Auf den Punkt kommen Archive - Page 6 of 12

In one sentence

Many great products can be described in one sentence:

“The notebook for creative people.”
“The fastest acceleration of a production car ever.”
“The headphones that let you work in silence.”
“The blackest black paint.” (Black 3.0)

Here’s a simple test: Can a customer (not you) describe your product in one sentence?

PS: If not, then my new course “Crack the Clarity Code” might be for you. It’s launching today and you can get 10% off using code “IwantClarity” when you order in the first week.

I’m not going to miss that

What outcome would make your next meeting so valuable that you wouldn’t want to miss it at any cost?

How about your co-workers? Do they feel that the outcome of your next meeting is so valuable that they wouldn’t want to miss it at any cost?

If yes, bravo! You’re a rare breed.

If not, what would make it so? What can you change to make it more valuable? (Maybe switch to a doing instead?)

Clarity takes time

But when it’s there, it’s an accelerator.

On the surface

Google’s search engine is incredibly complex inside and incredibly simple on the surface – basically a search bar and that’s it.

Many startups take a different approach. Rather than hide complexity, they surface it.

They want us to appreciate the complexity. To see the brilliance of their solution. They want us to be as obsessed about the nitty-gritty-deep-down-dirty parts as they are.

They want us to get it.

Google understood that that’s not what we want. We want our struggles solved. We’re happy to trust you in being the expert so that we don’t have to. We don’t want to become an expert in your field because we have our own passion that we’re the expert in.

We just want a solution.

The simpler, the better.

The irony is that that’s what we recognise as being brilliant. The simpler you make it, the less we have to deal with the complexity, the more we appreciate it.

(That’s why the “I’m feeling lucky” button is still present on Google’s homepage.)

Good intentions gone wrong

“I’m just going quickly over this graph!”

And she’s doing it with good intentions. Because that thing she’s going quickly over is not that hard to understand. Also, it’s probably not the most exciting part of her presentation. So, just going quickly over it seems like a great service to her audience.

Except that it’s the exact opposite.

Because she’s going over it so quickly that her audience doesn’t even have the time to read the graph, let alone understand it, let alone question it.

What was easy for her is hard for her audience. If only for the simple fact that it is new.

When in doubt, assume that it’s harder to see the point than you think it is. Rather than go quickly over something that is easy ask yourself how to focus on the most relevant bits. Rather than go quickly over something that is unexciting ask yourself how to make it more exciting.

Lighting the path is the presenter’s job, not the audience’s.

How not to buy tea

I wanted to buy tea. Easy, right?

Wrong!

Our local supermarket carries hundreds of different teas. Which means that for someone like me who is not an expert tea drinker it’s not easy to find the right one. Luckily (or not), the supermarket figured that out, too. So, they put up some signs for better orientation.

And achieved the opposite.

I’ve never counted the number of signs in the image above which is an actual photograph of the tea aisle in that supermarket. It’s a crazy number of signs. There are large signs and small ones. Some indicate the cheaper ones, others the new ones. Some indicate the organic ones. Some are even combinations of these. All of them wildly spread across the aisle.

The thing is: I’m only going to buy one tea, maybe two or three. Certainly not 50. But how am I supposed to choose?

The trouble with so many signs is that I don’t even know where to start looking. They are meant to provide orientation, but due to their sheer number they actually provide disorientation.

This is a general observation regarding prioritisation. When everything’s important, nothing’s important.

This approach delegates the task of prioritising to the customer.

That’s true for your marketing problem, too. If you don’t focus, you’re essentially delegating that task to your audience. If you put up too many signs, you’re asking them to prioritise.

The bad news is that – just like me in the supermarket – they will. They will pick one message, maybe two. Certainly not 23.

(And if things go really bad, they will just leave without any tea, frustrated with the paradox of choice.)

Would you like tea or coffee?

A simple decision, isn’t it? Well, you have no idea.

Let’s have some fun with it and pretend we would have to decide in a meeting. Obviously, we’ll need a PowerPoint to discuss the matter, right? Quickly, we arrive at 10 slides highlighting all of the important aspects, like so:

Slide 1: Title slide with presentation title (“Advantages and disadvantages of proceeding with tea vs. coffee”), name of presenter, their department, date, location, at least five logos
Slide 2: Agenda
Slide 3: Sales distribution of tea and coffee during the last 6 quarters, broken down by region. Underneath: comparison with other drinks such as hot chocolate and various juices
Slide 4: Mission statement for the coffee choice, market analysis including target group breakdown
Slide 5: Composition of ingredients (unfortunately, though, the font is so tiny that you can’t read anything) plus certificates from food testing institutes
Slide 6 & 7: The same for tea
Slide 8: Customer satisfaction rating and award for the most creative brand campaign 2021
Slide 9: Classification in the brand range with different flavor additives, variants, sizes and special promotions
Slide 10: Summary
Bonus slide 11: “Thank you for your attention”

All of this followed by an intense discussion to repeat the arguments a couple of times.

All of this without ever asking the question plainly: “Would you prefer tea or coffee?”

I’m positive that quite a number of meeting room presentations fit that description rather well.

Order from above

“Don’t ask me why. It’s an order from above.”

Still a common scheme in corporations – both outward and inward facing. It frustrates customers and teams alike.

One solution – basically the default in many corporations – is to explain harder, i.e. longer, i.e. repeatedly.

Using. The. Exact. Same. Words.

As if not getting it was the team’s fault.

Clarity is the leader’s responsibility. The days of command & control have long passed by. Lighting the path so that people see where we’re going – and why – is a much stronger approach. It starts with seeing from the team’s perspective.

(Likewise for customers.)

Speaking with clarity is a habit

Speaking with clarity is a habit.

As is the lack of clarity. If a team tolerates lack of clarity it trickles into every corner of the team. It becomes ok to use complex and confusing language. Even though that slows everything down. And leads to a lot of time being wasted as the team fights over what was actually being said or meant.

Turning that habit around and making speaking with clarity the habit is among the most valuable investments a team can make. And it starts with you, as the leader.

If you don’t settle with confusing communication, your team won’t, either. Try pushing your team for one week:

to use simpler words whenever you don’t understand something
to design simpler graphs that show exactly what they want it to show
to find anecdotes that we all can relate to rather than only the speaker

And even force them sometimes to go back to the drawing board and find those simpler words instead of having the team figure it out together. As Wolf Schneider famously said: “Someone’s got to suffer, either the reader or the writer.”

Yes, it might slow things down in the beginning. But the acceleration you’ll experience down the road overcompensates for it manifold.

Clarity really is a habit. Start looking for it and you’ll discover it – or the lack of it – everywhere. Start speaking with clarity and you’ll gradually transform the way you communicate.

And that of your team.

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