In a free market, companies create profits for themselves by creating value that others are willing to pay for, in excess of their costs of production. If they want to generate more profits, they must either increase the value or reduce their costs, and this focus on the bottom-line forces a customer-centered discipline. Before introducing a new product, they have to think carefully about whether customers will buy it, and whether they can produce it profitably. To help them, many companies have adopted the lean production as a framework for constantly looking for ways to maximize value and minimize waste.
When their customers consider whether to buy their products, they measure the value they receive in terms of ROI, which simply is a division problem, with Return on top and Investment on the bottom. While there is always a lot of gray area in deciding what results and costs to include in the calculation, it’s still a reasonably straightforward way of prioritizing how to invest their limited capital.
We all take this for granted when it comes to business, but is it possible that we forget it when we communicate? Just as companies don’t pump out products unless they think they’ll sell, we should not just pump out words without thinking about whether they are worth listening to. Will listeners be willing to pay the price in time and effort to hear what you have to say?
It may seem like a no-brainer, but if you’ve ever sat through an interminable and unproductive meeting, and calculated the total opportunity cost of everyone in that room, if you’ve had to wade through hundreds of emails to glean actionable information, if you’ve worked hard to decode what someone is really saying, if you’ve had to tolerate a chatty co-worker when you’re in a hurry, you know how rarely people think about communication in this way.
Maybe one reason is that we don’t consider the costs of communication. In a world where it is so easy to communicate instantly and electronically, it would seem that talk is cheaper than ever. But the real cost is the hidden opportunity cost: what is the combined value of the time that is used by speaker and audience, including all the process steps from composing the thoughts, writing/speaking, transmitting and discussing?
Return on Time and Effort
Is there an economic value to business communication, and if so, can it be calculated?
It’s much more slippery to pin down the return on communication, but we can at least try to measure the unmeasurable by applying the same thought process as ROI. I call it RoTE, or Return on Time and Effort.
Return: What value does your audience receive from listening to you? We measure value in lean communication in terms of outcomes and results. When the information shared improves a decision or leads to effective action that generates measurable outcomes, you could theoretically put an actual dollar value on that conversation or presentation. Of course, that’s tough to measure, especially since most decisions are the results of not just one single communication, but of countless conversations, presentations, messages going back and forth, etc. But still, it’s one of those things that people know when they see it or hear it. It’s also important to note that value is defined by the listener, not the speaker.
Practically and mathematically, R is the most important factor in the equation. If it’s zero or negative, no amount of brevity or clarity will make the communication worthwhile, and if it’s high enough, almost any amount of time and effort will be worth devoting to it.
That said, it’s still important to concentrate on the denominator of the equation. Unlike ROI, in which the investment is only calculated in dollars, communication requires the investment of two costly currencies: attention and cognitive effort.
Time is of course the most easily measurable factor. How much time do you take in getting your message across? Do you get right to the point, or do you overload your listeners with information they already know, do you hold back vital information out of fear of offending, do you have trouble resisting interesting but irrelevant snippets and trivia?
The paradox of brevity is that it takes time to produce. When Mark Twain received this telegram from a publisher:
NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS
He sent back this reply:
NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES
So, there is a cost/benefit analysis you have to run through your mind: is there any net value added when you invest your time to save time for the listener? The answer is almost always yes, first because when you are presenting to audiences of more than one person, it’s easy to see that an extra hour of preparation to shorten your presentation can pay off in multiples, especially when you are presenting to higher-level people whose opportunity cost of listening can quickly add up to big numbers. Second, the thinking you put into effort of making things brief carries over to the next part of the equation, effort.
Effort is harder to measure but no less important than time. The simple truth is that thinking is hard work, and we generally avoid doing any more than is absolutely necessary. As with brevity, you work hard so they don’t have to. The harder you make people work to understand what you’re saying, the more of their time you take and the less value you add to them.
By making it easy for them to understand, you also do yourself a favor, because they will be much more likely to repay you by accepting your logic. Make your “product” user-friendly by making your reasoning transparent, using plain language that all can understand, and illustrating your reasoning with stories, analogies, visuals and concrete examples.
Building equity
When companies create profits, they build equity which strengthens their balance sheets and provides resources to generate future profits. It’s the same way with personal communication. As you build a reputation for delivering good value through lean communication, you are building personal equity in the form of credibility.
Credibility can lead to the Matthew Effect, the idea that the rich get richer. By consistently delivering a Return, at low cost in time and effort, you will generate greater trust, with more decision makers who will require less verification of your arguments and facts, and accordingly save time over the long run—for yourself and for others. That is priceless, whether you can put a dollar value on it or not.
Many communications are a “data dump” in which the speaker tells everything they know, and the listener has to draw conclusions from all the detail. If you present all the information in your head without analysis or recommendation, you are asking the other person to do your work for you.
When Henry Kissinger became President Nixon’s National Security Adviser in 1969, he brought a reputation as a demanding taskmaster. So, when a staffer was given an assignment to write a position paper for his new boss, he understandably put in extra hours and took great pains to produce top-notch work. A day after he had turned it in, Kissinger called him into his office and asked him, “Is this the best you can do?”
The staffer promised he could improve it, and went back to his desk. He cancelled his other appointments, called his wife to tell her he would be home very late, and worked feverishly on the report: fine-tuning it, adding information, clarifying where necessary, etc. At the end of the week, he turned it in. On Monday morning, Kissinger passed by and contemptuously dropped the report on his desk. In a loud voice, he again asked, “Is this the best you can do?”
Stunned and not a little frustrated, the staffer vowed to do even better, and redoubled his efforts from the previous week, putting even longer hours and finding even better ways to express and support his position. Two days later, convinced that it was as close to perfect as he could get it, he turned it in again. The next day, Kissinger again asked, “Is this really the best you can do?” The young man had had enough, so he looked at Kissinger squarely and said, “Yes, that is the best I can do.”
Kissinger replied, “Good. Now I will read it.”
Kissinger could have read the first draft himself and—with a little thinking—had what he needed to make a decision, but he got more “value” from having his staffer do that work for him. He made the staffer do the work so he would not have to—not because he was lazy, but because he had so many other important things to do with his time. In economics, it’s called comparative advantage—even if you can do something better than someone else, you’re better off paying another person to do it and using your time for higher value activities.
Suppose you go to your executive team to propose a project. You have a ton of information and data that could bear on the decision, and you want them to make an informed decision, so you give them everything you know. At the one extreme, you could give them a data dump of every fact that is in your head, and you know that they will know as much as you do about it, so coupled with their superior vision and judgment, they can make a better decision than you could by yourself.
What value have you added in that case? At least you have collected the relevant data, so that’s a good thing. But they still have to do a lot of the work of interpreting the data, sifting out the critical from the irrelevant, making judgments about the accuracy and truth, and so on.
Thinking is hard work, and it takes time. Especially if you’re communicating upwards, your listeners are perfectly capable of handling the hard work of thinking, but rarely do they have the time to put the required depth of thought into every decision they have to make every day. It’s like buying furniture from Ikea: you save money but then you have to assemble it yourself.
Fox News has a slogan: “We report, you decide.” It’s a nice sentiment for a reporter, but you’re not a reporter. You need to do more than report—you need to at least advocate for a position. Otherwise you run the risk that they will take the facts that you supplied and interpret them in their own way—maybe differently than what you intended.
You can’t make the decision for them, but you can recommend a decision after you’ve done all the hard work. By doing this work for them, you add more value by making it easier and faster for them. Value is defined by the customer, and the amount of work they have to do will affect their perception of value.
Thinking is hard work, even for people who are paid for thinking. Anything you can do to ease this “cognitive strain”, as Daniel Kahneman calls it, will make your message more persuasive and actually more pleasurable to listen to.[1] In another context, Samuel Johnson said: “What is written without effort is read without pleasure.” If you want to maximize your chances of getting through to the other person, keeping their attention, and getting the agreement that will benefit both parties, you have to do the work.
The number one task in lean communication is to ensure you add maximum value, and one way to test for this is to gauge who does most of the work. Do you deliver a finished product, or is some assembly required?
[1] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp. 62-67.
So far in this series on lean listening, we’ve seen how the second conversation in our heads can be deployed to help us rather than hurt us, and how to use it to listen for value. This article shares ideas on how to use the second conversation to help us cut through the clutter and reduce waste. We do this by listening for the main point, making the logic and language transparent, and filtering out the irrelevant.
Listen for Organization: What’s the Point?
How many conversations do you participate in where you feel like you’re on a hunt for buried treasure? Under a torrent of words, you know there’s a point in there somewhere, and you hope it will show up soon. If your conversation partner is practicing lean communication, they will put the bottom line up front for you, but if not, it’s up to you to figure out their main point as quickly as possible, because having it makes the rest of the listening process fall into place. Not knowing their main point makes it hard to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, or the important from the merely interesting.
So, your main listening task is to identify and gain agreement on the main point as quickly as possible. Ask yourself if you’ve heard the point, and if the answer is no, ask. Do they want something from you? If you haven’t figured out their “ask” in the first thirty seconds, ask them: What do you need from me? Why are you telling me this? If they won’t tell you, be on your guard.
Listen for Transparency
Next, do you understand the logic and the language of what they’re saying? Logic refers to spotting the structure of the other’s argument. A clear logical structure makes it much easier to spot gaps, inconsistencies, and irrelevancies.
If the other person is communicating lean, following their logic should not be a problem, but if you can’t spot an underlying pattern, you can help the other person communicate more clearly to you by asking them for the structure that you prefer. For example, most business proposals fall into either a problem/solution structure or an investment opportunity (and they’re not mutually exclusive). If you can identify which of these applies, you can trot out your own mental template to help slot the incoming information in its proper place. For example, if they’re proposing something to solve a problem, listen for these four main areas:
What’s the nature of the problem: is it described accurately, are the root causes clearly understood, and what are the consequences of not solving it now? What criteria will they use for a solution? What alternatives have they considered? What are the advantages of their recommended solution?
As to language, there is so much room for misunderstanding in ordinary conversation, but we often don’t ask for clarification because we think it might make us look slow or ignorant. Don’t let your ego get in the way of effectiveness; make it a practice of asking for clarification or definition, or a concrete example of an abstract term. If you can’t picture it, you may not understand it—and often they may not either. For example, if someone says they want to improve quality, ask them to describe the gap between what is and what should be, or get specific examples of customer complaints.
Listen for Waste
Once you have identified the main point, it will make it easier for you to organize and classify the incoming information. You can apply the Four-I test: concentrate on identifying the integral and important information, enjoy the interesting without getting too distracted by it, and ignore the irrelevant. You should mentally ask yourself “So What?” periodically to ensure that what you are hearing contributes to the purpose of the conversation. Once again, you are perfectly within your rights to ask the question out loud (as tactfully as you think you need to be), to ensure that the content of the message is aligned with the purpose.
In the previous post, we said that lean listening is about listening for lean—paying close attention to the elements of the conversation that add value and minimize waste. This article focuses on the value part of that equation.
The thing about listening for value is that most of us are already pretty good at listening for value in conversations—as long as it’s our value. But in persuasive business conversations, there are usually two other parties that could potentially benefit: the other person, and the larger purpose.
Value in lean communication is defined as communication that improves outcomes for one or both parties while respecting the relationship. In lean communication, value can be added by one party, or jointly created by both. Listening is crucial either way, but especially so for the joint creation of value. It’s the key to getting the best thinking out of all parties in the conversation, first by allowing you to ask questions that dig deeper into the situation, and second by making it safe for the other person to bring up thoughts they might have kept to themselves. And, by involving the other person in whatever is agreed to, it makes it more likely that they will follow through.
You may recall that one of the tests of lean communication is who did the work. For example, the speaker may dump a mass of details and expect the listener to make sense of it. But lean listening does not care who did the work—just that the work gets done. In a conversation, you should take more than 51% of the responsibility to ensure that value is created, even if it’s you who has to do the work for the other person.
This 51+ rule means that if you are the one presenting the idea, you need to pay close attention to how the idea is being received, and whether you are getting active commitment rather than passive acquiescence; if you’re unsure, don’t hold back from asking questions to ensure the level of agreement you’re getting. If you’re the listener, listen for the question: what do you want me to do and why? If a question is asked, did you or they answer the question?
You can extract more value by taking positive control of the second conversation. If you don’t take control, your second conversation will default to looking for and noting negatives, such as differences between you and the other person, or obstacles that stand in the way of getting what you want. Try to listen actively for intersections of your interests and theirs. If your individual differences seem to be too far apart, listen for a higher purpose that you both can support, such as a specific value or goal of the organization.
Remember that value is defined by the customer, which in lean communication means the person you are speaking with. But the customer is not always right, because what they define as value may not be what is best for them or for the larger purpose. So, besides listening carefully for their view of value, you must always be on the alert for signals that indicate additional chances to add or create value. It’s like driving: your eyes are fixed on the road ahead, but your peripheral vision is alert for signs of unexpected danger.
In conversation, these signs fall into two categories: intentions and obstacles. Intentions are where they want to go, such as their plans, goals, desired future states, and values. Obstacles are elements of the situation that hinder their realization of intentions, and they fall under four general categories: Problems, Opportunities, Changes, and Risks (POCR).
They may not be explicit in these, or even be totally aware of them themselves, so listen carefully for the signs of value; it’s amazing how much extra you can pick up if you’re alert for these. I once videotaped a sales role play in which the “buyer” revealed five potential intentions or obstacles in about thirty seconds. When we reviewed the tape, the seller had missed all five, and the buyer was not even aware of three of them that had come out of his own mouth! But what’s interesting is that when we reviewed the video and looked specifically for signals of value, they popped right out.
All this may seem like a lot to remember, so here are just two questions you should have in mind to help you listen for value:
- How can I help?
- What can I learn?
If you keep these questions involved in your second conversation while listening, you are almost guaranteed to improve outcomes for all parties concerned; and you will definitely respect the relationship at the same time.
