the bottom up, where do you put your summary?)

Wikis solve this by allowing anyone to write and rearrange all of the text. You collectively get to build an integrated conversation summary. So, a conversation might start off as:

…. Question A… …Question B…
… … … Question C…
… Question D…

but the person who answers it would answer in-line, like so:

…. Question A… Answer A…Question B…
… Question 1…
… … … Question C… Answer C
… Question D… Answer D
… Question 2…

Furthermore, the document is capable of being rearranged, at any point, by anyone. Suppose that Questions A & D belong to a theme, and we want to build a table of contents:

*theme i*
…. Question A… Answer A…
… Question D… Answer D
*theme ii*
Question B…
… Question 1…
… … … Question C… Answer C
… Question 2…

And so on it goes.

This simple practice of letting people re-edit the same document (to intersperse question and answer, and rearrange as they see fit) rather than append increases the fidelity of the knowledge base. This is the very basis of situated cognition

Creating a community held document everyone helps maintain, and others will actually enjoy reading. In turn, that means they are more likely to use it as the basis for agreement.

So next time you and your colleague are on email, interchanging, and you get frustrated that your other party is skirting the issue, drive clarity by pushing the conversation onto the wiki. You’ll need to trust them to not delete your question, but you know if they did they really were skirting the issue anyway.

Its no wonder so many organisations are moving their communications onto a wiki. Clearer communications drives trust between staff, facilitates faster reading to catch up and promotes organizational alignment and faster speed to market. All this has got to be good for shareholder wallets and staff morale.