User-friendly Language Part 2: Clear the FOG

Have you ever come out of a meeting or presentation, and realized that you had trouble putting into words exactly what was said or decided? Maybe it’s because you were blinded by the Fog.

Fog has two slightly different but related meanings. As an acronym, FOG stands for “fact-deficient, obfuscating generalities”, in a phrase coined by L.J. Rittenhouse in his book, Investing between the Lines. And if you watched last night’s debate, you heard a lot of it.

As a noun, fog stands for any communication that is unclear, ambiguous or meaningless. It creeps into communication in several forms: deliberate vagueness, excessive abstraction, and euphemism.

Deliberate vagueness

There’s a phenomenon called the Forer Effect which describes the technique that horoscope writers and sellers of psychological profiles us to put things in very general terms so that everyone reading them is struck by how much it applies to them personally, as in this example:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.

Many business communicators seem to have gone to the same school. Once, just to prove a point, I talked to some executives from a company that is a leader in its industry. Using some web site quotes, I asked them if the quotes accurately described their differentiators and advantages. They responded as if I was wasting their time: “Of course, why don’t you tell us something we don’t know? What’s your point?”

The point was that the quotes had not come from their own web site. I had collected them from the sites of each of their next three competitors. In fact, without keeping track of the source of each quote, it would have been next to impossible to match the statement with the company.

When even the executives of the company don’t recognize the differences between what they say and what everyone else in the industry says, how can you expect customers to make sense of your message, to remember what you say during your presentation, or to care?

Excessive abstraction

Have you ever heard someone (perhaps even yourself) say something like, “our best-in-class quality and performance provides superior value that leads to unparalleled increases in productivity for our customers”?

Try to picture each of these words in your mind. You can’t, because they aren’t real or tangible. There’s nothing “wrong” with words like quality, performance and productivity, but you’re not doing yourself a favor if your conversations don’t use words that listeners can see, hear, feel, taste, or smell.

It’s difficult to write about abstraction and concreteness without being, well, too abstract. If I tell you to avoid excessive abstraction, I violate the rule. A better way to say it is: “When possible, use words that people can see or feel in their minds.”

Concreteness supports lean communication by making messages stick because they are easier for the mind to grip. I can give you two lists of twenty words each, the first with words such as “efficiency, morale, productivity, freedom”, and the second with words like “clock, lion, ship, cup”, and you will recall far more of the second list when your memory is tested.

Being concrete and specific forces you to think through your ideas thoroughly. You can talk about capturing market share all day long, but it won’t mean anything until someone figures out the concrete steps that will achieve that abstract goal.

Finally, concreteness reinforces effective action, which is the end goal of lean communication. Charities have long known that an abstract message about famine in Africa is far less effective than a picture of a starving child. It’s called the Mother Teresa effect, because she said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Euphemism

Euphemism is the intentional use of terms that hide unpleasant meaning, usually used to soft-coat bad news or avoid blame. When I recently heard someone had “graduated into heaven”, it took me a bit to figure out he had died.

The following example was so egregious that it was written about in a magazine article:

“Citigroup today announced a series of repositioning actions that will further reduce expenses and improve efficiency across the company while maintaining Citi’s unique capabilities to serve clients, especially in the emerging markets. These actions will result in increased business efficiency, streamlined operations and an optimized consumer footprint across geographies.”

Translation: “Citigroup announced layoffs. This action will save money.”

Euphemism is fine if it will avoid offending a key stakeholder, but when it’s done to protect the communicator, it is wasteful and wrong. My favorite example is “to serve you better…” when used to announce changes that will hurt the customer.

Clear the Fog with Q-SAVE

You have five tools at your disposal to make your language concrete and precise and SAVE it from FOG. These tools form the acronym Q-SAVE:

Quantity: Although numbers may seem like the ultimate abstraction, they are actually the best way to make something real and meaningful. You can say your solution speeds up their process, or you can tell them it makes it 17% faster, which translates to $3.4 million in additional revenue.

Story: A story is the leanest communication tool you can use, because it can pack the most power into the fewest words—as long as you select the right one and tell it right. The right story is relevant to the point you’re making, and it’s told without extraneous detail.

Analogies: Analogies bring foggy ideas clear by connecting them to the familiar, and a well-chosen one can snap your listener into instant focus.

Visuals: The cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” is true: despite the common misconception that people have different sensory preferences, the fact is that we are all visual.

Examples: Examples clarify by making things real in the listener’s mind. A striking example of this is a study that found that clipping a picture of the patient to a scan made radiologists more meticulous and accurate.

In the next article, we will tackle the third obstacle to clear communication: friction.