The POWERS process for effective team writing

Dylan Tweney's six-step method for collaborative content creation

Photo by Kamran Chaudhry on Unsplash

Most people think of writing as a solitary activity undertaken by lone geniuses operating under various degrees of inspiration and sheer tenacity.

But business writing is not usually the expression of a single individual's talent — it is generally, and often by definition, the expression of an organization's collective intention. And with real-time, collaborative, online editing platforms like Google Docs, collaborative writing has taken on an even more interactive dimension. It's now possible for you to be working on a document at the same time as others, adding text, leaving comments, and changing words — while other people's variously colored cursors dance through the page doing their own things.

Collaborative writing unlocks powerful new possibilities and enables organizations to create copy that benefits from the talents and knowledge of a whole team of people.

It can also be infuriating, confusing, discouraging, and waste much of everyone's time. It can produce flat, bland, safe, bureaucratic copy, and reads like it was written by a committee — because it was.

How do we make this work better? How do we maximize the benefit of working together while minimizing the process's frustrating and counterproductive parts?

Over and over again, I’ve found that organizing content creation into stages is the key. It creates a process your team can follow. Perhaps even more importantly, it provides language for discussing what’s needed, requesting help, diagnosing what went wrong, and coming up with solutions.  

Introducing the POWERS process

After some recent brainstorming, I developed a hopefully not-too-dorky acronym to make these stages more memorable: POWERS.

• Prepare

• Organize

• Write

• Edit

• Release

• Study the results

I’ve used some variation of this approach, albeit without the acronym, in the last several roles I’ve been in. It helps clarify what the team needs to do at each stage and how each content team member (or its clients) can best contribute.

Only the middle step, the actual writing, is an individual exercise. Everything else in this process involves multiple people, in principle, if not in fact. However, if you divide up the writing of a large project into smaller pieces and assign a different part to each writer, then it's also possible for the writing stage to be team-oriented.

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The POWERS process for effective team writing

Dylan Tweney's six-step method for collaborative content creation