Four eyes to make it right
Yesterday I put up a hot take on the news that Twitter had been hacked by Bitcoin-seeking ne’er-do wells. As it was a reaction to quite a newsworthy subject, I rushed it onto my feed after a quick read-through and sat back, satisfied.
That is, until I read it again about an hour later and found several errors. This was annoying for a number of reasons: as a professional, I want everything I put out to be of a high standard: as well-written as possible and with no marks of carelessness or haste. On top of that, as an example of my capabilities, it may have been judged by a prospective client as being sub-par. That would be counterproductive for my business.
Luckily, LinkedIn allows us to edit articles we’ve posted, so I was able to go back in and correct those errors. But the fact that the piece had gone out like that, and that a few people will have read it, still irked me. It’s an instinct communicators develop very quickly: before you press the button on your all-staff email or press release, it should be in the best shape it can possibly be.
Once the genie’s out of the bottle, that’s it – not only is that error out there forever, for everyone to see, but you’ve lost the opportunity to make the optimal impact with your communication . . . especially if the error is of a magnitude to drown out the news you’re announcing. Issuing an update might right the ship to a certain extent, but it’s not going to be as effective as getting it correct first time.
We’ve all heard the horror stories: one of mine involves an organisation which issued a press release congratulating Barack Obama on his election in 2009 – and misspelt his first name in the headline. An error of this magnitude tends to generate the opposite effect to what you’d hoped for – and really should never happen.
But it did happen, and there’s a reason which anyone who has been mired in the drafting and sign-off processes required for any public announcement at a large, complex organisation will know. After several rounds of edits and re-writes, when everyone whose desk the draft document crosses feels compelled to make changes just for the sake of it, you stop actually seeing the words on the page. Others in the chain assume someone else has checked everything – and so errors survive and prosper.
That’s why it’s essential that even the humblest communication should be proofed by a fresh pair of eyes before it’s released. You may be convinced it’s absolutely flawless, but someone else will pick up on that one typo you’ve missed – and spell-checkers just don’t cut it for this. At this stage you’re not asking for comments on your grammar or phraseology: there are ways of framing your request for a read-through that preclude commentary on these elements.
At one organisation whose communications were always of a high quality, we came to call this the ‘four eyes’ principle: no communication would be issued without at least four eyes being cast over the final version. This is a rather obvious rule, but you’d be surprised at how often it doesn’t happen – time pressure is often to blame – but being quite rigid about it can give you the confidence that it’s ready to broadcast it to the world. I should have done that yesterday and saved my own blushes.
Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash
