Keeping it simple is a critical skill for you at work. But it’s what separates great writers from average ones: they do the work. Kill anything that isn’t 100 percent new information. Not ‘brutal’ in what you write, but in what you cut.īe like Steve Jobs. It could be your company’s Sydney Opera House: over budget and running late, but it’ll be a prized and irreplaceable icon for many years.Īnalogies help you communicate complicated ideas more easily. Or maybe your big project is over budget. You could say you’re the Leonardo da Vinci of Human Resources: A multi-talented resource able to turn your hand successfully to most things. A generative analogy - a metaphor that generates new yet familiar ideas in your audience’s mind - works well. Once you’ve settled on your one key thought, you need to communicate it. It’s called the Inverted Pyramid style of writing, championed by journalists across the world: Think about the one thing you need to get across - the most important, the news, the thing they don’t know. ‘Your husband ran off with the babysitter!’ In your whole document, what’s the ONE thing you’d shout to them before they’re gone? One of my uni professors said to imagine your reader is in a lift, and the doors have started closing. If you were your audience, what would be the most important to you? What’s new? What’s at stake? Everything else can be filled in later.īesides the principles above, here are three simple ways to keep your messages, well, simpler: 1. He could so easily have decided its screen size was also very, very important. He simply showed a picture of an inter-office mail envelope. When launching the MacBook Air, it was all about how thin it was. He cut to the core, focusing on the ONE thing he wanted his audience to remember. Let’s make it simple by putting it all on one slide. Image source: It’s easy to see how this sort of presentation slide gets produced. Here’s how NOT to do it - this, from the Pentagon, is apparently the most complicated PowerPoint slide in history: He sailed through the IT industry’s sea of jargon with simplicity. Yes, but ‘all’ may mean ‘nothing’, as in the exec above who said no to the 40 slides then yes to the four. Oh, I can hear you now: ‘It’s ALL important!’ What’s the one thing you want to communicate? What’s at the core of your idea? Which is why ‘Simple’ is key to your ideas sticking:Ĭut through the clutter, don’t add to it. It also turns out that using long words needlessly makes people think you’re dumber, not smarter. found that business people got around 1000 external communications in 1970. And the bigger the words, the better.īut your readers are in an infobesity epidemic: Bain & Co. That’s why we get paid the big bucks, right? We want our boss, colleagues and clients to appreciate just how smart we are. It’s a good reminder that we tend to over-complicate things, especially when it comes to writing. ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.’ The big boss said, ‘Oh! I didn’t realise that. He laid the slides down, and explained the project and its benefits simply and clearly.
Of the 40 slides, he took just four, and raced into the big boss’s office. When they glumly told my client, he exploded: ‘What?! But he needs this project as much as we do!’ He said, ‘Show me your slide deck.’ They’d worked on it for months, and had a 40-slide presentation to convince him. Last year a client told me his team went to the BIG boss to ask him to approve their project. Let’s kick it off with ‘ Simple‘: Saved by simplicity Their research shows that ideas stick best with the SUCCESs formula:
In the next six newsletters, I’ll apply the Heath brothers’ ‘sticky’ ideas to your writing at work. Your success at work depends on how well you can get attention for your ideas, and make them stick in your readers’ minds. If you haven’t read ‘Made to Stick’, it’s time you did.
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