Today's Tidbit... Managing the White Space

One of my favorite management concepts concerns managing the white space. The idea refers to corporate charts that place functions and people in boxes with white space in between. The challenge in most organizations is not managing the boxes; the bigger challenge is managing the interactions between boxes, whether that means getting peers, functions, or geographies to play well together. Differences in logic, assumptions, and expertise across the boxes cause communication and other problems.

A similar challenge occurs when writing for an audience. What should the writer assume the audience knows, and what needs to be explained? The audience that reads Football Archaeology includes coaches, media types, everyday fans, and memorabilia collectors, and each group brings a different knowledge set to what they read.

Since I often use old postcards to illustrate points about old-time football, you may have noticed that some old postcards have lots of white space, with an image stuck in a corner, like the one below. If you are a coach, media type, or everyday fan, you likely will not know why the image is stuck in the upper right corner. Only the memorabilia collectors will likely know that, but I’ll let everyone in on the secret before showing some examples.

The image above is great. It shows Colby College fans sometime early in the last century, with some sitting under a grandstand, as mentioned in Grandstanding in Early Football. So, why did old postcards have lots of white space? It was due to the scariest of bugaboos: government regulations.