I’ve written before about applying lean manufacturing principles to business communication[1]. Although manufacturing and communication are two totally different activities, both share the goal of producing maximum value with minimum waste. In this post, I’ve tried to simplify it even further, and I’ve come up with the ABCs of lean communication.
I define lean communication as giving the other person the information they need to make a good decision, with a minimum of time and effort. Ideally, a conversation, presentation or a written communication will meet three tests:
- It must add value, leaving the recipient better off in some way.
- It must be brief, because attention spans are short and working memory is limited.
- It must be clear, so that they can glean useful ideas that they can put into practice immediately.
What does it mean to add value in communication? It’s communicating useful information that produces improved outcomes for both parties while preferably preserving the relationship. This implies three important ideas:
Lean defines value simply as anything the customer will pay for. By analogy, value in lean communication is defined as any information the listener finds useful, usually to take action or make a decision.
Second, while it’s certainly possible to communicate so that only one party improves their outcomes—such as a boss giving clear commands—it’s not sustainable in the long run. The word “both” recognizes that you have your own purposes for the communication, as you should, but you will be more effective and influential in the long run if you develop the habit of focusing on the needs, desires, and perspectives of the other person.
Third, I say “preferably” because sometimes the demands of the business or the situation will necessarily harm the relationship.
Adding value ensures that your communication is effective, but it’s also important that it be efficient, because everyone has limited time and mental resources. It has to be brief and clear.
Adding value begins with outside-in thinking, which the psychologists call perspective taking or cognitive empathy. The usefulness of your communication will be directly correlated to your understanding of the other person’s needs, wants, and existing knowledge. As Stephen Covey says, “Seek first to understand, and then be understood.”
Regardless how useful your message is, if your explanation is too long-winded it won’t add value because it won’t get heard. Being brief is your best chance at ensuring that your message will get through, because time is pressing and attention spans have withered away to almost nothing. But brevity is not just about efficiency—it also improves the quality of your message because it takes deep thinking to be able to distill your ideas into concentrated form. That’s why the paradox is that brevity takes time; you have to do the hard work so your listener does not have to. So, even though brevity is mostly about reducing waste, it’s actually another form of added value. Being brief also makes you sound much more confident and credible, which supports your purpose.
There are two approaches to cultivate the habit and discipline of brevity: BLUF and SO WHAT?
BLUF stand for “bottom line up front.” Give them the main point first, and then back it up with your logic and evidence as needed. It works for two reasons. For you, it forces you a clear conception of your own core message, which you often don’t know until you try to summarize it. For the listener, hearing the point you want them to accept helps them organize the incoming information, and it often creates its own brevity because they will stop you when they’ve hear enough.
In any communication, there is so much that could say, but only a small bit that you should say. Your mind is full of knowledge, some of which is integral to your key message, some important, and much that is interesting but irrelevant. SO WHAT? is your mental filter that ensures the first comes out, the second is available if necessary, and the last two stay in your brain.
While brevity focuses on shaving time from your message, clarity focuses on removing mental effort to understand it. Brevity and clarity can clash or cooperate. It’s possible to be too brief, because of the curse of knowledge. You don’t remember what it was like not to know what you know now, so you might leave out information that the other person needs to fully understand the situation. Besides leading to misunderstanding, the main cost to you is that when the other person does not understand your logic or your explanation, the default answer is likely to be NO, because they won’t make the mental effort to understand and they won’t admit it’s unclear to them.
But brevity and clarity can also cooperate, because stripping out unnecessary detail can make the structure of your thinking easy to follow. But just to make sure, it’s a good idea to surface your logic[2], which is making your logical argument explicit and providing signposts in your conversation. Tell them the structure of what you’re going to say, such as there are three reasons we need to do this. “The first is, the second reason is, etc.”
The second tool for clarity is the language you use. Speak plainly and directly, and don’t try to sound smart by using terms others won’t understand. It helps to make abstract concepts clearer by using concrete examples, but be careful you don’t insult the intelligence of your audience—which brings us full circle to the idea that knowing your audience is key.
Want to be known as a great communicator? It’s as simple as ABC: Add value, Briefly and Clearly.
Lean Communication: Delivering Maximum Value
Lean Communication: Reducing Waste
Lean Communication: Making Work Visible
[2] A wonderful phrase I learned from Bruce Gabrielle in his excellent book, Speaking PowerPoint.
Years ago, FedEx ran this commercial which poked fun at the fact that someone could steal another’s idea just by expressing it more forcefully. The lower ranking team member makes a sensible suggestion, which is ignored. Seconds later, the offending executive repeats the idea, but with a strong knife-hand gesture, and all but gets a standing ovation.
The video is funny and instructive, but for me, what is most revealing is reading the comments. They are almost all negative, and they lambaste the “blowhard” who steals the idea. It’s obvious that they think it’s totally unfair that something as superficial as one’s body language could determine the acceptance of an idea. They have no doubt had a lot of experience in the real world seeing people move ahead in the organization and develop greater influence just because of the confidence in their talk and their walk.
There are countless studies that verify this unfairness. Ideas expressed in a confident manner do carry greater weight—and good-looking people get their way more often. It’s a superficial world we live in, and shrinking attention spans are probably making the problem even worse, as nobody takes the time to dig beneath surface appearances.
But is it really unfair? I’ve written often enough about how important critical thinking and sound content are to ethical and effective persuasion efforts, so I should be adding my voice to the chorus of complainers.
But look at it this way: If you are blessed with a high IQ, you want to derive the most advantage you can from it. If you’re blessed with good looks and a confident demeanor, you also have a right to try to derive the most advantage you can from that. In fact, it’s much easier for a smart person to learn how to use confident body language than it is for a good-looking person to learn how to be smarter. So, where is the unfairness? We’re all born with strengths and weaknesses, and we all have the opportunity to work hard to correct weaknesses and develop strengths. Nothing unfair there.
That said, it’s important to keep in mind that the confident person got credit for a good idea. If he had received credit for a bad idea, that would have been unfair. But there is nothing unfair or wrong about using better body language to improve the perception of your ideas or proposals. It’s reality. We are hard-wired to consider the forcefulness and confidence of someone as one of the factors in assessing what they tell us. People don’t decide solely on the logical content of our ideas, so if you want to be persuasive, it’s incumbent on you to use all available means to get your point across.
If you’re one of those people who refuse to adjust your approach or presentation style to make sure your ideas are presented in the best possible light, kudos for sticking to your principles, but good luck with that. It’s your choice, you can whine about it, or you can learn how to use your body language to help you instead of holding you back. I suggest starting with the knife-hand.
There was an interesting article in Bloomberg View last week about what makes Warren Buffet successful. Matt Levine cites two separate paragraphs in Buffett’s shareholder letter to make his point. In the first, Buffett cites Berkshire’s unique ability to make capital decisions free of status quo bias, and then to move funds without tax consequences. In the second, he paints an appealing picture of B-H as a wonderful home for a would-be seller of his business, who can sell them his business and then operate free of management meddling, protected from investment bankers under the benign Buffett-Munger umbrella.
Levine summarizes the idea nicely: “The trick is to be rigorous while seeming sentimental, to drive a hard bargain while looking like a teddy bear. Some of this is fake, just carefully engineered perception.”
Really? Carefully engineered perception? Warren Buffett!?! To paraphrase the classic line from Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that carefully engineered perception is going on here!”
It also reminds me of another classic line which is falsely credited to Al Capone: “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”
It’s a wonderful way to encapsulate a key principle of practical eloquence. However, the quote works just as well if you change it slightly, so that it reads “with either one alone.” Kind words and guns are the velvet glove and iron fist of persuasive communication. Psychologists call them warmth and strength, but the idea is the same.
Let’s look at what happens when you rely on one or the other too heavily. If you have the big guns, why would you even bother with the kind words, won’t it just get in your way? In fact, it may seem hypocritical or unauthentic to try to disguise your power. When you have power, it’s in your best interests to hide it as much as possible behind a veneer of restraint, kindness and goodwill. Would-be monopolists know this well. They have to thread the needle between telling investors about their enormous competitive advantages while assuring government regulators that they are small, defenseless players in a cutthroat world.
One of the problems with relying on the gun alone is that what goes around sometimes actually does come around. Guns alone get you immediate acquiescence at the cost of simmering resentment—the nail that sticks out gets pounded first. I had a client in a commodity-driven business that would squeeze every penny of price out of its clients in years when supply was tight, and then bemoan the fickleness of its customers who bolted to the competition when things loosened up. I’m not saying that they should not have tried to maximize their profitability, but there are ways of positioning necessities with kind words that make them more palatable. It requires more work on your part, but it’s an important investment.
On the other hand, if you are a genuinely good person (which Buffett seems to be) and have others’ interests at heart, having a big gun behind you can make you that much more effective in getting them to agree to do what is good for them. Salespeople who rely solely on relationships with their buyers sometimes forget this, and can get into trouble when times get tough for their buyers and they’re left without the gun of superior value or barriers to entry to preserve the account.
The “gun” doesn’t have to be coercion—rewards and incentives also qualify. Yet even incentives can be wrapped in kind words to take advantage of intrinsic motivation. Incentives can work very well, but they only work as long as you have the ability to provide them. They also motivate people to do just what they need to do to earn them, but nothing more. On the other hand, people will often knock themselves out for reasons of their own, for deeply personal reasons. Leaders who rely only on the gun of incentives (and the threat of withholding them) can be exposed when things go off track.
Probably there is nothing new in this article for you, but if you are climbing the ladder in the corporate world, it may be a helpful reminder. We’ve all known, and research has confirmed, that people tend to shed the kind words as they rise through the ranks, like a balloonist dropping sandbags to aid their ascent. As you gain power, it gets tempting to rely on it more and more, like favoring your stronger hand.
That’s what is striking about Warren Buffett’s performance through the years. He’s managed to keep his benevolent image in today’s culture, despite being in the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1%, and that’s almost as impressive as his investment record. As a stockholder, I hope he keeps on succeeding with his “carefully engineered perception”!
Give it time and it will be great
Did you ever have the experience of thinking of the perfect witty thing to say in a situation—after it was too late? Of course you have, even if you can’t think of it right now. That’s because even though your mind works very well in real time, there are many times that it works better with a little time to reflect. In the example just mentioned, you might have unconsciously been bothered by the inadequacy of your response, and somehow your mind kept working at it even when you thought it was over.
I’ve also seen the phenomenon at work in a totally different activity: doing crossword puzzles. I love the really tough ones, especially the Saturday New York Times puzzles, because sometimes I will get stuck with large parts of the puzzle left as blank as my mind. Concentrating on thinking of the answers doesn’t work, so I set it aside. Almost invariably, when I pick up the puzzle a day later, one or two of the clues now seem obvious, and then the rest of the puzzle falls into place.
But the best use that I’ve found for this mental quirk is in improving my communications, whether it’s a speech, a blog post, or a section in my book. One of the simplest things you can do to improve your communications—at least those for which you have time to prepare, such as important meetings, presentations, or written communications—is to give them enough time to marinate in your mind.
When you think deeply about something, there is something mysterious working in your mind. I’m not sure what it is, but I know that when I think of a topic for a speech, for example, I can usually dredge up a lot of what I’ve heard or read about the topic during my first pass through it. But for some reason, some of the ideas I might have about it don’t come to the surface right away. I’ve written blog posts, for example, only to have a great idea pop into my mind two days after it’s posted.
Because of that, I’ve learned that the way to get the best out of your mind is to make time your friend. Start early, and think carefully and deeply about what you want to say and how you want to say it. This deep work at the start seems to be important in engaging your unconscious mind. If you have time, get as much of it done as possible.
Then, when you hit a sticking point, set it aside and do something else; a day or two seems to work nicely if you have the time. Somehow, your brain keeps working on the problem even when you are thinking about something else—maybe especially when you’re thinking about something else. In my own case, I find that the most productive time for having ideas bubble to the surface is when I’m showering; I also get good ideas while driving and even wake up occasionally with a new thought fully formed in my mind.
I’ve also found that if I’ve thought carefully about what I want to say, the logical structure of my message doesn’t change much. A quality cut of steak is going to be good no matter what you do to it, but marinating it can make it great. What does change is how you flavor your message, especially in the form of apt analogies, examples, or visuals.
There are other good reasons for starting early on major presentations, but giving it time to marinate in your mind is an unexpected bonus. I’m sure if I had more time to let it marinate, I would have thought of a better ending for this article.
