The Clarity Rules Blog

4 Lessons in business transformation from a former religious extremist

2011-10-06T02:31:00.000+01:00

Learning can come from unexpected places - Notes from a terror propaganda man:

Maajid Nawaz was born in Essex in the UK. He gave a TED talk at TED Global in July 2011. In his talk, he revealed that from the age of 19, for thirteen years, he was a member of an Islamist extremist organisation, and his focus, from the UK to Pakistan, to Denmark and to Egypt, was on spreading the messages of their social movement in order to unite similar extremists across borders, to make it easier to take collective action.

After spending time being tortured in an Egyptian prison, he had an ideological change of heart. He also has a message to spread:

"The people - he says - taking best advantage of the state of the art in knowledge and tools to effectively spread big messages are the extremists... and this isn't right."

His talk is aimed at giving some insight to people he would like to see spreading pro-Democracy messages. I think there are lessons that can be extracted for busines people too.

The four ages of identity - our messaging needs

His brief history of time includes a description of four ages of identity, and what it was in each of those ages that scholars believe gave us our sense of belonging:

The age of religion: In medieval times, identity came from affiliation to a religion
The age of the Nation State: where ethnicity was the principal focus
The age of Globalisation: where in citizenship in a nation superceded ethnicity, and
The recently established age of Behaviour: in which people have allegiance to ideas and narratives that transcend borders.

It is in this age of behaviour - where communication is borderless and where allegiance is to ideals, that social technologies can allow what would otherwise be isolated pockets of parochialism feel connected to each other and start taking action. This works if they harness the key ingredients of a social movement.

The key ingredients - The anatomy of a social movement in 4 parts:

In his role as a trans-national propagandist, Maajid was conscious that the strongest social movements had four key ingredients:

Ideas
Narratives
Symbols
A Leader

You can see his description in the TED talk here. His discussion of the four ingredients starts at 8:05.

To bind people together, these four ingredients must spring instantly to mind.

He uses Al-Qaeda as an example and describes it thus:
The ideas - the cause - of Al-Qaeda are something you can think of straight away. The Narratives, the background stories or propaganda Al Qaeda uses to back that up (The "West" is at war with Islam etc...) also spring instantly to mind. The symbols are easily conjured up (Journalists being executed by hooded men, the twin towers falling etc...), and the leaders of the movement are easily identifiable.

Applying this thinking to business.
If you have anything to do with sponsoring transformation in your business, how often do you hear about problems relating to organisational "silos"? I hear it all the time. The political, ideological and structural 'identity borders' an extremist faces on the world stage show up in a company as its functional silos, its geography, its org design lines and its other organisational constructs.

BUT

The kinds of challenges most businesses are dealing with often require those silos to dissolve - to become irrelevant. For instance, I'm currently working with a very large national infrastructure provider, and one of their chief strategic goals - on the radar of the CEO - is to become more collaborative. That is a tall order. To move a big comapny from a state of being 'not collaborative' to something that people would be happy to describe as collaborative involves big changes to all kinds of things: Culture and behaviours, the physical environment and processes, and of course the introduction of new technology. It's a big challenge and it means that the company has to be viewed and treated as a complex adaptive system - while at the same time acknowledging that it is a collection of disparate 'nation states'. The silos are a fact.

As architects of the transformation, we're being conscious to pay attention to the four key ingredients of social movements in order to help penetrate the silos.

Ideas - This strategy of collaboration is being well defined. We're using specific strategic planning techniques (including RIOS planning - brainchild of my friend Chris Tipler and subject of a future post) to ensure that those things the company has to be good at are clearly defined, without being restrictive. Complex adaptive systems have to be able to take advantage of emergence - and trying to lock the ideas into too rigid a construct can backfire. (Imagine trying to throw a birthday party for 24 nine-year-olds using a Gantt chart and milestones...)

Narratives - Narrative is one of the most powerful tools for establishing boundaries, getting complex messages across, making expected behaviour clear and for answering the question WHY. The strategic story behind a transformation has to be made explicit. I first really got bit by the bug of applying narrative techniques in business when I met Shawn Callahan of Anecdote in London. Gartner has published an article (Use Storytelling to Solve Wicked Problems), quoting a lot of Shawn's research.

In his last keynote as CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs uses narrative to explain why Apple was doing all the things it was doing in launching iCloud. It's masterful, and worth the watch. There's a brilliant analysis of it as a Strategic Story at Anecdote here, but in a nutshell,

Steve starts by describing the 'Once upon a time' history. He then goes on to share the Turning point (what changed), describe What we want to be, and therefore What we have to do. Then, he spends the rest of the time interacting with other Apple execs doing live demos to show What the new world will look like.

"Ten years ago we had one of our most important insights at Apple..."

In less than two minutes, that core narrative structure did a great deal of the heavy lifting answering the question "Why" about all the work that must've been going on at Apple. Why people were working overtime building more server farms. Why, while the champagne had probably just stopped flowing over wrangling out the legal issues to get the Beatles on iTunes, all the contracts were probably having to be re-written because of the new conventions iCloud indroduced around rights and syncing. Maajid Nawaz, our former extremist knew the power of narrative in doing his job - so does Apple.

Symbols - Symbols - especially concrete object symbols give us a tangible, visual reminder of the cause. Here's a symbol I saw a week ago at a major bank:

When I took the picture, I didn't even know the whole story yet, but good symbols say so much on thier own:

It's pretty clear that in a movement to simplify processes, one of the bank's internal paperwork forms was universally hated. Once they had managed to streamline their processes and retire that form, they mocked it up in cement, smashed it to smithereens with a big hammer and then, like heads on a row of pikes on the road into a medieval village, they left the rubble in a wheelbarrow in a prominent communal place as a symbol of the movement. (And a warning to any other overly bureaucratic and un-necessary bits of paperwork?)

Non-visual symbols:

Of course, not all symbols have to be visual. This is another role for stories. Good executives can tell stories. Better execs can tell a story and recognise a story when they hear one (so it can be harnessed..) The best executives can tell a story, recognise a story and know how to trigger a story.

Two companies known for their outstanding customer serivce, US retailer Nordstrom and global hotelier Ritz Carlton use stories of amazing, surprising, inspiring acts of customer service as the main focus of their induction and training material. Blow the profitability of a sale at Nordstrom by going over the top with story-worthy customer service do you don't get sacked? No - you get turned into a rock star. Both that fact, and every story associated with it are great symbols in aid of their movement.

The fourth ingredient for a social movement is a leader.

Leader - Does the leader of the movement spring to mind? Who is steadfastedly sticking to their guns in the face of difficulty? On whom can you depend as a beacon when the waters get muddied, when the decisions get tough or when you just don't know what to do next?

How emboldened, empowered, and galvanised for action do you think employees would feel under these circumstances: They got the email describing behaviours they were expected to start showing because of the new program, they'd been subjected to the PowerPoint presenation, seen the roadshow and have the little reminder card that has been deposited on every desk. But then, when their boss, or their boss's boss stood up at some event, or had a one-on-one with them, or was somehow involved, they got nothing. Or worse, they saw something inconsistent or off-message with the transformation?

Steve Jobs is an obvious visible leader for his cause. So was Osama bin Laden. If the leader of the movement springs instantly to mind, it's easier to unite those critical pockets who are already living the new values. Who is the face of your transformation effort?

Learning can come from unexpected places.

Clarity Rule: Know the anatomy of a social movement, and cover all four bases. Know your ideas, have a core narrative, propagate symbols and have a leader.

5 presentation lessons from the King's Speech

2011-01-19T03:21:00.004Z

Jesse Desjardins @jessedee pulled together a nice slideshare presentation with five good preso reminders we can take from the popular movie the King's Speech.

The five lessons are the following:

Have faith in your voice
Admit you need help
Put the hours in (!!)
Become an expert from experience
Broadcast a true version of your self (a bit like Garr Reynolds' presenting naked)

Have a peek at his great slideshare slides below. Note the full-bleed images (no logo-every-page-corporate-template-nonsense there) and the appropriate use of typography. I like how well the tone of the font on the 'lessons' pages matches the old school microphone.

5 Presentation Lessons From The King's Speech

Thanks to Darren Rouse @problogger for the tweet.

Creepy robots and how not to turn people off when telling business stories

2011-01-05T03:53:00.008Z

On the right is the face of one of the most sophisticated androids on the planet. Nevertheless, the face isn't quite right is it?... In fact it's kind of creepy.

So! It looks like authenticity is going to be one of the new trends in presentation for 2011. Hallelujah! (See Nancy Duarte's other predictions here.)

I once had a mentor of mine tell me:

"Greg, listen very carefully and remember this: Intent (he said,) counts more than technique."

And he was right. It's a saying that has stuck with me for a lot of years. What he meant was that you can learn all the clever people-influencing techniques you like (You know the ones:

conversations for rapport through common ground,
mirroring and matching body language and breathing pattern,
benefit-focussed solution selling, or
S.P.I.N. selling,
etc... etc...)

But if your intentions aren't in the right place, it shows. You just somehow know when someone is 'techniquing' you. You can see right through it can't you? On one hand, your friend waxes lyrical with puppy dog-like enthusiasm about why you should switch from your boring old PC to a super-cool Mac like she has, and even if you don't want to switch, you don't really mind her (neverending) insistence. But if some cheesy, over-slick salesperson tries to 'sell' you on one, it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth from the second they sidle up to you and come out with their first over-friendly greeting.

The truth leaks out the sides
The difference is about where they're genuinely coming from. No matter what 'technique' the super-slick salesperson may be using, there's something - some subtle combination of non-verbal cues that leaks their real intent (to 'sell' you) out the side and gives you a feeling in your gut - one way or another.

Of course nobody wants to be presented to by a "hey-there, hi-there, ho-there" cheesy salesperson type, but I read a very interesting analogy from robot design of all things that puts some science behind at least one reason authenticity counts.

It's from my friend Shawn Callahan (one of my Clarity Heroes) over at Anecdote. He found a great parallel between the feeling we get looking at different kinds of robots and the difference between what he calls 'Big-S' storytelling and 'Little-S' storytelling at work. What am I talking about - you ask? Read on.

This is from Shawn's post:

Imagine a spectrum of storytelling. At one end is Big 'S' Storytelling which includes those beautifully crafted stories we see in movies, novels, plays and even the latest Playstation games. Big 'S' Storytellers understand plot structures, character development, scene design and a myriad of other storytelling principles and practices. At the other end of the spectrum is Small 's' Storytelling where we find the stories we tell on a daily basis in conversations, anecdotes, recounts and examples.

Slipping into 'story mode'
Big-S storytelling techniques can be very useful to help with clarity - to help get your point across in a more vivid, engaging way. However, like the cheesy sales techniques, they can also be a trap. If you're trying hard with techniques like voice modulation and vivid imagery, even slightly missing the mark screams that you've stopped talking normally and have slipped into 'story mode'. Ever been having coffee with someone who recently started a new job? Often, if the conversation drifts to how they got it, you can tell the moment they've switched from just talking to you and started giving you the resume answers they used in their interviews. They've slipped into 'story mode'. And unless they're world-class seriously good at it, without meaning to, anybody talking in 'story-mode' risks being distractingly, eye-rollingly cringe-worthy.

So how do creepy robots fit in to all this?
In his post, Shawn introduces the findings of Japanese robot maker Mashahiro Mori, who found in his research that we only like our robots to be human-like up to a point, after which they fall into the creepy-zone he calls the Uncanny Valley - where they wallow in creepiness - until they become perfect and pop out the other side as likeable again.

Source: Crossing the uncanny valley, The Economist, Nov 18th 2010.

With this analogy, Shawn is saying that like making a too-close-to-human android face, using Big-S storytelling techniques to get close to delivering a Big-S story experience can be a dangerous thing, and risks alienating your listeners by propelling you into the creepy-zone of story-mode.

Like all things Anecdote, it's a post worth reading - see the full text here.

Clarity rule: Sometimes an unvarnished recounting of an experience is better than a carefully prepared "the-moral-of-this-story" story. To get a point across at work, it's a million times better to be clumsy and authentic than it is to be too much of a storytelling technique try-hard.

Four presentation predictions for 2011

2011-01-04T00:57:00.003Z

Nancy Duarte, one of my Clarity Heroes, author of Slide:ology and Resonate has posted her annual presentation predictions for 2011. In quick summary, her four predictions are:

Tablet war will shape the future of presentation
Authenticity will trump 'spin'
Slides will be hand-sketched and scanned in
People will opt more for 'no-slide' presentations

See her full post here.

The Surprising Truth about what motivates you

2010-07-01T06:34:00.006+01:00

Below is a great video from Dan Pink.

In it, Dan presents some excellent research into motivation which will help leaders decide what to be clear about if they're trying to encourage good performance. A lot of it ties in with the earlier post on Clarity Rules: Why clearly linking reward to your change programme is harder - and easier - than you thought.

What's more, Dan's animation is also a terrific example of communicating something complex in a very understandable way.

Have a watch.

Greg

How to present numbers - Buffet Style

2010-05-11T02:41:00.004+01:00

This article from HBR showcases a small trumph of plain language and humanising metaphor over technicals and jargon. I wanted to pass it on.

Every year, the chairs and CEOs of public companies write announcements to accompany their annual reports. Warren Buffet, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and the most successful investor of all time wrote one that runs to 20 pages. You'd be forgiven for expecting it to be dry, jargon-riddled technical reading, but it couldn't be further from the truth.

Warren Buffet presents his results and his assessment of the economic climate using conversational (dare I say fun) prose, funny examples and memorable metaphor that make his messages both clear and sticky. This will be great news for his readers - both the Ordinary Joe investor and professionals alike. (Why do people assume that just because someone is 'professional' they all of a sudden thrive on jargon and obscurity?)

His letter includes language like:

"In poker terms, the Treasure and the Fed have gone 'all in'."

(To describe the response to the Global financial crisis),

"Even evaluations covering as long as a decade can be greatly distorted by foolishly high or low prices at the beginning or end of the measurement period. Steve Ballmer, of Microsoft, and Jeff Immelt, of GE, can tell you about that problem, suffering as they do from the nosebleed prices at which their stocks traded when they were handed the managerial baton."

(To discuss different ways they could choose to measure their own performance), and

"We pay a steep price to maintain our premier financial strength. The $20 billion-plus of cashequivalent assets that we customarily hold is earning a pittance at present. But we sleep well."

(To describe their liquidity ratio and justify the opportunity cost.)

HBR sums up four lessons from Warren's shareholder letter:

Use numbers to season the points you serve - they're not the main dish
Use analogies and metaphor
Be honest and transparent
Use facts to put things in realistic context.

The one and a half page HBR article is here.

It's worth the read.

Mexico Oil Spill - an infographic

2010-05-04T07:16:00.008+01:00

If nothing else, pretty pictures make us keep looking:

This infographic is courtesy of our friends at FastCompany.
(click for a larger version)
You can see from the Fast Company article (and the boat and dots bit at the bottom of the picture) that the frightening fact is that in 40 days, the spill will have released more oil than the Exxon Vladez catastrophe on the 24th of March 1989.

Does the infographic do a good job of bringing clarity?

I think the picture itself has a higher stickiness than simply reading the facts would have, (especially if they were presented in a bullet list), and getting the information read at all is a big step towards clarity.

I'm less keen on the cirles for representing relative size. We are not as good at understanding relative size from circle charts as we are at interpreting linear information like bar charts. It's certainly a step in the right direction, given that there are fewer data points to have to compare against each other, but I think the circles' most redeeming feature is that they're an aesthetically pleasing graphic design element. Not as wild about them for getting information across...

Here's another (quite a bit worse) example of circles' dubious data-clarity properties from a previous ClarityRules post: Do Circles Suck?

The data represented in this chart are average US consumer spending numbers. (click for a bigger version)

For me, bar charts are still the best for comparing linear data to show if one thing is bigger than another.

Garr Reynolds does a nice job of showing where a bar chart (or perhaps no chart) can be the best way to show comparative magnitude data:

Before:
After:

You can see his excellent blog post on what he calls the 'signal to noise' ratio in charts here.

Clarity Rule: Pick the right sort of chart for the data

Clarity Rules on Alltop

2010-04-30T05:31:00.010+01:00

Bit of an exciting day for the Clarity Rules blog today: I just had a short conversation with Guy Kawasaki, and as of this morning, Clarity Rules is now featured in Alltop - in the Leadership section. (Guy is a columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, venture capitalist, former fellow at Apple, and author of nine books including Reality Check, the Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive your Competition Crazy and Selling the Dream),

This inclusion in their 'Top Leadership News' puts Clarity Rules in some very flattering company, listed alongside Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and blogs by Seth Godin, Tom Peters and 800 CEO read (and quite a few more...)

If you don't already know what Alltop is all about, the best way to show you is probably to put up these two pictures: They're drawn by Dan Roam author of Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures, and one of our Clarity Heroes:

The way Alltop explains it is as follows:

Being listed was a nice little surprise today. Best of all, it means I get to display the sexy little Alltop badge on the sidebar, which you'll be able to see at right. Made me feel good about writing Clarity Rules. I hope a some new people get to read it as a result. If you're a new reader - hello! And welcome.

A periodic table of visualisations

2010-04-29T06:02:00.010+01:00

Need help choosing what kind of chart or graphic to use?

I stumbled accross this the other day on Yammer - which is something like Twitter, but for work. In a big company, it kind of allows you to shout across the floor of all the offices...without actually shouting. Great for informal communication.

Anyway, about helping you choose a chart or graphic: This nifty little page is a nice collection that could provide some inspiration.

(That's assuming, of course that you actually NEED a visualisation.) Like PowerPoint, just because they're there, doesn't always mean they should be used. Nevertheless, having a bunch assembled in one place like this is really handy. Just mouse over each of the 'elements' to see a popup example. Thanks and acknowledgement to http://www.visual-literacy.org/.

Why clearly linking reward to your change program is harder - and easier - than you thought

2010-02-23T05:10:00.021Z

Or "The meaning of meaningless gifts"

Incentives are a clear way to motivate behaviour change, right? Maybe not.

You've worked on business transformations in the past. You might be working on one right now, and I bet you've heard the words - nay, maybe even uttered the words:

"We need to change managers'
compensation so it aligns with outcomes from this change programme."

After all - we all know alignment of reward with the the big project you're working on is a way to help achieve clarity around the kind of behaviours you're after, right?

Well, in practice it's not so simple. And it's not so simple for at least two reasons:

It's easy to get incentives wrong - because people are irrational, and

It's hard to get compensation packages changed meaningfully - because it's hard.

This doesn't sound like encouraging news. Conventional wisdom and intuition both scream that you have to link reward to good behaviour. You HAVE to.

So what do we do?
More on that later. First, I want to explore why it's not as simple as it feels like it should be, and to give you some real-world reasons to pause if a fresh-faced, wet-behind-the-ears "change manager" comes to you with the textbook platitude that they'll overcome resistance by linking outcomes to managers' pay. Let's look at the reasons in turn:

1 - It's easy to get incentives wrong because people are irrational.
If not properly understood, this notion - that people are irrational - can be one of the most frustrating obstacles you'll come across. It's hard to apply common sense if people's reactions aren't going to follow rational rules, and there are plenty of examples that we don't:

Do you know anyone who will drive around for ages, lurking in parking gridlock just to find a closer space to "save time"? Can you imagine the person who falls into the trap of spending $3000 to upgrade to leather seats on their new car, but would struggle to justify the same spend on a leather sofa at home? (even though they'll spend more time on the couch than driving?) How about this one: Would you be willing to take a pencil home from work and then chuck it in the pen-cup next to the fridge or give it to your kids? If you're like most people, probably. I expect you wouldn't give it a second thought. But would you be willing to raid company petty cash or submit an expense claim for the same thing? Probably not. These examples come from a book called Predictable Irrationality, The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, by Dan Ariely.

In his book Dan makes the point that people's actions can seem irrational - but in a predictable way, because we haven't always noticed that there is a distinction between Economic Transactions and Social Transactions. And this difference is very relevant when we're looking to influence behaviour and get people to do things:

Consider some more examples that fly in the face of traditional, rational textbook economics:

In Haifa Israel, the day care workers were having trouble with parents picking up their kids late. This meant that the care workers had to stay with the kids, keep the centre open later, miss their own
appointments and generally inconvenience themselves. So they got together at a meeting and decided they should link the desired behaviour (not being late) to an economic incentive. Behaviour changed all right. When they imposed a late pick-up fine, what do you think happened? The number of tardy parents doubled. Why? They had confused the social exchange of consideration for the outside lives of the day care centre workers with a commercial exchange. In effect, they told the parents that lateness, or extra time was a commodity they could get by simply buying it. So the parents did. In droves.

So that's an example of a penalty for bad behaviour backfiring. Can the same sort of thing happen with positive incentive?

Decades ago Richard Titmus (who founded the Social Policy chair at the London School of Economics) claimed that paying people to be blood donors reduced the numbers of people donating blood. At the time, rational economists refused to believe him. But now, experiments on this very subject and others have shown that social exchange and issues of signalling identity often override commercial exchange in motivating behaviour. In fact, offering to pay women to donate blood decreases the number of willing donors nearly in half. It tells them (like the daycare parents) that the commercial exchange isn't worth shifting their behaviour. However, make it an identity-related question, or a
social exchange (I am an altruistic person), and you can go a long way. (Letting the women contribute their blood donor fee to charity nearly reverses the drop in numbers.)

My favourite example from Dan Ariely's book though is this: What would your Mother in Law's reaction be if she invited you and your family over to dinner at her place, pulled out all the stops and cooked three courses' worth of your favourite meal - (with the roast vegetables on the side, and the nice sauces, and a beautiful pudding for afterwards), and when it was all finished, and you'd wiped the last drip of unctuous gravy from your plate with a bit of her home made bread, you pushed your chair back, pulled out your wallet and said: "Well that was lovely, Jann. What do I owe you?" How would that go over? Not well? That's the danger of confusing social with economic exchanges.

Dan goes through some of these examples in his short video below:

So. When you think about incentives to motivate change, are your stories and incentives focused on economic or social / identity outcomes? In a previous post (How to get Employees to care 22% More about your Change Initiative), I mentioned people probably don't care about your change for the same reasons you do. McKinsey Quarterly suggest there are at least 5 stories you need to be telling, and if you review the article, you'll see that most of them are more easily related to identity and social exchange than they are to commercial exchange.

So it's easy to get incentives wrong, because people are predictably irrational.

Now. Let's look at the second reason it's difficult to align reward with behaviour to motivate your change:

2 - It's hard to get compensation packages changed meaningfully - because it's hard.

To be clear, I'm not for a second suggesting that it's a good idea to ignore linking compensation to the outcomes of your change programme. What I am saying though are two things:

One, the link is probably at best a hygiene factor: If you have it backwards (people will be directly compensated for the wrong behaviour) you're in trouble, and if you don't have at least the notion of a link, it will seem incongruous and send a signal that the programme is not a priority. On the other hand, (and this is the critical bit) the research we're examining here suggests that the flip side is not true: Having a compensation link doesn't necessarily mean you'll motivate a behaviour change.

Two, getting a sufficiently meaningful link between remuneration and your programme outcomes to get people motivated and in the 'commercial exchange' frame of mind is not ever easy. In looking at an executives' pay package plan, there are two ways to approach it: Financial and non-financial measures.

The challenge with financial measures is that even if you can work the change impacts into budget forecasts, and even if you can get those forecasts to impact operating plans for the various business units, there are so many variables that contribute to the end review calculation that the link to your programme becomes weak at best. It's good that it's there, since you're not sending mixed messages by leaving it out, but the difference in Jane-the-executive or Bill-the-unit-manager's pay packet not going to move any mountains.

The challenge with non-financial measures suffers the same dilution problem: You might be able to make the label for your reward link really explicit, and in this way a non-financial measure may be better for your story than a financial one, but when it comes to impact, the diluting effect of all the other non-financial compensation variables (corporate social responsibility, sustainability, diversity, safety, staff turnover, employee engagement, compliance etc...) makes the financial impact of your particular incentive pretty much meaningless.

For a big enough programme, you could appeal to the CEO and the HR Director to change the way compensation is structured, but there's so much risk of unintended consequences. You wouldn't want to blow up people's reward for carrying on the rest of their business-as-usual functions, and a big compensation restructure would be so much work for what might not be the best motivator of behaviour that it's probably not worth bothering.

3 - So what can you do?

Well, you can treat people like dogs. And I'm only half kidding about that (and I definitely don't mean it to sound disparaging). Any dog trainer will tell you that the best way to train a dog is to concentrate on rewarding good behaviour. In a way, the same think can apply to your change program, if you deliberately take your rewards out of the realm of 'economic exchange" and place them firmly in the realm of 'social exchange'.

How do you do that? Spend less. (Result! Finally something you'll be happy to hear)

Surprising and delighting people with small, unexpected gifts has been shown to have an unexpectedly significant effect on people's satisfaction with their lives.

In 1987 two researchers named Schwarz and Norbert published a study where they gave people a very (very) small unexpected gift and measured the effect it had on them. Specifically, they had people do some photocopying, and half the people in the study found ten cents - a dime - in the machine. Then, when they asked all the subjects to rate how satisfied they were with their lives, those with the dime rated their lives - THEIR LIVES, mind you - a 6.5 out of 7. No dime people only gave their lives a 5.6. Why such a difference?

In their article The Inconvenient Truth about Change Management, Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken suggest that for humans (and maybe dogs?) it holds that "satisfaction equals perception minus expectation." For you, trying to use incentive to change people's behaviour and make them feel more satisfied with your big, disruptive change programme, it means that you can get a disproportionate lift by using small, unexpected gifts as rewards, and critically, make sure your actions register as social exchanges rather than commercial ones.

And you won't be alone: Here are a couple of examples taken directly from the same article of those principles being put in to practice:

Gordon M. Bethune, while turning around Continental Airlines, sent an unexpected $65 cheque to every employee when Continental hit a milestone, and made it to the top 5 for on-time airlines.

The CEO of a large multi-regional bank sent out personal thank-you notes to all employees working directly on the company's change programme to mark its 5-year anniversary.

John McFarlane of ANZ Bank sent a bottle of Champagne to every employee for Christmas with a card thanking them for their work on the company's "Perform, Grow and Breakout" change programme. (And I bet your mother in law wouldn't object to a nice bottle of wine with a thank-you note for the dinner either, would she?)

Like the dime in the photocopier, the small, unexpected gifts worked. And the key is that instead of trying to go the hard yard of changing the formal employee compensation system to reward people by economic exchange, the small, unexpected gifts work because they're seen in the social realm.

A final example from Predictably Irrational has to do with people who are trained for years in rational, cause-and-effect reasoning: Lawyers. He writes:

The AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) asked some lawyers if they would offer less expensive services for needy retirees, at something like $30 an hour. The lawyers said no. Then the programme manager from AARP had the idea to ask the lawyers if they would offer services to needy retirees - for free. Overwhelmingly, the lawyers said yes. When compensation was mentioned, the lawyers applied market norms and found the offer lacking. When no compensation was mentioned they used social norms and were willing to volunteer their time.

Clarity Rule: Make room for unexpected little gifts in your budget. It's a much clearer way to link compensation to desired behaviour.
Greg Stewart

How to get employees to care 22% more about your change initiative

2009-07-09T16:48:00.012+01:00

I could also call this post :"What to be clear about". That way it would be more brand-consistent. But I like the stat in the title. Below is where it comes from:

This is the interesting thing to consider if you're in charge of a change at your company: Odds are, your employees don't care about what you care about.

I'm just going to say that again:
Odds are, your employees don't care about what you care about.

So what does that mean to Henry?...

Henry's story:
Let's imagine Henry. You might recognise him. You might be him. Henry is in his early 40s, in reasonably good shape, and only wears a tie to the office when he's seeing clients. Henry has a high-powered executive role in his company (like you, maybe) and he is sponsoring a transformation. He has arguments so people can spend full-time on it despite their day jobs because he knows it's important. He attends steering group meetings for it, and he is a hands-on helper to the programme manager. He's no fresh-out MBA graduate with no experience; Henry is well-respected. Henry is seasoned. Henry has been around. Henry has the character behind his eyes that tell you he's been there, done it, got the T-shirt. That means Henry knows a few things:

Henry knows change
He knows most change programmes fail. That's old news to him. He's read his Kotter (Leading Change, 1996) telling him 30% of change programmes succeed. He's read more recent stuff, like McKinsey's survey of 3,199 executives that re-inforced the point, saying only 1 in 3 change programmes succeed. That means that over the course of his career, he's come to believe in the value of deliberate change management. He has worked with consultants in his past, and he has also hired people with change skills. (Again, this might be sounding familiar to you.)

He has seen the models. He knows the change needs strong executive sponsorship with visible role modelling of the new desired behaviour. (that's why he's so personally involved.) He knows that internal processes need to be altered so they re-inforce the new way of working. He knows the importance of a good communications and stakeholder management plan. He knows the importance of just-in-time training and he has even seeded 'change champions' throughout the organisation to help embed the change. He's big on benefits realisation and he knows how he's going to measure the value of the change once the 'new way' is in place. Crucially, he even knows that he needs to tell a compelling story, or have a strong 'case for change' so that all the employees who are going through the hassle can see the point of the change and agree with it. That puts him ahead of a lot of people running change programmes out there in business-land. Particularly because he knows the importance of communicating a compelling story, he is pretty confident that his change programme is going to be one of the 30% on the right side of the failure statistics. (If you have ever been Henry, so far you're thinking that everything sounds pretty well in hand. Read on...)

What's more, Henry has read (our clarity heroes) Chip and Dan Heath's book (Made to Stick) and his story about the change is going to follow their S.U.C.C.E.S.s formula: He will concoct his story so it will have a set of Simple messages. It may have some Unexpected elements, though this might be a bit harder. However, he will use Concrete examples and he will be believable and Credible. He will try to incorporate some Emotional elemts and of course since he's telling a Story, well, it will be a story. 5 out of 6 on the Made to Stick scale. Not bad going.

What Henry doesn't know though, is this: His story is going to be all wrong.

Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, in their McKinsey Quarterly article "The irrational side of change management" suggest one critical, potentially success-enhancing or success-killing thing to consider when crafting our clear, sticky, well-communicated stories, and that thing is this:

What motivates you, the research suggests, doesn't motivate most of your employees.
Typical change story types
The story form that underpins most change management efforts, according to their research, tends to follow one of two types: The "Good to Great" story, or the "Turnaround" story. 'Good to Great' stories are the ones that go: ''We conquered the world with our amazing search engine and ad revenue model. However competition is nipping at our heels so we're going to pour our energies in to innovative new things for our next generation like cloud computing for business and government. That next wave will keep us in our rightful position on top!" 'Turnaround' stories are of the "We're in deep trouble now, and our competitors are getting ahead of us. (showing what happens if we do nothing.) Therefore, we're going to make this change to get our costs under control. This will free up the resources to do the new product innovation we've been planning, and with that we can become one of the top 10% industry leaders in the next two years." ilk.

Both sound good, both sound compelling and both sound like rational reasons to change. So our Henry will take his Turnaround story, communicate it to his employees, back it up with great visuals, carry it on with ongoing progress newsletters and keep people involved.

The pitfall:
But this, according to Aiken and Keller is where the pitfall can be:

Research by a number of leading thinkers in the social sciences such as Danah Zohar, (they tell us) has shown that when managers and employees are asked what motivates them the most in their work, they are equally split among five forms of impact:

Impact on society (like building the community, stewarding resources etc...)
Impact on the customer (providing superior customer service, for instance)
Impact on the company and its shareholders
Impact on the local working team (for example creating a caring environment), and
Impact on 'me' (development, paycheque, bonus, hours, type of work etc...)

This finding, they say, has profound implications for leaders.

What the leader cares about (and typically bases at least 80% of his or her messages to others on) does not tap into roughly 80% of the workforce's primary motivators for putting extra energy into the change programme.

Change leaders need to be able to tell a change story that covers all five things that motivate employees. In doing so, they can unleash the tremendous amounts of energy that would otherwise remain latent in the organisation.

So here's how Henry can change his story to get his employees more motivated:

The 22% improvement story:
Aiken and Keller point to the following example:

Consider a cost reduction programme at a large US financial-services company. The programme started [like our Henry's] with a change story that ticked the conventional boxes related to the company's competitive position and future. [only one of the five dimensions from above.] Three months into the programme, management was frustrated with employee resistance. The change team worked together to recast the story to include customers (fewer errors, more competitive prices), the company (expenses are growing faster than revenues, which is not sustainable), working teams (less duplication, more delegation), and individuals (more attractive jobs).

This [and this is the good part:] this relatively simple shift in apporach lifted employee motivation measures from 34% to 57.1% in a month, and the programme went on to achieve 10% efficiency improvements in the first year - a run rate far above initial expectations.

Clarity rule: If your'e going to be clear, be clear about the right things.

Clear marketing ideas... from Canada

2009-07-02T14:53:00.005+01:00

Yesterday was Canada Day, and I stumbed upon a blog post, from a Canuck who had some good, sensible marketing lessons we can learn from the good people of the True North Strong and Free.

He shows how Canadians can teach us:

Why old-school marketing approaches are working less
Persuasion over ramming messages down customers' throats
The importance of trust
What customers expect from us in terms of being 'nice' suppliers
...and my favourite - to eliminate fluffy jargon

Thanks to James Chartrand.
See the full text of his post here.

Happy Canada Day, Eh?

Presentation and writing lessons from the Very Hungry Caterpillar

2009-03-20T14:28:00.007Z

Or, the REAL cause of Death By PowerPoint.

What can a childrens' book author teach us about what makes a good presentation?

Lots.

Don't think kids are an easy audience. Kids demand clarity. They have the same short attention span we have, but they don't have our learned tolerance to put up with being bored. While we might feel like it, read a boring presentation to a child and they actually will cry.

So what does the Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle teach us? Don't put too much on the page.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar was published 40 years ago this year, and has sold over 30 million copies. In an interview, Eric talks about an early experience in publishing that led him to his simple, engaging, uncluttered style:

Why did you start making children’s books?
Way back, when I was in advertising, someone asked me to illustrate what they called ‘educational material’, and I thought it was pretty awful. They put too much on the pages – I would say 32 good ideas on one page makes a terrible book. Then Bill Martin Jr asked if I’d illustrate his book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? It turned me on – the simplicity of the text, the rhythm of that book. I learned from Bill: you take one idea and spread it over 32 pages.

How can we apply this to business? Same way. When in doubt, make another slide.

There's a rule of thumb that too many slides in a presentation is what causes death by powerpoint. That rule is wrong. What causes Death By Powerpoint is too many ideas per slide.

Normally, those too many ideas are crammed on the slide in the form of bullets, but pictures, illustrations and flow-diagrams can all accomplish the same thing: Idea clutter.

If you want to keep your audience engaged and if you want to keep your messages clear, reduce the number of ideas per slide. (see previous post, Clarity Rule - Only One Point), and then, like Eric, maybe your presentation will also reach 30 million people.

I read this book to my kid. Who knew it would invade my professional life too?
Munch munch.

200 words NOT to use when selling to the public sector

2009-03-18T16:08:00.008Z

Hurrah! In a gorgeous move, I've just read here that UK councils have been instructed to ditch the ridiculous jargon-riddled 'business speak' in favour of plain English.

The Local Government Association has compiled a list of 200 ridiculous words in common use that councils are instructed to ditch when communicating to the public so that normal people can understand what they're talking about.

Anybody who wants to sell to them (I'm thinking consulting firms in particular) should pay attention.

Some of my favourite 'illegal words' include:

Coterminous - all singing from the same hymn sheet
Cross-fertilisation - spreading ideas
Actioning - to do

... and my favourite:

Predictors of beaconicity - ???

Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign (praised be its name) says:

"We call them 'rubber words' because they can be stretched whichever way you want to and then they bounce back at you."

Here is the full list of 200 words.

Readers: Have you heard any better examples? You must have come across some great ones. Please post your best ones as comments!!

200 WORDS AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES
Across-the-piece – everyone working together

Actioned – do

Advocate - support

Agencies - groups

Ambassador - leader

Area based – in an area

Area focused – concentrating on the area

Autonomous - independent

Baseline – starting point

Beacon – leading light

Benchmarking - measuring

Best Practice – best way

Blue sky thinking – thinking up ideas

Bottom-Up – listening to people

CAAs - why use at all?

Can do culture - get the job done

Capabilities -

Capacity - ability

Capacity building - enough room in the system

Cascading - why use at all?

Cautiously welcome – devil in the detail

Challenge - problem

Champion – best

Citizen empowerment – people power

Client - person

Cohesive communities – why use at all?

Cohesiveness - together

Collaboration – working together

Commissioning - buy

Community engagement – getting people involved

Compact - why use at all?

Conditionality - why use at all?

Consensual - everyone agrees

Contestability - Why use at all?

Contextual - background

Core developments – main things that are happening

Core Message – main point

Core principles - beliefs

Core Value – belief

Coterminosity – all singing from the same hymn sheet

Coterminous – all singing from the same hymn sheet

Cross-cutting – everyone working together

Cross-fertilisation – spreading ideas

Customer – people/person

Democratic legitimacy – voted in

Democratic mandate – elected to put people first

Dialogue – talk/discuss

Direction of travel – way forward

Distorts spending priorities – ignores people’s needs

Double devolution - Why use at all?

Downstream - Why use at all?

Early Win – success

Edge-fit - Why use at all?

Embedded – set in

Empowerment – people power

Enabler - helps

Engagement – working with people

Engaging users – getting people involved

Enhance – improve

Evidence Base – research shows

Exemplar – example

External challenge – outside pressures

Facilitate – help

Fast-Track – speed up

Flex - Why use at all?

Flexibilities and Freedoms - more power to do the right thing

Framework – guide

Fulcrum – pivot

Functionality - use

Funding Streams - money

Gateway review - Why use at all?

Going forward – in the future

Good Practice – best way

Governance - Why use at all?

Guidelines – guide

Holistic – taken in the round

Holistic governance - Why use at all?

Horizon scanning - Why use at all?

Improvement levers – using the tools to get the job done

Incentivising – incentive

Income Streams – money/cash

Indicators - measurements

Initiative – idea

Innovative capacity - Why use at all?

Inspectorates – monitoring bodies

Interdepartmental – working together

Interface – talking to each other

Iteration - version

Joined up – working together

Joint working – working together

LAAs - Why use at all?

Level playing field – everyone equal

Lever - Why use at all?

Leverage - influence

Localities – places/town/city/village

Lowlights – worst bits

MAAs - Why use at all?

Mainstreaming - Why use at all?

Management capacity - Why use at all?

Meaningful consultation– talking to people

Meaningful dialogue – talking to people

Mechanisms - methods

Menu of Options – choices

Multi-agency – many groups

Multidisciplinary – many

Municipalities – towns/cities/areas

Network model - Why use at all?

Normalising – make normal

Outcomes – results

Outcomes - focused

Output - results

Outsourced - privatised

Overarching - Why use at all?

Paradigm - Why use at all?

Parameter - limits

Participatory – joining in

Partnership working – working together

Partnerships – working together

Pathfinder – Why use at all?

Peer challenge - Why use at all?

Performance Network - Why use at all?

Place shaping – creating places where people can thrive

Pooled budgets - money

Pooled resources – time and money

Pooled risk - Why use at all?

Populace - people

Potentialities - chances

Practitioners - experts

Predictors of Beaconicity – Why use at all?

Preventative services – protecting the most vulnerable

Prioritization – most important

Priority – most important

Proactive - Why use at all?

Process driven – shouldn’t everything be people driven?

Procure - buy

Procurement - buying

Promulgate - spread

Proportionality - in proportion

Protocol - guidance

Provider vehicles - Why use at all?

Quantum - Why use at all?

Quick Hit – success

Quick Win – success

Rationalisation - cut

Rebaselining - Why use at all?

Reconfigured - reform

Resource allocation – money going to the right place

Revenue Streams - money

Risk based – safest way

Robust - tough

Scaled-back – cut/reduce

Scoping – work out

Sector wise - Why use at all?

Seedbed – idea

Self-aggrandizement - Why use at all?

Service users – people

Shared priority – all working together

Shell developments - Why use at all?

Signpost – point in the direction of

Single conversations – talking to

Single Point of Contact – everything under one roof

Situational - situation

Slippage – delay

Social contracts - deal

Social exclusion – poverty

Spatial - Why use at all?

Stakeholder – other organisations

Step Change – improve

Strategic - planned

Strategic priorities - planned

Streamlined – efficient

Sub-regional – work between councils

Subsidiarity – Why use at all?

Sustainable – long term

Sustainable communities – environmentally friendly

Symposium – meeting

Synergies – what use at all?

Systematics - Why use at all?

Taxonomy - Why use at all?

Tested for Soundness – what works

Thematic - theme

Thinking outside of the box - Why use at all?

Third sector – charities and voluntary organisations

Toolkit - guidance

Top-Down – ignores people

Trajectory - route

Tranche - slice

Transactional - Why use at all?

Transformational – change

Transparency - clear

Upstream - Why use at all?

Upward trend – getting better

Utilise - use

Value-added – extra

Vision – ideal/dream/belief

Visionary – ideal/dream/belief

Welcome – necessary and needed/step in the right direction

Wellbeing - healthy

Worklessness - unemployed

19 Offensive Presentation Techniques

2009-03-05T13:09:00.003Z

I was just tweeted the link to the 19 offensive presentation techniques.

They're from a site called Paul's blog. He says:

We’ve all sat through some hideous presentations. I sat through one today – run by a partner of a top-tier Melbourne law firm. It almost put me in a coma. The amazing thing is, the presenter appeared to have been trained to provide the presentation in that way. It inspired me to publish a list of terrible presentation techniques which has been growing in my notebook. If you want to give an offensively boring presentation, just do the following:

Use your company’s branding and style guide on every slide of your powerpoint and make them look really neat and clean.
Put as much information as possible in your slides. Have a minimum of two sentences in each slide. Never less.
Don’t use real-life examples that the audience can relate to. Stick to the subject matter.

For the other 16, click through here.

Prezi: Coolest presentation tool of 2009

2009-03-01T12:36:00.011Z

"Focus too much on the details and your audience might not get the big picture. But focus too much on the big picture and they might miss those devilish details."

I've seen the future.

After reading this, you will have too.

The future is Prezi.

Prezi describes itself as "A Zooming Editor for Stunning Presentations."

I watched a couple of presentations in their showcase, and they're right.

Do you know what? Just stop reading this and click through. Hit the logo and watch the video on the opening screen. That tells you why. Then scroll down and click on the one called "About Perspective". It tells you how.

Here it is again: Prezi

It will explain itself. If you aren't jumping out of your skin with interest, then in a year or two when this becomes more mainstream, you'll say to yourself

"Oh yeah. I remember reading about that on Clarity Rules. I see what he was on about now..."

Don't be that person. You'll feel foolish. Check it out.

We've come a long way in the last couple years. Vivid images and big type are supplanting bullet points. Succinct well thought out key messages are supplanting gratuitous 'thud factor'.

But big-picture, big-text, clean design style (a la Presentation Zen) and the 10-20-30 rule style (though still among my very favourite things) are great for pitches, they're great for keynotes, but you have to pick the medium to match the message, and as presentation techniques, they can sometimes fall short when it comes to presenting detailed information. Indeed, Nancy Duarte's top guess in her 'Five Predictions for Presentations in 2009" was that tools for complex presentations would have to evolve this year.

It's true. New techniques have to be added to the presenter's arsenal. Zooming interfaces like Prezi just might be one of those techniques.

It is just in Beta, and to my knowledge not yet commercially available, but it appears that Prezi allows you to design an entire presentation on a page, then using movement, magnification, orientation and position, lets you zoom in, out and around your presentation to tell a story. Indeed the 'zi' in Prezi stands for "Zoom Interface". They were originally going to call the product "Zui" for Zoom User Interface, but people found it too hard to pronounce. Prezi it is.

It kind of reminds me of the PowerPoint-style version of when Blaise Aguera y Arcas presented Photosynth and Seadragon at TED a couple years ago.

The user interface from Minority Report will also be a great way to explore detail and the big picture in a non-linear way...once it's ready. (Here it is again...just for fun)

But Prezi, however, is nearly here and I for one can't wait. I mentioned a few posts ago that the 12-year olds were winning. Let's beat 'em. Let's learn Prezi.

Unclear chart - do circles suck?

2009-02-27T12:07:00.007Z

So do circles suck?
- or can they be used well?

Here is an example of a bad chart, pointed out on Twitter by Nancy Duarte, owner of Duarte Design, author of Slide:ology and one of the Clarity Heroes.
While you have to applaud the attempt to be innovative in presenting data, in this case it just doesn't work. Using circle area makes it difficult to process what could otherwise be some interesting data.

The chart is below (click for large version), or go to the original blog here.

So why doesn't that work? Too many data points, too near in value.

Used well, circles can be used to show large differences in magnitude with one or two data points, but this is too many points with values too close to be easily interpreted.

Question: Does anyone have any great examples of circles being used effectively?
(There's an opening title sequence to a film I can't remember - something about spiralling US debt. It's done with Kinetic Typography and I think it had a great use of circles to show magnitude. I just can't find it...) Will update if I do.

Clarity Rule: Use the right tool for the job

Google's innovation message: "Fail Quickly"

2009-02-25T19:42:00.014Z

Guy Kawasaki talks about the Mantra as being key to communicating what your company/project/idea is about. A mantra is a 2 to 4-word succinct encapsulation of the core message. Gone are the laborious old mission statements of the 90's. Banished to the world of overly-expensive "close-your-eyes-and-fall-back-in-my-arms - that teaches us trust!" executive retreats. In their place - says Kawasaki - should be the matra.
A couple he quotes in his article:

Federal Express: "Peace of mind"
Nike: "Authentic athletic performance"
Target: "Democratise design"

Short, sharp, sweet - and most importantly: Clear. Why? Becasue you can remember them.

Today I hosted a table at a breakfast roundtable discussion for senior executives in the telecoms media and technology space. Google provided the guest speaker and the event was run by Atos Consulting and Boyden Executive Search and it was attended by an impressive guest list from the sector (The Telegraph newspaper's Mobile division, the Financial Times, BAE Systems, NEC, Yell, World Television Group and more)

The guest speaker, the UK head of Google Enterprise had been invited by Atos to talk about the role of innovation as a lifeboat in a sinking economy, and in doing so he came out with a cracking mantra describing Google's attitute towards internal innovation: "Fail quickly". Doesn't that just sum it up nicely?

At Google, they provide unbridled latitude to their employees to innovate, they tolerate failure, and they pilot loads of smaller projects in order to quickly be able to decide whether or not to continue to devote resources to them. Rather than engraving all that on some corporate plaque what did the man say on the stage? "Fail quickly." Love it. And people were all a-twitter about it afterwards. Simple, memorable, clear.

60% and 6%
As an aside, another clear message that came out was the fact that not many of the organisations present were following that advice. The Q&A session was run by Scott McArthur (of McArthur's Rant) and he did a straw poll of the 40-odd senior execs in the room. Of that group, Scott's' poll revealed a funny set of numbers: 66% and 6%.
66% believed that innovation could add significantly to their bottom line in this downturn, but only 6% believed their companies to be innovative!

So the new question becomes: Can you become innovative? It almost becomes this: Innovation - nature or nurture? Some at the event believed that nature was the stronger argument. "It's all well and good for Google to say they're innovative - but they start out by exclusively hiring innovators. Our company has different requirements, so it's not so easy for us.".

Clear messages from executive leadership stimulates innovation at Telegraph
Maani Safa, (pictured) the head of mobile at the Telegraph Media Group, told me that he believes the answer can be nurture. In his experience, under new leadership and in under two years, the area in the Telegraph Media Group where he works is unrecognisable from his perspective, in its approach to innovation.

"You can tell", he told me "...just from the partnerships we now have. I'm working on getting Telegraph content onto the big 4 handsets, and we've got partners coming to work on the project with us all the time. Google. Nokia. Adobe. They all come walking through the door. Two years ago, that never would have happened."

Maani was clearly a man exciting about and loving his job. A job in a very innovative space, but at an institution that might have been viewed by many - not that long ago - as unlikely to be labelled a hotbed of innovation. In his experience, the executive leadership sending a clear message transformed that part of his business. Clarity Rules.

Feedback from Presentation Zen's Garr Reynolds

2009-02-23T23:02:00.008Z

It's not a big thing, in the grand scheme of things, but I'm absolutely riding high right now. The other day, via Twitter, I got a little bit of feedback. Not just any feedback mind you (at least not for me)... Clarity Rules got an acknowledgement from one of my Clarity Heroes, Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen (voted one of the best business books of 2008).

Early last week I was on my computer, working away, having sent a Tweet to Garr pointing out the site, and what should come back from him but a reply saying:

"Yes www.clarityrules.org ....Rules! Great site." Garr Reynolds

I'm just thrilled about that. (It's also great to have Japan on my map of reader countries!) Thanks very much, Garr.
Greg.

PS: If you're reading this and you don't know who Garr Reynolds is or why he's listed as a Clarity Hero on Clarity Rules, here is a blurb about him:

About Garr

Garr Reynolds is currently Associate Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University where he teaches Marketing, Global Marketing and Multimedia Presentation Design. Garr is active in the Japanese community and can often be found presenting on subjects concerning design, branding, and effective corporate communications.

Garr is the former Manager of Worldwide User Group Relations at Apple Computer, Inc. in Silicon Valley. With Apple, Garr worked with user groups (brand communities) in the U.S. and Japan and traveled extensively delivering presentations, software demos, and keynote addresses to the firm's most loyal customers. Apple's installed base consists of the most sophisticated and loyal customers a company could dream of. (The only company which has a similar kind of loyal, informed, and fanatical user base is Harley Davidson.) Garr worked closely with user groups while at Apple and had a great time helping out the local user group events such as You Don't Know Mac in Oregon and the Mac Computer Expo in California. Before joining Apple, Garr worked for most of the '90s at the head office of Sumitomo Electric Industries in Osaka.

Garr lives in Osaka, Japan.

Kinetic Text and Data visualisation - How are your skills?

2009-02-02T23:06:00.003Z

You need new skills.

So do I.

This world is all about sharing ideas and information, and I'd be willing to bet that our skills are out of date.

The blogosphere, the internet and indeed bricks and mortar offices and lecture halls are awash with the world's experts in getting ideas and information across. The best do it better than ever before. We have insights into the how the brain works, what makes things 'click in to place', what makes things memorable enough to stay there once we get them in, we have refined presentation techniques and thinking available to us to help us do this better than ever before. The bar of Clarity Heroes links on the right is chockers with great thinkers and presenters. Getting ideas across has become the new science - and many of us - including myself - are leaving ourselves behind when it comes to being able to take advantage of all this great thinking.

Guys like Garr Reynolds will tell you that it's 'not all about the technology'. And he's right. But sometimes it is.

I read an article before Christmas telling me that YouTube had surpassed Yahoo as the world's number 2 search engine. How good a video producer are you for things at work?

The world has moved on in the way it communicates ideas, but strangely the demand for new tools as basic requirements to participate hasn't yet caught people like me short. But it is about to - and it should.

I see these great presentations. I see these amazing visualisations of data. (See Hans Rosling below) I see new ways to capture an increasingly sophisticated, skeptical and short-attention-span audience every day (like with the Kinetic Text in Girl Effect further below).

And yet, my own skills and the skills of many of my colleagues seem to be topping out at being 'pretty good at PowerPoint. Worse, my employer seems satisfied with this.

RUBBISH I SAY! It's not good enough, and it's not placing enough emphasis on the need to be able to communicate well!

DATA VISUALISATION
Just watch Hans Rosling use some very clever technology to get complex statistics across in a powerful and engaging way:

That was no Excel plug-in!

MAKING A POINT POWERFULLY
In another example, check out how powerfully this message comes across using Kinetic Text:

Also check out 4 approaches to kinetic text from wisdump.

You KNOW that's not available to you NO MATTER HOW GOOD YOU ARE AT POWERPOINT.

Incidentally, if you want to give that Kinetic Text a whirl (and I haven't yet, but I'm happy to pass along the goods in the name of Clarity) then the people of Carnegie Mellon University who have been messing about with kinetic text for 10 years have made a java engine available for download. Their site also contains some background info and several examples.

That's fantastic stuff!

THE IMPLICATION - ABOUT YOU AND ME

Do YOU know how to do What Hans did? Can you whip up a Kinetic Text supplement for a presentation tomorrow morning? I certainly can't. I'll tell you what though:
Today's 12-year-olds will be able to.

And sure, there will be new toys that prove to be useless. There will be new technologies that are good, but get misused (flash intros to websites? Yikes.) But that's not an argument against learning new stuff! We have to play with these things to get good at them and to find the real value. For every 'girl effect', there's something dreadful. But that's great. At least there's something!

Office jobs are all about getting ideas across. And some of the most powerful examples of getting ideas across involve technology. Not for its own sake, but because it's a real facilitator.

I'm looking forward to the day when people like me are grumbling about these new tools we have to learn just to pass the basic requiremnets hurdle. This stuff shouldn't just be the domain of the specialist - it should be mainstream!

We don't walk around taking stone tablets and chisels to meetings anymore do we? No! We advance our tools! Well I think the standard-issue PPT is becoming the shaven goose-quill and blacking pot, and while some of us may pride our nib-carving skills over and above some of our colleagues', let's dip in to the future a bit.

The world is changing. Audiences are changing. Thinking and methods available to us are changing. If your job involves the need to get messages across to people, are you keeping up?

So if you want to communicate clearly, if you want to capture your audience's attention, then skill yourself up. I know I'm going to.

How are your skills?

Clarity rule: Upskill

How to stop people reading your slides while you're presenting

2009-01-25T12:13:00.008Z

Easy!
Don't put any damn words on them!!

The best picture I can find about PowerPoint abuse is from Presentation Zen

I wouldn't have made an entry about this except that on Thursday a guy at work came up to me and honestly said

"I wish I could stop people from reading my slides!...I try to flip through faster, but they always catch up."

This is seriously old news, but it bears repeating:
If you are doing a presentation, it's more work, but gives a much better result if YOU do the presenting instead of PowerPoint.

No words (or very few words) for a presentation is hard work, but it means the following things: -

It means you have to do the work of distilling out your main points
It means you have to do the work of figuring out how to get them across memorably
It means you can't have someone else 'make your slides' and then swoop in and read them like a teleprompter
It means you can't hide behind content and 'blind them with science' ... or even blind them with quantity...science or not
It means you have to respect your audience enough to rehearse
It means you have to do the work of possibly creating an additional document to accompany your presentation if more information is required

Easy, right?

It sounds logical, but lots of people don't do it.
It sounds like a no-brainer, but lots of people don't do it.
It sounds like yesterday's news (especially if you're reading this blog or anything written by any of my clarity heroes, but again, lots of people don't do it.

The good news is, there's loads of help around:

If you think you might be able to use some help stopping people reading your slides when you present, despair not. Just link to ANY of the Clarity Heroes listed in the sidebar on the right and start reading their stuff. It's brilliant.

I'd start with the presentation tips from Garr Reynolds. And then never stop.

Barrack Obama's Inagural Speech: Clarity in action

2009-01-20T21:26:00.010Z

Today Barrack Obama delivered his inaugural address.
It was clear.

In addition to his great timing, musical oratory style and presidential mannerisms he followed a few of the clarity rules:

He had one point which was: The US is in a crisis and getting out of it will be hard but possible.
His points could be structured into a logic tree (see Logic Tree post #1 and #2)
He signposted - telling us where he was in his logic tree. (after talking about the war, the economy from various perspectives, health care, schools, the housing slump and energy policy"These [things I just discussed] mean crisis is hard")
He didn't waffle around an unpleasant message
He linked his central idea to an emotional theme: (repeatedly invoking "The values of our forefathers", which saw the US through crises in the past)

Watch his speech again, paying attention to those things he did deliberately to make it simple and clear:

See if you can construct the underpinning logic tree.
See if you can imagine his speechwriters storyboarding out the structure points.
See if you can see them ticking off the pointed emotional appeals to various stakeholders.

Politicians are often derided for talking lots but saying nothing. Spouting political doublespeak and leaving their audience obfuscated and wondering what was actually said.

Not so yesterday.

The Clarity Rules Manifesto

2009-01-15T11:47:00.006Z

There is a great movement afoot, and I want to help:

Tribes have been started by the likes of Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, Nancy Duarte of Slide:ology, Dan Roam, Barbara Minto, Chip and Dan Heath and many others, and more and more, their work is having an effect on all of us:

We are improving the way we think and present.

Clarity Rules is a call to arms in support of this growing movement.

Its goal is to spread this good thinking. To be another voice insisting that clarity is an absolute necessity. To unpick tangled thinking. To smooth out waffle. To kill off bad presenting altogether. I want Clarity Rules to be a place where everyone can come and share their stories of clarity winning over obscurity, and to make sense of how it can be done.

I want use this blog to assemble everyone's great ideas and techniques into a series of Clarity Rules we can all share and use.

This is a call to you: Please join the movement!

Use ClarityRules to

Share your personal clarity stories
Share great Clarity Rules you've found elsewhere
Share examples you've found of clear thinking overcoming the unclear
Share your stories of applying new communication thinking - at work, at home
Point out where you find examples of great techniques that can make this happen
And let's not accept anything less from the people who communicate around us

So many people are doing so much good work, and I humbly ask for the opportunity to help them spread it.

Yours,
Greg Stewart.

Five predictions for presentations in 2009

2009-01-14T15:42:00.016Z

Nancy, one of my Clarity Heroes, over at Duarte design just posted her predictions on what we will see in slide design for PowerPoint in the coming year.

Have a look at her post here.

I think her firm is well-positioned if prediction 5 comes true, (look what they did for Al Gore, after all), and I love (and fervently hope) for #2 to come true (increasingly sophisticated audiences will heckle presenters who prepare badly and who have bad visuals)... love it!, but I'm really interested in her

Prediction #1:
There will be a rise of new visual benchmarks for solving complex communication problems.

She says:

Large photos and sparse text are quickly being adopted...[FINALLY! - you GO, Garr Reynolds!],which is great. But they only work for keynotes and marketing. So what about the physicians, scientists and engineers? Best practices for these folks should arrive in 2009.

What will be the modes for making the complex clear, visually?

Dan Roam (another one of my Clarity Heroes) is having a go with his book Back of the Napkin on visual thinking and problem solving.

Another one of my favourite examples is this old standby: Hans Rosling on TED showing dry world welfare statistics in one of the most engaging presentations I've seen. I've you've seen it before, enjoy it again and if you haven't check this out:
(and remember: by rights, this should be really, really dry)

So the question becomes: What tools will come next, and what skills must we master to be clear with the complex?

Six word stories: Great lesson here

2009-01-12T23:06:00.006Z

So much meaning, so few words. For some interesting examples of getting a point across with artistry and economy, check out

http://www.sixwordstories.net/

Untangle Your Thinking - Logic Tree Post #2

2009-01-07T14:47:00.003Z

If you haven't already, have a look at the post that precedes this one:

What's your point - Logic Tree Post #1

So - if you've got this far, you've done your work, you've been through your analysis, you've figured out what you're trying to say.

Now - how do you say it with clarity?

How do you make it as easy as possible to get your audience in a position where they can sensibly agree or disagree with your conclusion (as opposed to putting your audience in a position where they spend all their brain power trying to unpick your tangled thinking so they can even begin to decide whether or not they agree)?

How do you use a logic tree to untangle your thinking?

The answer? Follow these steps:

Know your key line: talk to yourself for 5 minutes like a journalist would to their editor
Don’t choose confusing logical structures: forget how you arrived at your conclusion – it doesn’t help
(The Biggie) Get away from your computer and physically draw up the logic tree
Now you can write, using your logic tree branches to provide your chapter headings

I wrote this post from a logic tree. (I thought it would be pretty hypocritical not to). A portion of it is included below. You can see how it dictated the structure, sequence and content of this post.

Say it with Clarity: Step 1 - Think like a journalist

Get the key line out first. If your goal is clarity, don’t make us guess, don’t take us on a journey – just spit out the answer. Up front. First thing.

Journalists don't write like anyone else. They don't write like novelists. They don't write like magazine feature writers. They don't write conversationally, the way they speak. In fact, journalistic writing follows neither the rules of natural conversation, nor the principles we normally think of when we think of some aspects of good writing - like suspense or storytelling.

What journalists do is they write hierarchically. The idea behind a good piece of journalism is that from the first sentence (the headline, or the ‘key line’) you should be able to understand what's going on. With the next sentence you begin to get more detail. In fact, you should be able to (and feel compelled to) read further into the article only to the extent you want to get more and more detail in support or explanation of the stuff - and ultimately the headline - you read above.

One story about where this came from is journalists broadcasting stories during the war were constantly at risk of being cut off the airwaves, and so had to develop a style that would ensure that as their broadcast carried on, the most important stuff got out first and each successive sentence was of lesser, ‘filler’ value so the message of the story would be understood no matter when they broke transmis….

So do you know your key line?

Say it with Clarity: Step 2 - Forget how you arrived at your conclusion

This is a discipline in your message structuring that will help keep you from creating a tangle in the first place:

This step is about removing confusing, extraneous structure. Given our natural desire to tell stories, and given that the way we came to whatever conclusion we’re communicating is probably already a natural story, there might be a temptation to use that sequence of events as the default structure for our writing.

For example, let's say you were doing a piece of work for a client and it took you 2 months of data gathering, hypothesis testing and conclusion deduction to get to your answer. The temptation is often to take your client along the journey you took, so they can see how your thinking evolved, and how you came to your end result.

Rubbish.

This synthesis is what your audience or client is paying YOU for - to untangle the mess of data, indications, ideas etc... in order to come to a conclusion. Why make them re-live the tangled process with you? What they're interested in is the answer you’ve synthesized (the headline). They want to know whether or not you can support it enough so they believe it too, (and probably, they want to know whether they can convince someone else of the answer using your arguments.)

(I came to decide to write this article as a result of an experience I had helping a colleague re-write a report to a client. I based my advice to him on the teachings of Barbara Minto, author of The Pyramid Principle, and this recent experience made me think it was worth posting about – but for clarity in this message of how to use logic trees I haven’t told you any of that – it’s extraneous.)

Think like a journalist – get the answer out first. Drop the other mess.

Say it with Clarity: Step 3 – (The Biggie) Structure using a Logic Tree

Now that you have decided what your key idea is, and now that you have shed the temptation to tell the story of how we came to the conclusion, you can then use a logic tree to determine a clear structure for getting your message out.

A logic tree, also called a pyramid structure, is a physical chart of your ideas grouped in a hierarchical, logical way. It is like a storyboard, but with cause-and-effect relationships.

A logic tree is an org chart in which your main point is the CEO and everything else is organised in support.

Logic trees, or ‘Pyramids’ are best described by Barbara Minto in her book The Pyramid Principle, which has made Barbara one of my Clarity Heroes. If this article whets your appetite for using logic trees, go out and buy her book immediately, read it and start applying her thinking to your writing.

You could just have a pyramid conjured up in the back of your mind, but it is very helpful to create a physical tree you can look at, play with and critique.

You can make a logic tree using your notebook, post-its on a wall or tools like mind-mapping software. MS Visio works a treat. (If I have a meeting room at my disposal, I like to put post-its on the big windows and draw around them right on the glass using dry-erase markers. I just think writing on the windows is fun!) Very liberating.

Logic trees will be pyramid-shaped in concept, and if you draw them out, they’ll often be pyramid-shaped in practice (depending on the detail of supporting evidence under each point.)

Here is the logic tree I used to create this section: (click to enlarge)

My key line for this article is that “in order to say it with clarity, you should use a logic tree to structure your argument.”

The first line of my logic tree pyramid (in black) shows the main steps I think will help you to apply this Clarity Rule to your own work: (1: getting clear on the main idea, 2: removing confusing stuff that came from how you got your idea, 3: using a logic tree to shape your argument and finally 4: writing based on your resulting tree structure.)

We are currently in section 3 – “Use a logic tree”, and you can see from the tree itself that I believe logic trees are good for the following three reasons:

Readers get clarity (because we think structurally, and thus presenting ideas congruently with our thinking process makes them more clear.)
Logic trees force you to organise your thinking (because there are implied rules and because you can then test your thinking against those rules), and
If you set up your ideas using a logic tree, then your text basically writes itself! Your structure and supporting information is already ordered for you.

If I follow the tree, I can then go on to expand on any of those elements – such as listing out the logical rules we need to follow when organizing our thinking, and describing what some of the detail behind those rules looks like. But let’s do this in order:

Because: Logic trees give readers clarity:

Someone who wants to learn your view on a subject is faced with a pretty complex task. They have to take in all of your points, interpret them, sort them, then hold them together so they relate them. Finally, once they have mapped out in their minds what you are saying, they have to test your ideas against their own knowledge and beliefs, weigh that against the support you have provided and decide if they agree with you.

The more we can do to help our readers with that sorting job, the easier it is for them to get to the important part of agreeing or disagreeing.

We’ll look at this more specifically when we examine the rules for grouping ideas later, below.

Because: Logic trees make you organize your thinking

The biggest bonus to a logic tree is that it can help you ensure your thinking is both coherent and complete. Since you’re organizing your thinking in a pyramid structure, when you draw your ideas out, it instantly becomes awkward to build if you aren’t following logical rules. Also, knowing the logical rules means that after you’ve structured your views, you can test whether your thinking complies.

If you can’t build a logical pyramid, you also probably haven’t built a coherent story.

The logic tree pyramid rules:

Ideas at any level of your tree are summaries of the ideas below.
Group apples with apples – to make sense grouped ideas should be the same kind of idea
Order the ideas in your groups in a logical way

Rule 1 – Ideas at any level of your tree must be summaries of the ideas below: Well this just makes sense. In the same way that a paragraph is a summary of the sentences within it, writing where your sub-points all support your points with what a reader will expect. The easiest way to check you’re doing this is in rule number 2, next:

Rule 2 – Group apples with apples. If you have five ideas that can be collectively summarized by one level of abstraction into the idea above, then each of those five ideas will necessarily be the same kind of thing:

For example: grapes, apples, mangoes, bananas and clementines are all kinds of fruit.

In contrast: grapes, shopping, dignity, expensive and ‘be careful’ are … well… nothing. At least nothing I can make sense of very easily.

Using that extreme example might make it sound silly or trivial, but this is a danger point and a potential Clarity Blocker. Nonsensical, accidental logical groupings are insidious in writing and really worth checking for. It is easy to end up going down a tangent if writing the group of ideas is long and involved, and thus easy to lose sight off the fact that the group of ideas is meant to be collectively in support of the summary idea above. Ever asked: “What was I talking about again?” Exactly.

So how do you check you have a sensible group? Easy. Just name each of your ideas with one word, and see if you can assign a plural noun to the group of them. Could be anything:

Fruits
Steps in a process
Reasons
Examples
Proposed changes
Problems
Recommendations

As long as you can name them, there’s a good chance they’re a coherent group. In our first example above with grapes apples mangoes bananas and clementines, they can all be called fruits. Check. In the second example of grapes shopping dignity expensive and ‘be careful’, you’ve got a fruit, an activity, an emotion or state, a description and some advice. Definitely not a group. At best, some of those ideas could loosely be tied to the notion of acquiring fruit – but that would be quite a stretch. Plus, it would be wrong – and as a reader you would have wasted time trying to guess at the grouping.

So: make your logic tree, group your ideas as summaries of the layer above, and check you can name those grouped ideas with a plural noun. (Following the logic tree behind this post, we are currently at the end of number 2 of a group of ‘rules’)

Rule 3 – Order the ideas logically.

This is where some of the persuasive magic and dramatic artistry can happen. In her book, Barbara comes right out and says:

“Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized” - Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle

There is an art and a science to ordering groupings properly, and the book devotes an entire chapter to getting it right, but in a nutshell, Barbara asserts there are only four possible logical ways to order ideas:

Deductively (major premise, minor premise, conclusion)
Chronologically (first, second, third)
Structurally (Boston, New York, Washington, or Design, Engineering, Marketing, Sales), and
Comparatively (First most important, second. Or: these three problems, all the rest)

Barbara asserts that our minds can perform four kinds of analytical activities: deductive reasoning, working out cause-and-effect relationships, dividing a whole into parts and categorizing - and these activities correspond naturally with idea order:

If it was formed by reasoning, then you group your ideas in argument order
If it was worked out as a cause-and-effect, then group in time order
If commenting on a structure, then order structurally, and
If categorizing, then order by importance.

We have already established that organizing ideas into a logic tree helps our audience digest our position because it helps us to present our ideas the way our minds work to absorb them. This step of ordering our ideas within sound logical groups is the poster-boy example for this, up in shining lights.

All this organization also has the by-product of taking care of all the hard work:

Because: Using a Logic Tree means the text writes itself

Say it with Clarity: Step 4 – Go ahead and write, using the tree as your chapter guide.

Once you’ve finished, you’ve got your key idea chosen, you’ve reduced the extraneous rubbish, you’ve designed and checked your message using a logic tree all the hard work is basically done! You just have to tour through the branches and flesh them out with words. You can be loose, just writing free prose that will magically have the welcome quality of being easy for your audience to follow. Equally, if you want to be formal, your paragraph numbering system is already in place.

The top level will be your introduction (including a key-line statement of your conclusion)
The next level down the tree will be your main sections eg: 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0
Down each section will be your progressively more detailed sub-sections eg 1.1.1, 3.1.2 etc…

That’s it!

Clarity Rule: Structure your point: Start with a logic tree

Keep an eye out for Logic Tree post #3: Setting it all up with the right introduction

Write on the glass

2009-01-05T16:26:00.008Z

Hard up for space to think visually?
Not enough white boards or flip charts?

Write right on the windows!
(dry erase markers wipe off)

I love doing this. Kind of reminds me of those posters of John Nash in 'A Beautiful Mind'

Liberating.

(And if nothing else, it'll get people in your office wondering.)

Only One Point

2008-11-04T10:25:00.006Z

If you want your point remembered, then remember this: Have

Thing is, you don't want to have only one point. It's hard, and it can feel wrong. Cutting out bad points for clarity is easy. Cutting out irrelevant stuff for clarity is easy. Cutting out good stuff though, is hard.

The difficulty is that when you present or write about your topic, you will know lots and lots of points. You will also know that leaving out some of the points is wrong, and will give your audience or your readers an incomplete picture of your position. And as a person of great intellectual integrity, you won't want to provide an incomplete picture, so you will be tempted by the curse of all your knowledge to include enough relevant points to get the whole, complete, well-argued, multi-point message across.

Trouble is, people won't remember it.

They will remember something: They will remember that you knew a lot. They will remember the reassured, comfortable feeling they had that you covered all the bases. If you're a good, entertaining speaker, they may remember that you were a good and entertaining speaker. The risk is though, that they won't remember your points.

So now you have a choice:

Either present many points and be remembered for being knowledgeable, or
Or present one, have it stick with people, and actually change the world one memorable point at a time.

Don't get me wrong. Having one point is not the same as having one sentence. We're not talking about being content-free. (We wouldn't want to put copy writers or the printing industry out of business after all.) It's fine to have lots of supporting arguments for the point. (Using a logic tree is a good way to ensure they do support the point) It's fine to have compelling stories to illustrate the point. It's fine to present concrete, unexpected evidence to shore up the point. The trick though is to make sure that all those arguments, all those stories and all that evidence are obviously, easily and memorably linked to your one central point.

Clarity Rule: Have One Point

What's your point? Logic tree post #1

2008-10-31T14:40:00.020Z

I get confused a lot.

I listen to a lot of presentations and I look at a lot of documents that lose me. Well, mostly I look at a lot of "Sliduments" that confuse me.('Sliduments' are a bastardisation of a document and a set of presentation slides, but that's another post...)

It might be because they bog me down in loads and loads of data, facts and clever discoveries that they haven't prepared me to be able to assimilate. It might be because the author isn't on hand to explain what I'm reading. It might be that there are no supportive exhibits or pictures. It might be that there are too many. Granted, it might just be that I don't have the biggest brain in the world, but even if you discount that, a document or presentation loses me the most when I'm distracted by trying to figure out what they are trying to SAY.

It's so easy to fall in to the trap of writing a document that will lose people. I've been (very) guilty of it myself. In consulting, it usually comes from building a slide deck that acts as kind of diary of activity you undertook for the client to do your analysis. About a month ago, a colleague of mine took me through a set of slides he was getting ready to present. To protect the innocent, I'll blur the details, but essentially the presentation story line was as follows:

"Over the last 6 weeks, we did this, and we did that, and we investigated this (where we found THIS out) and as a result we also investigated that. It led us to believe that you should do this. Of course then we found that that department won't support doing this, so we think either this or that would be the best options. This and this person support the idea, but not surprisingly this one doesn't, so we looked at this and that. In the end we thing this. Please extend
our contract."

Somewhere in there there might have actually been a real, well-founded recommendation with excellent backing arguments. (There was, actually). But it wasn't obvious. I was working so hard to try to piece every new fact into its place as we went, that the power of their argument was lost.

The mistake there was writing chronologically and trying to take me on the same journey they went through when they went through the analysis and discovered their answer. Put yourself in a client's shoes though: As a client, I don't want to have to go through the same convoluted journey the consultants went through. I don't want to have to apply the same thinking to sift through it all to come up with an answer just to follow their presentation. That's what I paid them for.

Most dangerous is the presentation that's not really trying to make a point, but just has to be given to a client to provide the appropriate 'thud factor'. (If you slap a document down on a client's desk, the weightier the 'thud' the more compelling the document... so the thinking goes.) Documents or presentations like that arre often the amalgamation of a brain dump of facts, some supplementary sprinkling of "good slides" from previous, vaguely-related packs and a bit of "corporate bumph" cut and pasted in for good measure to pad it out to a good, respectable length. (You KNOW you've seen these ones before. They're often written by a "team" (you do this chapter, I'll do that chapter), and pulled together by some poor, hapless junior who has to wrestle with formatting - or by a partner who corrects the punctuation.) Do documents like that usually win the day? Maybe we could run a poll.... Five'll get you ten I can guess the result...

Best way to avoid these pitfalls? The logic tree.

Don't leave home without it. Or more to the point, don't write a document or build a presentation without it. Logic trees are great. They force you to organise your thoughts, and to justify all the slides and data your'e thinking of including by making you show what argument, exactly, they're supporting.

"What were we talking about again?"

Ever get stuck going down a tangent, only to lost track of what the original branch-off was supposed to be proving?

Having your thoughts organised in a logic tree prevents all that. Plus, drawing up a logic tree, even freehend in your notebook forces you to strip out all the distracting content, and makes you lay the thrust of your argument bare, so you can see it all at once, and decide whether you believe yourself.

I first learned about logic trees by reading Barbara Minto's book: The Pyramid Principle. Barbara is one of my Clarity Heroes. Her book is basically the McKinsey bible for structured thinking. Her premise is essentially this:

Our logical brains look for order and patterns to things.
If you're making an argument, make it easy for the reader to understand how your logic fits together.
That way, your reader can spend time deciding whether or not they agree with your conclusion, rather than distracting themselves trying to figure out how to pull what you're trying too say out of a batch of disorganised facts.

Clarity Rule: Start with a Logic Tree

In subsequent posts, I'll look at how to use a logic tree from scratch, and how to apply logic tree thinking to a presentation that's already mostly written.

See Logic Tree post #2: Untangle your thinking

Clarity isn't always popular

2008-10-29T13:04:00.009Z

In fact, one of the biggest barriers to clarity is unpalatability. Sometimes we're accused of not seeing the wood for the trees? Well even more often I think we don't see the wood because we just don't want to.

Front page news on McKinsey Quarterly's new website is a series of articles about managing in a downturn. One article in particular caught my eye. There's an axim in CEO strategy-space that says "Invest in a downturn." McKinsey's primary research of global companies and the results of the strategies they have followed through up and down economic cycles shows that of all the moves a company can make to grow in a downturn (invest to gain share, divest something, buy something), more shareholder value is created when companies invest aggressively. Tidily, the opposite is also true. The data shows that divestiture creates more value in an upturn.

So the axim and the data match up: Buy when things are bad, sell when they're good. Buy Low, Sell High. It even has a nice ring to it. A nice, clear, strategic rule of thumb.

Except... the McKinsey data also shows that by and large, CEOs ignore it! The exhibit in their article shows that over upturns and downturns, most companies did nothing, and of those that did act got it exactly wrong!

Why? Because at the time, it doesn't feel right.

One view is that companies act a bit like people: When the going gets tough, the most natural feeling thing to do is to batten down the hatches, reign in the reckless, cut spending, curl into a ball and weather the storm. Live to fight another day and all that. The data may advise the opposite, but we largely ignore.

Another a propos example of ignoring clear data would be the argument that goes like this: Lending a whole bunch of money to people who can't afford to pay it back, then building an enormous, interdependent financial growth spiral based only on magnified, bigger and riskier (but impossible to understand) derivatives of those risky loans (ie: a huge economy based on next to nothing) is not a good time to close your eyes, plug your ears and cover your mouth like the three 'see no evil hear no evil say no evil' monkeys when it comes to writing up and enforcing industry regulations. But we did it.

Why? because at the time, it doesn't feel right.

There was money around. Bonuses being paid. Big growing wealth based on a 'new economic model' that we didn't quite understand, but hey! Who cares! We're making money! You don't even need a long memory to remember the fictional 'new economy' of the first dot-com boom. Revenue? Pah! Business plans? Pah! This is a new economy. Underlying fundamentals don't matter. It's about something else! (sentiment, hype) Let's invest millions! Despite the fact that the evidence clearly wasn't there. It just felt better to go with what we wanted.

Clarity Blocker: Unpalatability

Shut Up!

2008-10-28T12:43:00.010Z

Clarity isn't just about being understood. It's also about understanding. And the most powerful lesson in active listening I've ever been given was simply this: Shut up.

People make all kinds of noise about various active listening techniques. My aim isn't to knock those techniques - but to offer an alternative. I believe for all the mirroring, and nodding, and repeating back we're taught to do, we often get it wrong. Put simply, we do it too much. Once upon a time, I was on an advanced leadership course and one segment was all about active listening. We were a room full of consultants, so of course we already knew all this stuff. We were all asked to list the most effective techniques for active listening that we used. As we did, the instructor captured them on a flip chart at the front of the room:

Use open body language;
Ask open-ended questions;
make encouraging noises like 'mmm hmm' and 'go-on';
paraphrase what's being said;
check understanding; etc...

Once we had a good list, and were feeling like we'd pretty much licked it, the instructor did something I'll never forget. He pulled out a great big red marker and with a squeaky scrape down the page he slowly, agonisingly crossed them all out with a big, page-filling 'X'. He then tore off the sheet, crumpled it up, then blue-tacked it to the wall so we could all see our words slashed out, and he wrote two words on the blank page underneath:

"Shut up"

"That's it" he said: "Shut up." It's that simple. And to prove the point he asked us to do one of those artificial group exercises that makes everyone roll their eyes. He asked us to think of one emotional, personal story we wouldn't mind sharing with one other person in the group. Then, our job was to listen to the other person tell their story for five minutes, and switch roles. The catch was that as listeners, we had to abandon everything we knew about active listening, and try just shutting up.

It was miraculous. You've never felt so listened to in your life. Five minutes, it turns out, when you're truly being listened to, can feel like a very, long, comfortable time. You see, when you know you're not going to be interrupted, you're not going to be drawn down a tangent sparked by something you just happen to have said last, when you know you're not going to be jumped in upon when you pause to take a breath, as a speaker, you can relax. You can actually tell your story. You can build up points without fear of being drawn down a rabbit warren of listening to the other person say "Yes! I know what you mean! I had that when.... blah blah blah" and you can make your whole argument in peace. I shared way more than I intended to that day in that little exercise, and I've never, never forgotten that lesson: Shut up.

The problem is, while the active listening techniques we read about are well-meaning, and while in theory they're even correct, as social animals we apply them wrong. We have an insatiable apetite to autobiographise. (that's totally a word). With the best intentions in the world, we're dying to let the person talking to us know that we really, really understand them, and one of the best ways we can prove it to them is by telling them just how their circumstance also applies to us. "I know what you mean!" we tell them. Followed by giving them 'proof'.

Wonderful intention, but it's an interruption. And for gaining clarity, it just doesn't hold a candle to shutting up. So much more comes out in the silence of shutting up and your listener feels great.

Try it. Watch them. You think the silence that normally occupies a conversation will be uncomfortable if you let it draw out? Ha! That's only if you happen to be Anglo-Saxon, or even more so if you're Latin. It's just a cultural thing. Ignore it. The Japanese are quite happy with more silence. Use total silence to let your speaker know they have complete freedom. Don't even give an 'mmm hmm'. Watch the relief in their eyes when they realise it's not just a mirage, but you really aren't going to interrupt them when they pause for a breath or to collect their thoughts. Let them finish, and just stay quiet, looking at them with an open, expectant face. Then, when they don't say anything, stay quiet some more, and wait until they firmly declare that they're done, and ask you for a response.

You'll have so much more clarity, and it's the greatest gift you'll give someone this week.

Clarity Rule: Shut Up

YOUR view of the Credit Crisis

2008-10-25T15:08:00.001+01:00

My friend Scott posted a question on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago asking if people could explain the credit crisis in one sentence. The responses were great. Re-enforcing, contradictory, informative, funny. So we decided to mash it all together into a presentation. (with a style nod to Garr Reynolds)

We spent a lunchtime doing this

(I known the hand model, enquiries on a postcard) and a little time looking for images and came up with the presentation below.

A LinkedIn view of the credit crisis

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

We entered it into a competition on Slideshare and much to our surprise, they put it on their front feature page about 12 hours later!

Hope you like it, and if you do, please sign in to Slideshare and vote for us! (you just press the green ThumbsUp button)

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