(2019-07-30) Dearing Executive Communication Minton Pyramid

Michael Dearing on Executive Communication. Every good fight is about what to do with this now-growing pie. (positive-sum) The executive communication that's demanded by that, up into the right curve, the good coordination of those complex systems, the coordination of that growth is incredibly difficult.

This is a graph of gross domestic product per capita for earth...For the last about 1,015 years, how much have we produced on the planet earth in dollar value? Best estimate. Credible people did this, the data behind it. Real credible. Total dollar value divided by the total population, this is the curve that you get...If you look at just the last few hundred years, it's pretty obvious that we're on an adventure (progress) that nobody's been prepped for... This curve, if I have to boil it down to somebody who's never thought about economic history, for me it boils down to a few things we figured out over the last couple hundred years. How to put together people, machines and methods of work in entirely new ways.

Every good fight is about what to do with this now-growing pie. (positive-sum) The executive communication that's demanded by that, up into the right curve, the good coordination of those complex systems, the coordination of that growth is incredibly difficult.

general management and running companies. It's incredibly hard

I think executive communication as a slice of general management, as a slice of running a company, is just like this.

That's where Barbara Minto comes in.

one of the first 20 women admitted to the Harvard Business School in the late 1950s, early 1960s

Her first job out of business school was to go to McKinsey and Company, where she became one of the first female management consultants.

She'd say, "I hated it. Didn't like being a consultant, didn't like my clients, didn't like the work." I said, "Why'd you stay?" She said, "Because I really had fun rewriting other people's presentations."

It's not just, "Sound better at work." It's "Unlock doors." It's "Unlock doors so that you get to decide what business opportunities you get

I had the great privilege 25 years ago to spend three days with her while she coached me, rewriting a three page memo to Michael Eisner about why we should buy Winnie the Pooh for $850 million dollars.

The best executive communication for Barbara starts with "Situation."

the state of affairs. It's fact based, unambiguous. It's totally not controversial. No matter what side of an issue or a hard choice you're on, you should be able to read the situation and go, "That pretty much sums it up."

The next thing that comes out is the complication. A crisp, short statement about what has changed or what's making things harder

The question, the "Q" falls automatically out of "S"and "C" and it's almost always "What should we do?"

"Answer," "A," answer first at the top of a pyramid.

Pyramid-shape your evidence underneath it, and it has to resolve the complication 100%.

I carry around this cartoon to remind me of her technique

The answer is always clearly stated and it's got bolstering arguments, those arguments across that second row.

Those might be why my answer is right, they might be "How" arguments to implement the answe

Let's see an example

This was written in a narrative style by a manager in charge of the watches category at an e-commerce company. The category managers writing a response to the CEO pinging her to say, "How's it going in watches?"

"We're doing OK, not as great as we could be. We've got a decent growth rate and the new promotions coming up look excellent. I don't like what I'm seeing on the repeat purchase rates, though. Those are down about 10% versus last month. I think we should make it a priority to do more research with users. Maybe we can also test some higher frequency email campaigns. We're already locked and loaded on those new promotions, so that will be good to get those out."

This is "Minto-ized" answering the same question, "How's it going?""Watches is critical to our growth. It's 15% of our sales and it's a feeder category for jewelry and shoes. We're plus 3% to the sales plan year to date." I'm moving to complication now, in case yo can't tell, "However, repeat purchase rates are down 10% versus last month. That costs us about 300 basis points in growth if it continues. Team and I are thinking about the obvious question, what should we do about that? We've decided to focus on marketing and merchandising to the buyers. First, we're going to increase cross marketing of other categories, here is some evidence for that. Second, we're going to accelerate the release of two new subcategories. Here's some evidence for why that's a good idea. Finally, we're going to do a price promotion test to the lapsed buyers. Here's a little bit of data to say why we picked that one."

I want you to put yourself in the role of the recipient to the narrative style version

How's things going?" Then this comes back. Let's be honest about what's going through your head. "Not good."

it up, to pull out the unnecessary words, and to get a little bit more firm in the conclusions

The narrative style, it is completely unclear what we're going to do about any of this. Is there a decision we're asking for support? Are we needing resources?

What happened was it was a little bit of a yikes moment for that CEO. What's most important for you to know is, that is a completely incorrect conclusion. This person who wrote this, she did it quick, and like all of us will be pressed for time and will jump to write some stuff down before it's ready, before it's fully-baked

This technique, which takes like 5 minutes of extra work after you've practiced for a while, lands you in exactly the opposite bucket, into the "Holy smokes. This person has their shit together," bucket. Now, why is that?

Decisiveness."There's a real point of view here

If anything, it suffers from the shortcoming of being awfully brief for this big plan of action. I think that's an opportunity, and if Barbara were here she'd say, "Honey. Tell them they can add links to other documents if they want to go deeper. But keep that SCQA nice and tight."

Go ahead and decorate your writing. But don't lose the skeleton

Another shortcoming

It sounds like somebody has already figured everything out and it's being commanded down from the top.

Similarly, if the style in your team or your environment is more collaborative and more exploratory, go ahead and put a "draft" stamp on that "A." "That cluster of ideas, we're going to meet and talk about whether this is a good prototype, we're going to revise it as needed, and we're going to get back to you with what we end up deciding to do."

we'll hear a few minutes of this recording and then we'll talk a little bit about how you might use SCQA to unwind this problem. We'll take the role of the head of the operations at the company. The backstory on this recording is a person has called Comcast to try to disconnect their service

we are 2 minutes and 17 seconds in. There are 8 minutes and 14 seconds left

What's the situation?

"Customers occasionally cancel their service."

"Sometimes we like to point out features and functions that might change their mind." I buy that. Yes? "We have a team of people that do this for a living."

Now, the complication. What's changed or making our lives harder in this moment? The incentive plan

This is just disrespectful to keep badgering somebody when you know they're not salvageable.

Question, "What are we going to do about it?"

Remember, it's always pyramid shaped. We are going to radically simplify the cancellation policy to a one-step opt-out. Now the base of the pyramid can be, "Why?" Or "How?" Do you want to do a "Why" or a "How" argument? Let's do a "Why"argument. We have a lot of damage to repair and our brand might be "Why."Number one. What's, "Why" number two for a one-click cancel strategy? OK, we can significantly change the cost structure of this.

I'd say if you have one-click opt-out you always have that 24 hours to go email them an offer for three months free to come back

What's a third thing? These things almost always go in threes. We've got other products we might be able to sell down the road when we come back and market with a super duper version of Comcast

We're going to preserve some goodwill in that market and ballpark our estimate of the ill will that we created here was umpty ump million dollars, something like that. That's a perfectly good "A." It's a very radical and progressive "A" and it wouldn't be at all what they came up with.

Let me share with you the communication that Comcast put out. Trying to do a bunch of things in one communication and not doing either of them expertly well, particularly the part about the defensive tone or the bolstering tone.

Is it about training and development of our people? You might think so if you look at his action plan towards the bottom where he says, "We're going to review, refresh, and relook at how we do this,"with no specifics, no follow up timeline. None of the specific steps of an "A" that you'd really like to see.

If he were a Mento disciple, I think he would have written one SCQA for the team and one SCQA for the public, and really kept those two things separate.

he's trying to mix too many things together here.

Why do we practice this? We practice this because communicating poorly stunts your growth.

(Q&A)

When SCQA Goes Too Far

If this draft were going into a highly collaborative, cross-functional team where she is, the author, didn't have any of the authority to pull some of the levers in the "A,"it would be inappropriate

you'd probably want to say, "OK. I'm going to send you SCQ, and I'm telling you I'm working with head of product, head of design, head of eng on "A," and I think it's going to be about a day before we get our plan solid and bought in. I'll come back to you."

No rule that says you have to uncork SCQA perfectly on the first draft

One of the great gifts this gives your colleagues is clarity on where you stand. Clarity on where you stand, so that if I disagree with your "A," I know exactly how you came to it so that I can talk to you about the way we disagree. I have different data. I have different world view, or first principles.

Other Methods Open to Collaboration

invite it and to say, "Here's my draft, here's my prototype 'A,' but we got to iterate this together. If you want to get together, I'm going to carve out some time

Insights into Similarities of Story Structure and SCQA

There's an approach that I teach side by side with Minto. It's Robert McKee's storytelling framework for screenplays, and there's the basic status quo, there's the inciting incident which breaks the status quo, and then there's the journey back to a resolution.

The storytelling framework that I think you're referencing, that long tradition is about just the journey, the human connection to the protagonists. (Hero's Journey)

I think for her, the purpose is, "Resolve a business conflict." For storytelling, the purpose is, "Have an emotional moment

When SCQA is Inappropriate

A quick passing conversation, the classic example is "What's the elevator pitch version of this?"

you might stop at "Q" and say, "If that's something you'd like to go deeper on, just drop me a note. I'll come by and show you some of the data we're using to figure out what to do about it

Another form that I hear people talk about a lot when I talk about execution with folks is, "What about Slack? I've got this endless stream of stuff happening during the day and people are asking questions. Is this something I'm supposed to stop and add a whole big nugget?

I think what you might do in those very short-form communication channels is tease it with a headline or a bit about the complication and link off to a form that's a more appropriate expansion of the topic. That might be a Google doc, that might be a presentation somewhere

I've been collecting these examples of really bad communication for years, and the workbook has a bunch of examples that you can Minto-ize

People use Minto to get to the right answer faster and to make the conversation (collaboration) much higher signal, much higher productivity.