Writing should be a team sport

Everyone in a decision-making role knows the feeling. You open your inbox to find dozens of briefs, emails, and reports competing for your attention. Some are crystal clear, while others are impenetrable walls of text that make you wonder what the author actually wants you to do. The quality varies wildly, and the time you spend deciphering poorly written documents is time stolen from actual decision-making.

As someone who’s spent years working in government, I can tell you that writing quality is one of the most discussed capability issues across the APS. There’s much talk about its importance, templates are developed, and writing workshops are delivered. But then people return to their desks, the immediate pressures take over, and those good intentions disappear under urgent deadlines and competing priorities. Rinse repeat.

Why most writing training doesn’t stick

I used to believe that writing was purely an individual skill – something you either had or didn’t. Give someone the basics of grammar and structure, send them back to their desk, and surely they’d write better, right? Wrong. Most training is forgotten the minute people return to their desks because it doesn’t address the real barriers to sustained behaviour change.

That’s why we designed our government writing program around the COM-B framework – understanding that lasting change requires not just Capability (the skills), but also Motivation (the drive to use them) and Opportunity (the environment that supports and reinforces new behaviours). We wanted to harness the group’s collective power to create a shared language and supportive norms, allowing people to continue improving long after the training ended.

The government writing challenge

The government context presents unique writing challenges. You’re writing briefs, reports, and emails for senior leaders who will read your document amongst dozens of others during their packed days. The balance is incredibly difficult – provide enough information to help them understand the (often complex) issue and take recommended action, but not so much that you waste time – both yours and theirs. And everyone has different preferences for how much detail they want and how they want it presented.

Our workshop participants typically flagged three major challenges:

• Condensing complexity – This was the biggest issue for most attendees. How do you take complex policy issues, technical information, or multi-faceted problems and make them accessible without oversimplifying?
• Writer’s block – The inability to get your thoughts flowing, especially when dealing with complex or sensitive topics. What strategies can you use to get over the paralysis and just start writing?
• Time pressures –This is an unavoidable reality for many in government. It would be lovely to have plenty of time to write the perfect brief, but most of us don’t get that luxury. How can you use some simple tools and frameworks to write well, even when under the pump?

Our Approach: Build the foundations. Then build it up.

Rather than jumping straight to advanced techniques, we provide the basics first. But for us, the basics are not ‘what is a verb, it is understanding what professional, accessible, and inclusive writing looks like. This is the core foundation that everything else builds upon. Without this shared understanding, people are working from different starting points and toward different goals.

Professional writing is about having a very clear purpose and respecting your reader’s time

From there, we build up in layers. We move from simply ‘providing information’ to ‘influencing the reader’. Government writing isn’t just about documenting what happened but about making it easy for the reader to take action.

Finally, we focus on developing strategies to make writing a collaborative effort, ensuring everyone understands how to support one another in improving, as they’re all accountable for the team’s output quality. People shared their common challenges, whether it’s writer’s block, condensing complexity, or constantly feeling the pressure of deadlines, and worked together to identify and share strategies to help each other with those challenges. After all, when a colleague can see you staring at your screen, not knowing where to start, they are best placed to give you the friendly nudge you need to get going!

The power of shared language

Our program structure reflected this layered approach. We provided the core session over an afternoon, with a follow-up one-hour session a few weeks later for reinforcement. Between sessions, we sent multiple reminder and prompt emails to keep the concepts fresh and provide just-in-time support when people were actually writing.

The feedback consistently highlighted one key element that made the difference: having a shared language, frameworks, and tools that provided the same foundation for everyone in the team. This shared language transformed how teams gave each other feedback. Instead of vague comments like “this doesn’t flow well” or simply rewriting someone’s work, people could give specific, helpful feedback because everyone knew what to look for and how to be constructive about it.

“After the training, it was like being in a state of enlightenment. We just looked at everything differently.”

– Training participant, Nov 2024

Making writing a team sport

This shift from individual skill to team capability addresses something fundamental about how work gets done in government. Writing isn’t an individual activity – documents get reviewed, edited, and improved by multiple people before they reach their final audience. When everyone on the team has the same foundation and vocabulary, this collaborative process becomes much more effective.

People started catching issues earlier in the process, offering more targeted suggestions, and taking collective ownership of their team’s communication quality. The senior executives we worked with reported not just better individual documents, but better overall communication patterns from their teams.

Back to basics for sustained change

Sometimes the most effective approach is going back to basics – and then using that foundation as a building block for the whole team. Even for something like writing that’s often thought of as an individual capability, creating shared standards and collaborative processes ticks the most important boxes: the ones that are more likely to result in sustained behaviour change.

Because at the end of the day, clear writing isn’t just about skill – it’s about creating the conditions where good communication can flourish and spread throughout your organisation.

Reach out if your team needs help with writing. It’s a minimal time investment – that can have a huge impact!