Robert Baden-Powell’s last message to Boy Scouts all over the world was: “Leave this world a little better than you found it.”
Strive to do the same thing for your audience every time you communicate, and you won’t fail to create value. In lean communication, value is defined as anything that improves business and or personal outcomes while preserving the relationship. You create value in communication by giving others information they can use for better decisions and more effective action. They will be better off, you will be better off, and the world will be better than you found it.
Note: This is the first in a new series of posts in which I impart Lean Communication philosophy and techniques in 100 words or less.
You’ve just finished your important presentation, and opened up the floor for questions. What’s your mindset? Are you anxious to get through the Q&A safely; are you hoping that you won’t get tough questions; are you praying that the blockers will keep quiet?
If so, you’re playing not lose, rather than playing to win—and you’re less likely to get your wish.
What sets the great performers like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady apart from the merely excellent, is that when the game is on the line in the closing minutes or overtime, they want the ball in their hands. They trust themselves above all others to bring home the victory. Above all, the greats play those crucial minutes to win, while others may simply play not to lose.
I submit that the same dynamic applies to great presenters. If you view the Q&A as an afterthought, and as merely an obstacle to complete before you’re done, you are already in trouble. I’m not referring to ordinary presentations, where the decisions are routine and little change is expected. I’m referring to crucial presentations, where the audience is going to make a decision that entails major change; it could be a major purchase decision, or a strategically important project.
In those presentations, the presentation itself is not enough. In fact, it often serves just to set the context for the real discussion among the various people involved in the decision. The presentation is important because it can frame the discussion, and help to define the limits of the discussion that will take place, but it’s during the interaction after the presentation when minds will be made up and intentions will be formed.
Here are three specific reasons that the Q&A is crucial:
It surfaces real attitudes and concerns. If your blockers keep quiet, it may be because they’ve been convinced by your airtight logic and eloquence—or it may be that they’re just waiting for you to leave so they can open up about everything they think is wrong with your proposal. You want your blockers to bring their concerns out in the open while you are there and at least have a chance to address them.
It allows you to show your mettle. If you have a polished and effective presentation, people may be impressed, but they also know that you had a lot of time to practice. Before entrusting their money or their reputation to you personally, they may want to see how you react unscripted and under pressure. For example, senior decision makers may not know enough about the technology to judge your claims during the presentation, so they like to “scratch beneath the surface” to test your knowledge and conviction…
It enables you to facilitate the real discussion. In The Challenger Customer, we’re told that the key task in major purchases is to align the diverse perspectives of the 5.4 (on average) stakeholders. Your Mobilizer can do that for you during the sales process, but when you have all the stakeholders in one room, you have a unique opportunity to guide the discussion, to stimulate open and productive debate in the room. That’s a scenario that most salespeople would rather avoid, but the Jordans and Bradys of the sales world will relish the challenge.
Of course, simply having a positive, opportunistic attitude is not enough. It has to be grounded in reality; Jordan and Brady earned their killer instinct through countless hours of preparation and practice so that they could execute at the right time. I share tips on Q&A preparation and execution in this video:
You know as well as I do that there is a lot of waste in business communication, but we should try to do better than that. Can we put a price tag on what communication costs you and your organization?
When financial advisers help people get control of their finances, the first thing they do is make them track their spending. That’s usually an eye-opener and it’s a crucial step to motivate real change.
I’d like to do the same for you as your lean communication adviser—to give you a little added push to improve your own communication, and if you’re in position to do so, to encourage changes in your own company that will take a surprising amount of waste out of daily communication.
Let’s focus on the two biggest sources of waste in business communication: meetings and email.
Between the two, they can take up about 60% of your work hours.
A study by Bain says that meetings take up 15% of an organization’s collective time. That number sounded low to me when I first came across it, and that’s because the percentage climbs as you move higher up the ladder. One study found that top executives spend approximately a third of their time in formal meetings, and that doesn’t count the time on phone meetings or business meals, so it could be up to 40% of their time.
Peter Drucker said, “One either works or meets. One cannot do both at the same time”. But let’s give meetings the benefit of the doubt and assume that the time you spend in meetings contributes to the productivity of your real job, and then subtract the percentage of time that meetings are found to be productive. In one study, respondents surveyed estimated that 50% of the time they spent in meetings was wasted. So if you spend 40% of your time in meetings and half that is wasted, that takes 20% off the organization’s productivity right there. Insert your own numbers to do the math.
But it doesn’t stop there, not when you consider the hidden ripple effect that some meetings can have across the organization. How many meetings have you gone to, just to prep for higher-level meetings?
That Bain study I just mentioned analyzed the Outlook schedules of everyone in a large company to figure out the actual impact of the company’s weekly Executive Committee Status meeting.
To prepare for the meeting, senior-level participants spent 7,000 hours annually. Meeting with their unit heads. 7,000 hours
Unit heads meet with their senior advisers to prepare for those meetings: 11 unit heads x 1,800 hours = 20,000
Senior advisers get information from their teams: 21 team meetings averaging 3,000 hours = 63,000 hours
The teams need to spend in prep meetings time synthesizing the information: 130 meetings x 1,500 hours = 200,000 hours
No wonder John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”
The next largest chunk of time taken out of your day is dealing with email, which takes up about 28% of your time according to a survey by McKinsey—let’s just say 25% to keep the math simple. What percentage of those emails are waste? One article in the HBR estimates that 80% of emails are wasted. A survey by Atos Consulting in the UK says respondents spent 25% of their total time writing emails that add no value.
Bill Jensen, the author of The Simplicity Survival Handbook, says 80% of internal communication shares information that does not require action, and there is no consequence if you ignore it.
So, if 80% of a quarter of your time is wasted, that’s another 20% of your total productivity.
With just meetings and emails, poor communication sucks 40% right off the top of your productivity.
By now it should be pretty clear that there is a huge amount of waste in business communication, but at the risk of talking past the close, let me cite just a couple more statistics that relate to real work: getting projects done on time. The computing Technology Industry Association ran a poll in 2007 in which 28% of respondents said that poor communication is the #1 cause of project failure. And the Project Management Institute in 2013 said that for every 1B spent on a project, $75 million is at risk due to ineffective communication.
When you add all this together, not to mention the cost of errors and misunderstandings, it’s clear that at least half of business communication either does not add value or actually subtracts value. If those numbers aren’t enough to motivate you, I don’t know what will.
With apologies to my alma mater, it’s not all about the U (especially the way their football team has been playing lately)[1]. In lean communication, it’s all about the YOU. Value begins and ends with the YOU.
The purpose of lean communication is to add value while minimizing waste. Since waste is defined as anything that does not contribute to value, the definition of value is absolutely central to successful lean communication. If you don’t get it right, nothing works, and if you do get it right, you will always have an excellent chance to succeed.
In lean manufacturing, the customer defines value, because value is defined as anything the customer is willing to pay for. It’s the same in lean communication, where your listener defines value. That means that when I communicate with YOU, I don’t get to define value; it’s not what I think is important; it’s not about my reasons for deciding or acting; it’s not about the language that I understand. If YOU are my audience, it’s about what YOU think is important, about what YOU value, and about what YOU care about. I can only get what I want by helping YOU get what YOU want and need.
Although there are 9 keys to Lean Communication, the master key is outside-in thinking, which is the ability to put yourself into the listener’s perspective and build your communication so that it resonates with that point of view.
Cognitive empathy
Most people think about empathy as being about emotion, but there’s also a form of it called cognitive empathy, which is thinking what the other person is thinking. Because lean communication is directed at business communication, it focuses primarily on cognitive empathy. While it might help to feel your boss’s emotions when you’re making a big presentation to the executive committee, you’re going to need a huge dose of cognitive empathy to succeed, and that’s what outside-in thinking is about.
Although it’s not a business example, General U.S. Grant knew how to get into the heads of his opponents. When he attacked Fort Donelson in 1862, he knew that an aggressive approach would work against General Floyd. Floyd bugged out before the fort fell and left General Simon Bolivar Buckner to surrender. Buckner, who had served with Grant in California, told him that if he had been in command Grant would not have gotten up close to Donelson as easily as he did. As Grant later said in his memoirs: “I told him that if he had been in command I should not have tried in the way I did.”
Individual YOU and collective YOU
The interesting thing about the pronoun YOU is that it can be singular or plural, and when you’re presenting something to a group, you need to appeal to both. If there are five people in the room, you have to answer two questions. The first that is on most people’s minds is WIFM, or “What’s In It for Me?” Each stakeholder will evaluate the idea in terms of their own self-interest. As the old saying goes, “where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit.”
But if you appeal only to a collection of individual YOUs, there’s a high likelihood of failure, because everyone in that room has their own conception of WIFM, so the quest for agreement may generate a lowest common denominator that tries to satisfy everyone, which is why committees turn out camels when horses are needed.
When you’re trying to produce a horse instead of a camel, you also have to appeal to WIFU, which is “What’s In It for Us? That’s the collective YOU, and it must address what’s important to the group as a whole. [2] It could be the organization they all work for, or the larger purpose that drives them. When you can master the mix of singular and plural YOU, you can create more value for more people than by simply focusing on individuals, because everyone gets part of what they want and all of what the group needs.
So, if you want to be a true lean communicator, make it a habit always to make it about the YOU. To paraphrase Sun Tzu: “Know yourself and your audience, and you will not be imperiled in a hundred presentations.”
[1] For my readers unfamiliar with American college football, the University of Miami’s team has adopted “It’s all about the U” as its unofficial motto. Although just about every team has “university” in its name, somehow everyone knows who they’re talking about.
[2] Credit goes to The Challenger Customer, by Dixon, Toman, et. al. for this concept.
