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.
In this three-part series on user-friendly language, we’ve seen how we make it too hard for listeners to understand us, either by blowing smoke on purpose, or generating FOG inadvertently. While we can go a long way to clearing up our communication by getting rid of those, we may still get tripped up by friction.
Friction slows down vehicles and saps the power from their engines. Friction in communication does the same thing: it’s my name for speech patterns that prevent you from being as smooth and confident-sounding as you should. These patterns can reduce value of your message and add to waste in its expression. They reduce the likelihood that people will believe your message and act on it—if someone asked you to do something, would you be more likely to agree if they sound completely confident and sure of their message?
The two forms of friction that add waste to communication and reduce clarity are hedges and filler words.
Hedges
Hedges are phrases that pull your message back from absolute, such as, I think, maybe, it seems, and so on. They can make it seem so that you don’t sound totally confident in what you’re saying. It’s common sense, but there are also numerous studies that confirm that they “lead to negative perceptions of the policy, source and argument.”[1]
Hedges are not bad, if they are intended as such. In some cases, you need grey areas, so you may want to use them as qualifiers. For example, you may not want to intend or signal complete certainty. If you say, “I think we’re going to make the schedule”, you are raising a flag that alerts your listener that there may be risks, and they can probe for more information if they choose. In the study referenced above, use of the “professional hedges” are not perceived poorly by listeners, and may in fact add to your credibility.
But hedges become a problem when they’re a normal part of your speaking style, even when you’re completely certain of something. They sap power from the strength of your statements and rob the courage of your convictions.
The only way to combat these stylistic hedges is to become aware of them, which you can do by listening to yourself, or by asking others for their opinion. Once you’re aware, it’s not hard to catch yourself and weed them out, but it does take discipline and practice to make it a permanent part of your style.
Filler words
Filler words are funny. On one hand, everyone knows that they can be a problem for speakers, and in fact they are the most-commented-on behaviors that peer coaches in my presentations classes pick up on. On the other hand, very few people realize the extent to which they themselves use them. I’m not referring just to ums and ahs; you know, like, and so are also extremely common, the latter two more so among millennials.
Filler words are not always a bad thing; so don’t obsess over them. They’re a normal part of two-way conversation, and in that case they’re actually useful because they let the other person know you’re not done with what you’re saying. By some estimates, we use filler words once every ten words, and it’s usually not noticeable because they’re so common—ordinary speech is infested with them.
The problem is that when you speak to groups, they don’t add anything to what you’re saying, and can be a problem when they’re excessive. The president of the bank where I once worked was a magnetic and dynamic speaker in small groups, but when the audience hit double digits, he would morph into a stuttering blob of jelly—so much so that it became a terrible distraction.
What does excessive mean? There’s no numerical definition, but the simple rule is that they are a problem when others begin to notice them. You’ve probably been in that situation when listening to a speaker: if you pick up on their filler words, you soon pay attention to nothing else.
In that case, you’ve got some work to do to minimize (complete elimination is possible, but usually is not worth the effort) them. The first step is to figure out if it’s a problem; you can try to listen to yourself to gauge it, or ask a colleague for their opinion, because you are usually not the best judge.
The simple advice is to become comfortable with silence—there’s no need to “fill” a pause with sound. In fact, pure silence can do more than simply avoid the friction of a filler word—it can in fact add power to your speech.
But that’s easy to say and hard to do, so if that doesn’t work, the next step is to create consequences. Toastmasters International has a practice called the “ah” bell, in which a designated audience member rings a bell every time a filler word is uttered. It’s tough love, but it works amazingly well. Having attention called loudly and embarrassingly to each filler word quickly primes your mind to get rid of them. I’ve also had success with clients who offered to pay their colleagues a quarter (or more) for every one they hear.
Besides awareness and consequences, one of the best antidotes to filler words is preparation and practice. The more you know your material, the less likely you’ll find yourself searching for the next thought or the right word. I’m especially reminded of that myself as I explore the unfamiliar territory of recording video; it’s always so much smoother after one or two tries to find my stride.
In our distracted world, simply maintaining someone’s attention is a difficult challenge, so you should do everything you can to make it easy for others to grasp your messages. That’s why lean communicators do themselves and their listeners a favor by making their language user-friendly—free of smoke, fog, and friction.
[1] For example: Amanda M. Durik, M. Anne Britt, Rebecca Reynolds, Jennifer Storey, The Effects of Hedges in Persuasive Arguments, 2008: Journal of Language and Social Psychology.
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.
