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May 31, 2009

Is “high level” the wrong level?

Let’s say you’re planning a meeting, and you’d like to cover complicated content, but you don’t have a lot of time. You may be tempted to present only “high-level” information: broad strokes, conceptual, not a lot of detail.

The meeting may go well—people nodding in agreement—but you may be surprised to find that there aren’t a lot of questions. Or the meeting may go badly, with people acting cranky because they don’t really get what you’re talking about. But you get through it, and everyone leaves feeling like something was accomplished.

You may be in for another surprise later when you discover that people don’t quite remember what you presented at that meeting. Your surprise may take a nasty turn when it’s time to implement your proposal, and the same people who seemed to be in agreement now raise objections.

What’s the problem? It’s that darn “high level,” of course. Let’s pretend that “High Level” is a person (a tall, thin person) who goes by the nickname “Hi.”

The trouble with Hi is that he’s vague. He talks in abstractions—like “quality,” “strategy” and “values”—that sound good when he says them, but don’t really mean anything. These concepts are hard to argue with, because they’re not tangible. If Hi says, “customer service,” how can you object?

But although everybody likes Hi well enough, he doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression. And when it comes time to get things done, Hi disappears into thin air. Suddenly reality sets. Although “customer service” was fine as a theoretical term, you realize that it means you have to take all your phone agents through seven hours of training. You look around to see who’s responsible for this headache. Where’s Hi? Gone with the wind.

I guess you can tell that I’m not a big fan of Hi Level (or his sidekick, Big Picture). In fact, I think high level is a waste of time. To engage people, you need to back up abstractions with information that’s both tangible and tactile. If you say we need to improve customer service, I want to know: “By how much? How will we know we’ve achieved an improvement? What does ‘improved’ look and feel like? What, specifically, will we need to do differently?”

High level is easy. The hard stuff is "low level" specifics. And that's the stuff that really matters.

Posted by Alison Davis at 01:55 PM

May 21, 2009

Helpful signs

I just spent the last 18 hours driving around Houston, and even for a car-driving gal like me, I found it a bit daunting. It’s one of those cities where 610 North becomes 610 East becomes 610 South and where you can drive around and around the city without ever actually reaching it.

(And the kind of place where the Sam Houston Tollway is sometimes also known as 8 and sometimes isn’t and sometimes requires you pay a toll and sometimes doesn’t.) It looks something like this.

But there was one thing I liked: when you reached a point where the highway split into two separate roads, the pavement was painted with helpful signs, including the route number. So, for example, when I was traveling east on Route 10, and the left two lanes were heading to 610 North, the signs read, “610 Only” and then a hundred feet later read “This lane 610.”

This little system was extremely helpful, especially when the overhead signs were complicated and traffic was moving fast (as it does around here) and you needed a little reassurance to know that you were heading in the right direction.

It’s not a bad metaphor for communication: Are you giving people the signs they need when they need them most?

Posted by Alison Davis at 04:55 PM

May 19, 2009

The librarians' challenge

I’ve been meaning to share what I learned at the New Jersey Library Association Annual Conference, where I spoke a week or so ago.

The first thing I learned is that librarians don’t wear black oxfords or arrange their hair in buns or look like someone who might have checked books out for your grandmother. The librarians I met were all pretty cool: smart, of course, but also very current on trends in information and communication.

And their challenges were very similar to those you face in reaching and engaging people, with a few exceptions. Here’s what they’re up against:

“We have a large staff spread out over several locations. It’s hard to keep everyone informed.”

“It’s tough to get buy-in from our board and the staff.”

“Information overload. People are too overwhelmed to pay attention.”

“One of our key groups is people with young children. But these parents are very hard to reach—they’re always juggling, so they don’t read the communication we send.”

“Our demographics are quite broad. How can we reach all these groups with one message?”

And here’s one you don’t hear every day:

“Students come to the library and fall asleep. They’re staying up way too late texting and Facebooking and playing video games. If they got more sleep, they’d pay more attention.”

Posted by Alison Davis at 09:02 AM

May 04, 2009

Ask the right questions

Our client was in a bind. She was expected to communicate the company’s new direction so that employees could understand it and support it, but the senior management team had shared only a sketch of what the new direction was all about—nothing more than a one-liner in a PowerPoint deck.

How was our client supposed to make something out of nothing? Our advice: Arrange individual conversations with members of the senior management team and ask them a series of questions like these:

This may sound like a simple process—even the questions themselves are simple—but I’ve discovered that asking questions is a rare art. Too often we accept information from a senior manager or a subject matter expert and don’t ask the essential questions that would make the content meaningful. Or, we fail to seek answers to the questions most on employees’ minds, and as a result, the communication we do provide isn’t relevant.

This morning I was skimming a book called A New Breed of Leaders by Sheila Murray Bethel, Ph.D. (Berkley 2009) and to my surprise found a passage on the importance of questions in developing leadership skills.

Dr. Bethel writes, “We’re living with the most complex issues since time began. There are no simple answers. It is critical to draw on well-thought-out questions to lay the groundwork for new solutions. Having all the answers is far less important to you than knowing what to ask.”

She advises that we go back to the way we learned how to ask questions in school: Five Ws (who, what, when, where and why) and an H (how). Dr. Bethel believes that of all the questions, “why” is the most powerful. “Many organizations and individuals have gone completely off course because they first asked how to do something instead of first asking why they should do it.”

Any questions?

Posted by Alison Davis at 05:25 PM