There is nothing quite so disappointing as a group of talented people who can’t achieve because they lack mutual trust. Likewise, it’s tough to see folks who can’t speak up because they either don’t have the courage or don’t trust their colleagues enough to listen to what they have to say and react constructively.

With dwindling trust or courage, you’re building yourself a culture of silence. This manifests itself in very destructive ways:

• People do not speak up. Even when it is important for the progress of the team and company, people are reluctant to voice their opinions. It takes individuals with tremendous courage to speak up and when they do, they are labeled as dissenters and not supported even though they are saying what everyone wants to say — but won’t dare.
• There is no room for failure. Most successes are preceded by wonderful failures. Not having the trust of leadership or colleagues eliminates failure as an option and stifles innovation. If you can’t fail for fear of retribution, you probably aren’t going to succeed at higher levels.
• Nobody challenges each other. If I think you’ll try to sabotage me or get revenge because I disagree with you, I’m going to be less likely to challenge your points and assumptions. I won’t be vested in your success enough to challenge your core arguments. Healthy discourse goes out the window and those with the loudest voice — or those who speak first — start winning out.
• Your true talent bleeds. People with better options don’t tolerate a culture of silence. They recognize lack of trust and leave fairly quickly for better opportunities. You often won’t hear about why they really left. It’s always the “opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” As you might suspect, there’s usually more to it than that.
• Politics run rampant. In an environment where nobody truly knows where people stand, extroverts get a lot of credit and overshadow the silent majority. Politics, defined as, “people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merit and contribution,” replaces any meritocracy with a bureaucracy. Ben Horowitz wrote a good post about politics.

Here’s how you can prevent building this culture of silence:

• Listen to people. People who do not listen or practice in selective listening do not trust the speaker enough to consider they may be right. Maybe you’re formulating your response before they are done talking. Maybe they are just totally wrong. Either way, if you start talking immediately after someone makes a point and come back with 10 reasons why they are wrong you are telling them something very clear: I do not trust you and I don’t value your opinion. Don’t do this — just listen.
• Forget about blame. Blame is a huge waste of time in most cases. Can you recall any time you pointed out it was someone’s else’s fault where working with that person again was easy? If so, congratulations; that might be the first time in human history. Assume the best in your colleagues. Allow them room to fail and help them. It will pay off tenfold in the long run.
• Sort things out directly without bosses. I can’t recall a time where cc-ing someone’s boss resulted in a positive outcome. Adults tend to work things out directly and when they can’t, they escalate. If you conduct normal business thinking, “if I say something, it could go directly to my boss,” you’re going to say less — or agonize over what to say. Try to work things out with people directly and avoid involving their superiors unless you’ve already tried and didn’t get results. You just might be able to resolve things with less drama and avoid losing trust.
• Don’t play the victim. Everybody hates you and you’re just trying to do your job, right? I remember hearing stuff like this; I think it came from 6 years olds dealing with their first exposure to groups of other people. It has no place at work. Excuses, blaming others, entertaining all forms of outward influences as plausible scapegoats before addressing what you did or what you could have done differently is a good way to lose people’s trust and confidence in you — it’s also mentally exhausting. If you play the victim and enter meetings like mama bear protecting her cubs, you’re going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don’t be a victim. Be strong. People will respect you for it.
• Avoid character attacks. Maybe you think Jim is a huge asshole. Maybe Mike is crazy and he gets on your nerves. Maybe Jenny said something that hurt your feelings. A good way to screw yourself is to be irresponsible in how you share this internal dialogue. Vent to your friends, your partner, whatever — but keep it clean — always. Word gets around and you don’t want people to hear your internal dialogue. Keep the nasty stuff to yourself. Don’t play that game — everyone loses when it becomes too personal or vindictive.

Organizations lacking trust and courage can generate both noise and silence at inopportune times. Those who get drowned out have a lot to offer; the analytical, the listeners, the silent majority contribute just as much to the long-term health of the organization.

So speak up, be heard, but always listen to others. Trust they are saying things for the right reasons — give them the time they deserve before you hammer their opinions into tiny itty-bitty pieces. After all, their next point may be brilliant. But you’d never know if they lacked the courage to speak in a room full of people ready to pounce.

It opens simply enough:

How Users Read on the Web
They don’t.

Instead of just tweeting the article (which is ironically so long that people don’t read it) I’d like to instead study some examples from our site and show how it could improve our own site content.

Often, I find that some of our site content is:

• Difficult to scan
• Verbose
• Passive
• Unclear
• Likely to be ignored — users won’t read it

So what should we do about it? Well, we should tackle it from different directions:

• We should educate ourselves and become familiar with best practices
• Those who do understand the basics should do their best to teach others
• We could also conduct user research, eye tracking studies or run a/b tests to verify theories

Either way, I’ll save you some time: simple is better.

So let’s go to some examples. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Bulleted lists
• Highlight key points
• Reduce unnecessary or redundant words (of, the, a, at, to, that, with the, and)
• Remove passive speech and replace it with active speech

Bulleted lists

Your goal should be to identify common threads or trains of thought. Tie them together with a lead-in. Augment the leading thought with key phrases. Our example has a common entity: Mozilla. So how can we apply a list to this paragraph?

Before

Mozilla is a non-profit. We don’t have shareholders. We’re not trying to get acquired. Our bottom line is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.

After

Mozilla is:

• a non-profit company
• loyal to you, not shareholders
• promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web

Highlight Key Points

Highlighting helps users quickly scan key points. They don’t have to read word-for-word but can pick up the general concept of a block of text without reading the whole thing. This is typically how users read on the web, and studies show how important writing scannable text is.

In our case, let’s take the first sentence and see what we end up with.

Before:

Mozilla is:

• a non-profit company
• loyal to you, not shareholders
• promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web

After:

Mozilla is:

• a non-profit company
• loyal to you, not shareholders
• promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web

The addition of bulleted lists gets us farther, but highlighting keywords dramatically improves the visibility and likelihood that those concepts will be communicated to a web reader.

Reduce Words

The single most common problem is that people write too much. In technical writing and web writing, the goal should be content over style. Simple, clear, concise text wins; then users can focus on the content, not on deciphering what you’re actually trying to say.

Words that don’t add anything to the message are a huge problem. We can break up or eliminate some sentences in our example:

• Mozilla is an extensive open-source software development project powered by a small (but growing) staff and a worldwide community of dedicated volunteers. (before: 23 words after: 10 words)
• Because our products are used for many of the web’s most innovative projects., a job at Mozilla allows you towill develop cool, useful technology that impacts millions of lives. (before: 29 words after: 20 words)

You can say the same things using less effort while benefiting users. All kinds of win.

Fix Passive Speech

Speaking passively increases the length of your sentences while reducing clarity. Here are two examples:

Before:

Because our products are used for many of the web’s most innovative projects, a job at Mozilla allows you to develop cool, useful technology that impacts millions of lives.

After:

You could impact millions of lives developing innovative products at Mozilla.

Here by focusing on “you”, you eliminate a ton of words but deliver essentially the same message.

Before:

At Mozilla, we encourage creativity and ambition with the goal of revolutionizing how people access the web.

After:

Mozilla’s goal is to revolutionize how people access the web by encouraging creativity and ambition.

By changing our sentence structure to focus on Mozilla, we eliminate the need for words like “at, we, with, the”.

That’s it. Go forth and write great content. Visit the Writing for the Web main page to learn more.

He gave Mozilla a shout out and said we’re an inspiration for other companies trying to do things the right way and focus heavily on what people want and need. He also mentioned he’s an avid Firefox user and tries to install it on every machine he can get his hands on!

Another thing worth noting was his comments on crowdsourcing — that’s it’s not at all about getting a group to do a bunch of work for you. In many ways the textbook definition of crowdsourcing betrays the real value in it.

He said it should really be called co-creation because their community as well as potential customers for this car are a huge part of what the car will actually be and how it will evolve over time. It is a good way to look at things, and not very different from what Mozilla strives to do from day to day.

Overall, it was a great experience and the car is damn cool. Thanks to Jay and his team for visiting us. See more pictures here.

Over time, if you keep up with it you can see improvements in different categories:

• Distance – you can run more as you get in better shape
• Heart rate – peaks and average should normalize
• Time – you’ll improve your time (ideally!)

Since I’m not a running super-beast and I’m not very fast, I have been pretty interested in the heart rate! I’m also interested in it because the first few runs were pretty tough because I’d run for a bit (at the speed I remember running at) and my heart would go nuts and I’d have to walk for a bit. For a while I’d have to keep doing that, and my heart rate chart showed why.

On my first run in about 2 years, I was getting owned:

After waking up this morning at 430am and going for a crazy morning run (which, if you knew me, is something I never do), I was happy to see this:

I still have to walk a bit in the middle of a 3 mile jog, but while I’m running my heart rate remains constant and it never felt like it was going to explode. I’m now able to sustain for longer and I also have less movement between 180 and 200 bpm (Note that the top graph was 1.5 miles and the bottom one was 3 miles).

As I was writing a blog about browsing statistics and how they can improve how we use the web, it made me think of this little Garmin watch and how knowing more about my own body can help me improve my life.

Data is good, knowledge is good. By itself, not so much — but if you use it right it can make all the difference.

Well, you do. And here’s the thing:

• Only you have access to it
• It’s under-utilized
• You probably didn’t even know it existed

Browsing could be better. There’s no question about that. We have set conventions and preconceived notions about how browsing should be. That is, until the next big thing comes along and rocks our world.

It feels like using data to improve browsing is a no-brainer, and data-driven browsing is already the next big thing. You see this in search suggests, amazon suggested items, the iTunes store, and other sites. And that’s just all site-specific. Imagine if we used data the right way and made things just click?

On a limited scale, it’s all more than possible today. You have complete control over your own browsing history:

• Sites visited
• Bookmarks
• Awesome bar history
• Media viewed
• Favorite sites
• Search keywords
• Trending of all the above

Simple fact is that you’re not using as much as you could.

The Firefox awesome bar was heralded as a great step in browsing innovation. And it’s true, it really was. And that’s because a lot of browsing is really repeat browsing. How many times do you go back and view what you just looked at the other day?

But that’s the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of things we can learn about the web and about how we use the web to make it better. And don’t think about person -> corporation -> other corporations. For starters, think about what you could do with just your own browsing data, or your family’s browsing data:

• Easy access to repeat searches – movies, facebook, maps, you name it
• An automated media catalog of images, videos and news articles you read over time
• A list of phone numbers you have looked up and who they belong to
• A list of all map directions you’ve ever done
• A list of people you read about over the last week

The awesome bar in Firefox already uses this, and it’s great to see some Firefox extensions are already tapping into the possibilities:

• about:me lets you read about your own browsing statistics
• Voyage is a very cool way to not only view the sites you’ve used but see how you got there over time and whether or not you Tweeted about it!

Those are just two examples of what we can do and where we can go. I’m pretty excited to see what happens next. Maybe you have the next great idea — go forth!