Organizational Linter

An automated system that eliminates a class of feedback when reviewing a work product. Similar to how code formatters like prettier work to remove code style comments during code review, an organizational linter can take an opinionated, repetitive form of feedback and automate it. This frees up time because automating cooperation decreases the cost of coordination.

See also:

  • Automating Cooperation Decreases the Cost of Coordination

    If every time a group of people need to work together they need to agree on how they work together, who is involved, and expectations, the cost of cooperation would grow with the number of people (possibly exponentially). By automating established norms, practices, and processes, the cost of coordination goes down because you are no longer solving the same problems repeatedly.

  • Linting Prose in Emacs

    There are a few ways to get linting of prose (grammar and style, not just spellcheck) in Emacs. Unfortunately, there is no good language server implementation for the popular open-source command line tools. The best option right now is probably proselint, but vale gives better suggestions.

  • Using Vale With Emacs for Prose Linting

    After looking into linting prose in Emacs, I found a way to roll your own prose linter setup using vale (an extensible prose linter), efm-langserver (a generic language server), and eglot (a language server mode for Emacs).

  • Sloppyness Adds Up

    Imagine a busy executive trying to work with multiple people. They’re coming in and out of meetings and working on several projects all day long. They have maybe 15 minutes to concentrate on a thing to try and keep things moving or prevent holding things up. Every time there is a broken link, spelling error, obviously incorrect statement, or something that needs to be double checked, it creates delays and more work.

  • Grammarly Comes Close to Being an Organizational Linter

    Grammarly improves the overall level of communication within an organization, but if you think of it as an organizational linter it does much more. It eliminates a class of common feedback that would otherwise need to repeated for each work product for each person (with some decay curve as new employees internalize these rules). Even better would be if it could lint the structure of documents (i.e. a minto linter) and not just grammar and phrasing.

  • Minto Linter

    A theoretical tool that checks a piece of business writing against a set of rules from The Minto Pyramid Principle. Like a code linter, this would serve as a ratchet for improving the output of others—in this case, those sharing business writing like strategy memos, 1 pagers, and project briefs.

  • Automation Reduces Marginal Cost of Nonautomated Tasks

    In a recent study, researches looked at the effects of automation on in a supermarket. They found that by automating the process of collecting payment, productivity of the non-automated task of scanning items increased 10%. An explanation for the improvement is that automation enabled specialization and specialization reduces the marginal cost of the other tasks which increases effort and therefore productivity.

  • Linters Automate Quality Control

    Using linters on a codebase is a way of automating quality control. It frees up time for engineers by shifting the meticulous checking for minor details to the linter instead of code reviewers. It also helps the engineer writing the code to get faster feedback directly in their text editor.