Why Royston G King Writes Everything Down
By: Halden Reed – interviewer & journalist covering business, entrepreneurship, and finance
Royston G King has built his practice around written records rather than meetings, a preference he says began as a practical necessity and became a conviction. Here he explains what writing changes about the quality of decisions, and why he thinks most companies discover this far too late.
The habit is visible in how Royston G King describes his own operation. Decisions are proposed in writing with the reasoning stated. Handovers between people are documented rather than described. Standards exist as text rather than as things everyone is assumed to know.
King began in digital marketing while studying business administration at the University of Southern California, and founded his own firm in 2018. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco list, he has advised more than 1,000 clients across over 100 industries, working with businesses across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia.
“An argument that survives a meeting is not the same as an argument that survives being written down,” said Royston G King. “Half of what sounds persuasive out loud falls apart the moment you have to put it in a paragraph, because the gaps become visible. That filter alone is worth the effort.”
The second benefit he identifies concerns memory. A decision made verbally leaves nothing behind but recollection, and recollection reshapes itself over time to fit what happened afterward.
“Six months later everyone remembers agreeing to something slightly different, and everyone is being honest,” said Royston G King. “A written record does not have that problem. You can go back and see what you actually thought at the time, including the parts you got wrong, which is the useful bit.”
“Half of what sounds persuasive out loud falls apart the moment you have to put it in a paragraph.” Royston G King
King has argued the value compounds most visibly when new people arrive. In an organization that runs on conversation, context lives in the heads of the people who were present, and a newcomer acquires it slowly through exposure. In one that runs on writing, they can read backward.
“Somebody joins and can go through two years of decisions in a week,” said Royston G King. “Not just what was decided but why, and what the alternatives were. That is a year of meetings compressed into an afternoon. Nobody builds it for that reason, and then it turns out to be the main return.”
He is direct about the cost: writing is slower per decision than talking.
“It is slower at the moment you do it and faster across everything afterward,” said Royston G King. “People look at the first part and stop. That is the whole reason more companies do not work this way.”
King has also raised a failure mode he says is common among firms that attempt this. Documentation written as a one-off project, by the person most expert at the task, tends to go unread.
“The expert has internalized the job to the point where the hard parts are invisible to them,” said Royston G King. “They write down the steps and leave out the judgement, which is the only part anyone actually needed. Then it sits in a folder being technically accurate and useless.”
His preference is for the most recent person to have learned a task to write its description, with the expert reviewing for accuracy. The newer person still remembers what was confusing, which decisions were unclear, and where they went wrong.
“They document the parts that are actually hard, because they were hard last month,” said Royston G King. “That produces something people use. The other version produces something people are told to read.”
He has argued for maintenance triggered by failure rather than by calendar. Reviewing all documentation quarterly is a commitment that erodes within two cycles. Updating a description whenever it produces a wrong outcome ties the work to a moment when the need is obvious, and somebody is already looking.
King has said the test he applies is straightforward. If a firm’s written material were deleted overnight, would anyone notice inside a week? Where the answer is no, the material was serving as a record of intention rather than as an instrument of work, and rewriting a smaller set of genuinely used documents will do more than expanding the existing pile.
