There’s an intriguing report in New Scientist this week about a study by psychologists at Glasgow’s Calendonian University. They studied a group of regular diarists (the study didn’t specifically mention whether posting to a blog was considered diarising) and found that:
…regular diarists were more likely to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness
The theory of the researchers is that diarists tend to churn over problems repeatedly as they write over a period of days, rather than get it all off their chest in a single cathartic outburst to friends.
Which got me thinking about how applicable this would be to blogging in a business context. Could what on the face of it seems like a negative process for an individual be a positive one for an organisation?
I’m thinking specifically of weblogs being used in internal scenarios – perhaps as project blogs, keeping a team up-to-date with the status and progress of a project.
While the diarist might moan about the lousy day they’d just had, or how they’d tossed and turned all night worrying about something that was about to happen, a project blog might include status updates, or posts about problems that were being encountered.
But here’s where the positive benefit for the business could come in. Whereas a diary is a private, solitary record of the angst of an individual (at least according to the study), a project blog is a shared environment where problems can be aired among a group. So posting an entry about a problem would hopefully result in responses from other team members about possible workarounds or resolutions. A problem shared is a problem halved, as the saying goes.
And the other factor to bear in mind is that airing a problem in a business situation is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly in a project environment. Sometimes it’s important to alert people to issues that are looming on the horizon, so that steps can be taken to mitigate or resolve the situation. A blog can be a more informal way of raising an issue or seeking feedback before the problem becomes formalised by inclusion in a project status report or committment to paper.
