Collaborating vs Copyediting

As an EARLY user of GSuite’s collaboration suite, I’ve been a big fan of their ability to increase collaboration for a very long time. In particular, love the collaborative editing features of Google Docs. The ability to have multiple editors is a huge win for anyone working collaboratively on a document, presentation, or spreadsheet. I also think the comment feature is well through through and a huge value for teams (though why comments work so poorly on iPad, I still don’t understand).

However, as I’ve used Google Docs more and more I find that sometimes the collaborative features seem to get people responding to me in the wrong mode. Specifically, I will often draft something like a document or a presentation and send it to some colleagues for feedback. However, with the comment/suggest feature of Google Docs they will tend to start copyediting words or phrases — without responding to the overall structure and content.

While this sort of collaborative editing can be wonderful once you have the structure together and agreed to, it is not as helpful in the early stages. I’m increasingly finding that I need to give specific instructions to people on this or — gasp — give them View Only access so that they have to respond with their own written thoughts — and not just make small edits to my document.

This is just one example of how when our tools for collaboration get more powerful — we also need the cultural norms and expectations to evolve to allow us to take advantage of those tools. And for those who like to control how a document turns out — there’s a lot of power in being the person to write the first draft…

Originally published at Jeff Keltner.