In oral tradition companies everything happens in face to face meetings and not very much is written down. To learn why things are the way they are you have to do the equivalent of sitting round the campfire and listening to the elders tell the tales of the ancestors. When there is only one team, and it’s small enough, this can be fine. Everyone knows what they are doing and who to ask if they need to. The system understandable without lots of documentation so it feels wasteful to take the time to write it.

In written tradition companies the discussion happens in documents, emails, tickets etc. and discussions happen in text rather than face to face. This makes it easier for someone not initially involved to follow the trail of documentation and get context around why certain decisions were made. Writing is slower than speaking so it takes more time to discuss things this way. It allows for asynchronous communications, which is an advantage when there are multiple teams and people are in different timezones.

Most startups start in the “oral tradition” mode of operation and switching to the “written tradition” mode can be hard as it’s a culture shift. It needs to happen at some point as the benefit of having written communications outweighs the cost of writing the documentation. These days you can also feed writing to LLMs which is harder and more expensive to do with video.

What “tradition” does your organisation operate in?