Is writing with style something you are born with, or is it a skill that can be taught? The answer is probably a little bit of both. 

Below is part of a presentation I made at a governance conference in Ottawa back in January. It’s based on Sydney Dekker’s excellent book Drift Into Failure (Ashgate 2010).

Dekker’s insight is that most disasters and failures happen for the same reasons: a succession of small, everyday decisions leading to a breakdown on a massive scale involving systems that are so complex, no one understands the whole picture.

According to Dekker, an important factor leading to these cascading failures is our collective inability to say exactly what we mean, and mean exactly what we say. I find this to be an important insight, worth remembering as we attempt things in our work environment.