Say you're cooking and you ask someone helping you to "boil the pasta" — how much of that action can you actually put into words?

Some people might think it's as simple as dropping pasta into a pot of boiling water. Someone else might picture that water having salt in it, raising the boiling point slightly and seasoning the pasta as it cooks. And someone else might further picture olive oil in there too, keeping the boiling pasta from sticking together. Depending on the type of pasta being used, other instructions might come into play, and the equipment you need to prepare might change as well.

In this way, how deeply you think about something varies depending on your own experience, the time and situation, and the context — and since you're also filling in the gaps mentally with images in your head, even something as simple as "boil the pasta" isn't guaranteed to come across correctly to the other person.

Because what's going on inside people's heads differs from person to person like this, I think it's important to define the matter at hand and put it into words, so that both sides can reconcile their thinking and have a conversation from the same perspective.

Why I started being conscious about putting things into words

Partly because I've had a string of painful failures myself recently, but reading about the following two perspectives made me newly aware of the importance of putting things into words.

1. From the perspective of shared understanding

• Misalignment happened repeatedly on a project
  • This is a bit of an excuse, but once we moved to remote work and communication became mostly text-based, misalignment between people's thinking happened repeatedly due to under-specified instructions
  • Both sides ended up with different understandings of the final output for something like "please handle that task," leading to rework, lower evaluations, and mounting frustration on both sides
  • Understanding of what the project was even for got out of sync, leading to inconsistent perceptions of task priority and varying degrees of commitment

2. From the perspective of organizing one's own thinking

• Performance dropped while working remotely
  • Whether or not someone can make good use of Slack's "times" channel depends on their ability to put things into words. While in the office, we could also communicate verbally, but remotely it's text only, and some people couldn't post what they were stuck on to Slack, so their hands stopped and their performance dropped *1
  • Putting into words what you don't understand is hard, but it's necessary in order to organize your thinking
• I couldn't turn something I found interesting into writing
  • Not being able to explain why I found something interesting partly reflects not having the means of expression within me, but it also reflects that I hadn't fully thought it through or organized it

What does it mean to be able to put something into words?

What state is "being able to put something into words," anyway? I think that state means being able to correctly express and define the matter at hand.

As I mentioned with the pasta-boiling example, your brain helps support all sorts of imagery for whatever you're thinking about internally, so when you take it out of your head and put it into words, you can end up short on words, or find that you hadn't actually finished organizing your thoughts or hadn't considered enough.

That's exactly why putting things into words matters — to express things correctly, to organize your own thinking, and to eliminate gaps in consideration.

How to practice putting things into words

I think there are various methods, but whether analog or digital, I think writing things down is the best approach. Whether you jot it down as a note or write it up as a blog post, anything works — but if you can write without losing track of what you're thinking about and what you're trying to express, I think you'll have gained the ability to put things into words.

In closing

I imagine the people who work with me — someone who's bad at putting things into words — have had a hard time because of it, and I suspect writing this article might just end up sounding like a negative campaign along the lines of "working under this guy sounds tough..." But I put it into this form in the hope that it might prompt someone reading this to become more conscious of it.

That said, did this blog post actually manage to put what I was really thinking into words?

It seems I still have a lot of practicing to do when it comes to putting things into words.

*1 At our company, we use Slack's "times" channels as mini-reports, where people post what they're doing and what they're stuck on. We've adopted a system where the people around them help out wherever they can after seeing those posts. See this explanation of "bunpo" (mini-reports) for more background.