We are all familiar with the concept of icons - visual cues that tell us what to do or what something means.

Occasionally I come across a word or a phrase that makes it into my vocabulary of verbal shortcuts.  This isn’t something that can be predicted in advance.  It just happens when the phrase fits and feels right.  Like a visual cue it conveys much more meaning than is apparent at first glance/listen.

Seth Godin’s book The Dip has provided us with a phrase that has been the most powerful verbal shortcut that we have used in our business in the past year.  This is not a book review - ‘The Dip’ has been out for a while and many have commented - nor is it a synopsis of the key ideas.  For a succinct summary take a look at Andy Wibbel’s mindmap of The Dip.

Rather this is about how a phrase, that captures the imagination and is simple but conveys much more, can help individuals and organisations accelerate their thinking.

We talk about ‘The Dip’ in relation to where we are on the chart.  Common questions for us are:

• Is this helping us to be best in the world 
• Is this making it harder for others to follow - Seth suggests finding a field with a steep dip and then making it through.  Things worth doing have a dip
• Is this something we should quit - yes, sometimes quitting can be the behaviour of champions.  The key is not to quit when its hard (and emotions and challenges are both running high) but rather to know when to quit before the fact and then to apply that criteria when the pressure comes on - this tells us whether to quit or whether this is part of the dip and we need to persevere.

So, in our business when we say The Dip we’re asking all three questions and accelerating the speed at which we can get to the answers.

Another phrase that we use a lot is Big Rocks. I’ve got no idea who initially coined this phrase but was stunned recently when a group of people I was working with hadn’t heard of it.  Big rocks refers to getting your priorities in place first and then dealing with the other incidentals (the pebbles and the sand) that come up during the course of a week or a month or whatever time period you are considering.  Zen Habits has a useful piece about Big Rocks.  Of course, in my situation the verbal shortcut wasn’t because no-one else had a frame of reference for it so I had to start explaining about priorities and rocks and sand and of course the moment was lost!  Wise to this, I next used the phrase ‘big rocks’ in a training and preceeded it with a volunteer from the audience filling a beaker with rocks, pebbles and sand.

Using ‘big rocks’ in our business discussion helps us shift the focus quickly and smoothly to priorities.

What verbal shortcuts do you use?  Where have they originated from?

In most organisations we come across the information environment is polluted.  It is noisy, smelly and slows down business.  There is information everywhere but users rely on their email in-boxes or google to serve them up the data that they make decisions on.  For all the talk of ‘knowledge workers’ and ‘knowledge economies’ the benefits have failed to arrive. 

Here’s five reasons for this failure:

1.  Weak performance measures that don’t require timely, accurate information - the absence of meaningful, data-based performance measures means that information has little currency in the direction and operation of the organisation.  Take a services organisation that subcontracts to a local Council.  We helped them set up an information environment that was tuned to the management needs of team leaders and direct supervisors.  This was designed to give them explicit daily feedback on quality audit results, tasks actually undertaken versus those scheduled, complaint reports and satisfaction reports.  Has this made a difference?  Absolutely!  Niggles that previously took months to solve, or just hung around like a bad odor were suddenly highlighted for everyone to see.  Decisions started to be made that adjusted course on a daily basis the results of which then got shown up in the next set of measures.

2. Lack of consistent ways of describing business activities - this makes it difficult to compare or aggregate operational activities for overall reporting.  The ability to make course corrections is lost and organisations can simply forget about knowledge creation and sharing.

 3.  Lack of consistent ways of linking documents and data sets - this makes it difficult to gain overall views from a customer perspective and leads to information accidents.  Typically examples, that we often think are often just ‘poor service’ occur when different people in an organisation deal with our problem and we get conflicting advice - and often ending up redescribing our issue or need.

4.  Documents and data don’t mix - we can’t see a consolidated picture of a service transaction or recurring problem as some of the information is held as data and other parts of the information are held as emails or documents.

5.  Toolsets for viewing information don’t meet the needs of users.  Take for example an operational team who have their policies and procedures recorded in a Standard Operating Procedures manual published on the intranet.  This is fine for experienced staff but for new staff it takes them a long time to get to grips with where in the manual to find the answers to their questions.  Imagine, instead, if this manual were sliced up into pieces of information that were searchable by key word or by FAQ.  Accuracy and speed go up immediately.

What’s the answer?  In one phrase it’s simply: “Information environments aligned with organisational and team goals”.  Obviously there’s a lot more below the surface of that phrase.  To find out what this ‘lot more’ is see the article at http://www.sarah-heal.com/BuildingHealthyIAs.pdf

How many speakers have you heard recently who seemed to just ‘stand up and deliver’?  They had put work into writing a paper (or creating bullet-point powerpoints at least) and then off they went…trying to pass as much information from their head into your head as possible.

And yet this misses the whole point of speaking.  Speaking is about entertainment – it is a performance.  It is often about convincing or influencing where, to be effective, the audience has to be - yep you guessed it - entertained.  This is why stories, including long stories in the form of case study presentations, are so effective.

Gladwell’s 2006 talk to the New Yorker Festival on the ‘American Obsession with Precociousness’ (downloadable from Audible) is an example of a talk that really works.  On first listening I found it compelling, thought provoking and simply an enjoyable way to spend 40 minutes or so.  In fact, I thought it was one of the best talks I’d heard all year – and that was without being there but rather listening to it after the fact.

On second listening it became apparent that there was a clear structure and techniques in play that made this talk so effective.  The premise is challenging, unexpected and turns conventional wisdom on its head.  This is the attention grabber introduced by way of humourous personal anecdote.  The premise is supported by several examples.  Once this has been established Gladwell posits some reasons why conventional wisdom is not correct.  He finishes with the call to action in the form of three ‘take-aways’.

This gives some great pointers on preparing talks:

·         Challenging – a point of view that contradicts conventional wisdom

·         Story-telling – a range of examples presented as stories

·        Structuring – tightly structured.  My guess would be that there was at least 5 times as much material available as actually got directly used.

For more on creating compelling messages see Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

In 2007 I started trialling outsourcing for our small company.  Inspired by the Tim Ferris book The 4 hour work week I started looking for opportunities to move some of our financial tasks out of the organisation.  The responses from off-shore organisations were less than inspiring and, in the end, I chose someone closer to home (in the same city in fact).  There’ve been some glitches but things are now relatively smooth and I have expanded the tasks that we outsource.

Ferris says that outsourcers need to be clear about the tasks that they are asking others to do and suggests instituting controls that check that tasks have been understood and are progessing as expecting. 

The other success factor that I would add is that of identifying tasks that can be moved and allocating the time to actually do this.  While I’ve moved some tasks I’m still drowning in administrivia.  It’s the same old delegation issue - if I have to show someone how to do it I might as well do it myself. 

So, my two part resolution for 2008 is (i) identify more opportunities for outsourcing (ii) make the time to take action on these.