CHAPTER 12
The Gift of Brevity
AS MUCH AS I’d like this chapter to be brief, brevity demands an enormous investment of time and energy. As Goethe put it in a letter to a friend, “If I had had more time, this would have been a shorter letter.”
First, let’s identify the root causes that undermine good communication. The opposites of brevity—waffling, droning, repetition, or other forms of boring an audience to death—occur because of predictable and avoidable issues that are best resolved before you tell a story. Surprisingly, editing too much, too soon to achieve the perfect “sound bite” or “elevator speech” can prune your story too soon and thus cripple its power to communicate.
Most of your storytelling occurs during personal conversations, presentations, and informal interactions—this is the time to practice brevity. Make your mistakes and attempt various styles of editing when it doesn’t matter so much, so that you have the skills when it does matter. As you practice you will discover the particular bugs in your system that hamper brevity: waffling due to internal conflicts, droning because you enjoy the sound of your own voice, excessive control needs, or lack of preparation. Most of these issues threaten us all at one time or another.
Start with what you know—actually what you believe you know—about “selling an idea.” Our larger culture and your organizational culture have imposed formal and informal templates that pop into play when you sit down to think about how to sell an idea (i.e., tell a story). These mental templates sometimes conflict. When two sets of expectations or methods compete you can end up looping through increasingly meaningless choices. Remember the agony of the dreaded “mission statement” meetings. Before Scott Adams of Dilbert fame gave us access to David Youd’s Automatic Mission Statement Generator,1 we gathered with high expectations only to end up choosing words selected less on the promise of a bright future and more on the basis of ending the damn meeting. In any culture where objective clarity (what, how, when) reigns supreme, the exercise of answering subjective questions—like Who are we and Why are we here—feels ambiguous. Why and who are inherently ambiguous—which is why we need story and metaphor to approximate concepts like passion, service, and faith. The word-smithing goes on forever when a group seeks impossible levels of clarity.
Hidden assumptions about professional presentations and what is or is not appropriate can screw you up. If the basis of your mental template of “a good presentation” is a highly objective, linear progression with all relative information presented in bullet points, you can end up with seventy slides that communicate less than a three-minute story does. Test yourself: If you were going to give a one-hour presentation on your most important project and its relevance to the organization’s mission, what would it look like? Notice your mental “to do” list. I’m guessing that choosing a PowerPoint template and identifying your bullet points is one of the first things on your list.
I know one large organization where most presentations easily include an average of seventy PowerPoint slides, called a “deck.” They spend hours formatting data, adding animation, images, and graphs. I doubt they realize the impact this presentation format has on their thinking process. These hours feel like hard work and provide the illusion of improved communication. Performance anxiety fuels hours of formatting, sequencing, and display that would be better spent pacing the floor—particularly if your floor pacing gave you time to deeply consider why anyone should care about these numbers.
Brevity is better achieved by turning the computer off and asking yourself the basic questions: Who am I, Why am I here, and What is the highest possible outcome of my presentation? This may not feel like real work because it involves a LOT of staring into space, going for a walk, even heading to the gym—but this is the work that builds a cohesive message. Be prepared for these questions to reveal incongruities, paradox, and conflicting values. That’s why you are taking the time to ask the questions—unaddressed incongruities, paradox, and conflicting values are the root cause of waffling, superficiality, and lack of cohesion.
For instance, imagine a human resources manager speaking to her company “town hall” meeting in a status report about customer service. This is a big topic with guaranteed paradox and incongruity. If customer service means “the customer is always right,” and yet the same company also asserts, “People are our greatest asset,” this is a paradox. This HR manager can support both messages equally well with graphs, charts, nice photos of customers and employees … but what is her story? Which one is it? If a mean customer treats an employee like dirt—what do you do? Do you protect your most valuable asset or tell the poor employee to suck it up because the customer is always right? In this rare scenario, it is impossible to achieve both. However, that “rare” scenario carries a disproportionate amount of emotional weight. It is, therefore, the perfect place to tell a story about what is ultimately most important.
Numbers keep your message superficial because they ignore paradox and competing values. If you want your message to really “pop,” take a stand on which value you choose at the point of paradox. This resolves the reluctance to commit for fear of exploitation. You are then free to pursue BOTH values—which is what we really want—up to the rare point where the two actually conflict.
Graphs tidy up reality whereas stories reveal the mess. Avoiding messy reality keeps your message clear but shallow. Facing messy reality isn’t as treacherous as you might imagine. Taking a stand (e.g., saying, “Employees first”) achieves clarity, brevity, and the power of a clear, clean message. It requires that you both respect and trust your audience. And the minute you make that decision, it rearranges your presentation into a story that sticks, and it helps you edit your graphs and numbers down to the vital few. Core values always compete at some point. It takes courage to call, in advance, which value you choose when two values conflict. The failure to choose—the failure to imagine that the conflict will arise—is a root cause of superficial presentations and uninspiring leadership.
Having the courage to make a tough call—between customers and employees, quantity and quality, structure and freedom—relieves not only your anxiety but the anxiety of an unresolved story. Resolving the ambiguity of your listener’s reality into a meaningful story wins followers … and enemies.
Brevity and the clarity of a meaningful story reveals your personal feelings about an issue. Contrary to the “business isn’t personal” myth, you have to have feelings before you can stimulate feelings in others. Trust, faith, passion, empathy—these are all feelings. The purpose of telling a story is to make the impersonal personal. Personal feelings are there anyway, you may as well be honest.
What Is Your Story?
I recently visited an old friend in the hospital. He and his wife are wealthy from a fitness equipment business, which they sold when he contracted Parkinson’s disease. He is confined to a wheelchair. His wife wants to pretend nothing is wrong. She wants to curb his spending on home care. She thinks he doesn’t need a driver. She controls his access to new cell phones and is tired of him dropping them. I sat in the chair by his bedside, flooded with my own solutions to his problem. But they were my solutions. You will sit in this chair someday if you haven’t already. Someone you love or someone who works for you is a victim of unfair treatment but you can’t fix it for them, only they can resolve the problem.
What does this have to do with brevity? The ambivalence of wanting to appear sympathetic and wanting to give someone a kick in the butt (or the wheelchair in this case) can trap you in a looping conversation. These loops cycle endlessly. New ideas are met with a “yes, but” rejection, followed by sympathy, which elicits more examples of feeling trapped, which trigger new ideas for change, and you are back to “yes, but.” It’s an infinity loop that you can focus like a laser once you are willing to choose one value over another.
I was thinking, “You ought to have three phones at all times because you are going to drop ALL of them. You have Parkinson’s, fer crissakes.” But his depression frightened me and I was very careful to put my needs aside and choose a story that met his needs. I chose a kick in the seat over sympathy—but once I chose I was free to do both.
I told him this story:
A law firm hired me to teach storytelling, and one of the young female lawyers told a story about her dad. He was a famous litigator. People said he “invented hardball litigation.” But he wasn’t such a great dad. One night she was talking on the phone, like any normal fifteen-year-old, and her father burst into the room. He grabbed the phone and slammed it down, berating her that he had been trying to call for over thirty minutes. He yelled some more and then laid out a ten-minute maximum phone time and stormed out. We could see the hurt move across her face. Then she smiled and said, “Two weeks later the phone company pulled up to our house to install my own private line. I called them myself and paid out of my own babysitting money. Problem solved.”
Can you feel the brevity this story brings to what could otherwise be a preachy litany of positive thinking or “you poor dear” sympathy? After I told that story I said, “If a fifteen-year-old girl can do it, so can you.” And then I shut up. To talk more would have diluted the power of the story. I let him talk instead. The story did its work. After crying about his wife’s inability to make the transition to their new life, he put his fist in the air and said, “I can even get a Blackberry!”
Brevity demands that you trust your own judgment about what is most important here, now, today. Trusting your judgment usually requires that you trust your audience too. These tough choices become clear as you face the dilemma of choosing the stories that best tell who you are and why you are here. Choosing the highest outcome for your presentation is a rigorous process. Once you have resolved conflicting values and hidden dilemmas, editing for brevity is easy.
Too Soon to Prune
Brevity is best sought after you are clear on the big issues. If you seek brevity from the beginning—looking for the “sound bite” or the “elevator speech” from the get-go—you tend to think “we don’t have time for the Who I am, Why I’m here, What-is-the-highest-value bullsh**.” After all, you are going to edit most of it out, aren’t you? Sure, but like vegetables strained out of a good broth, the flavors remain.
Chapter 11 had you seeking mountains of sensory data, and this one asks deep meaningful questions … only to realize you never use most of it in your telling. This is not a contradiction in advice; it is about a distillation process where you travel a particular sequence that refines complex issues and broad appeal into a powerful story. The breadth and depth of your investment shines through your story with brightness, intensity, and essence like a 100-watt bulb compared to a 30-watt bulb. Each bulb is the same size, turned on for the same three minutes—but one is more intense and reaches farther than the other.
Great artists and writers invest hours of time and attention in search of an elegant expression or a single line that says it all. Picasso’s original sketches possessed a remarkable realism that rivals photography. And yet his representations in later years edited out the realism and distilled an essence of meaning so intense that one painting can represent epic levels of human experience. His painting “Guernica” brought me to tears in the same way the movie Schindler’s List did. Consider the investment of time necessary to communicate all the emotions of a war in one painting or one movie.
This is a good ratio for us to remember. Millions of dollars and hours beyond reason are invested to create one experience. The painting that looks easy or the story that seems simple is usually the product of many hours of investment. Sure, there are times when the perfect story pops into your head and you go with it. But most of the time the perfect story is the product of flesh and blood experiences reported after self-examination and considered intention.
I love when friends call me to say, “I used a story and it rocked.” Greg Fuson, a conference director, told me about a remarkably brief story that shows the kind of deep connection forged when you take the time to ask yourself: Who am I? Why am I here? and What is the highest outcome?
Greg walked onstage to introduce the first-ever meeting of The Vine, a conference for developers who want to build social community, not just physical structures. In his arms he held his baby daughter. “I had the privilege of becoming a father twice this year—first my daughter, Anna, born seven weeks ago; and again today at the birth of this conference we are experiencing together. Being a father leaves me awestruck at the sense of responsibility I feel toward Anna: one human being taking care of another. I think the essence of community, in its purest form, is as simple as that: each one of us taking responsibility for the care of others.”
That’s brevity at its best.
* * * * *
Take your longest story and ask yourself: What is the central message I want to communicate?
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Tell the story again and see if it is shorter this time:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________