Guy Kawasaki recently gave an audience some helpful advice: Effective communication is concise. He was asked what he felt business schools should do a better job of teaching. He replied as follows:
“They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off because no one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting. What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have a certain number of slides. Then you get out in the real world and you think you have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 60 slides.”
What do you make of his argument? Is it true? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for padded reports or excessive slide shows. The only non-renewable, limited resource I have to guard carefully is my time. I cannot get it back. I never have enough. I waste too much of it on worthless stuff.
Then I began to ponder what types of communication I engage in that waste my time – and that of others. Here are eight that immediately came to mind.
1. Reading unjustifiably lengthy books, reports or articles
2. Writing reports that provide too much accurate but unnecessary detail
3. Sitting through presentations in which things I already know are reiterated
4. Engaging in debates that lead nowhere
5. Listening to long-winded sermons or lectures
6. Taking phone calls that have no purpose
7. Participating in mindless interviews for miniscule audiences of distracted people
8. Speaking before having adequately clarified my conclusion in my own mind
Effective communication is truly an art. As people in ministry or leadership, the ability to communicate effectively is one of the non-negotiable skills we need to move things forward. I fear that we are so busy, however, that we rarely take the time to evaluate how well we communicate or what our experiences teach us about our communication efforts.
Here are some things I’ve gleaned the hard way. Short beats long. To-the-point beats exhaustive. Blunt beats nuanced. Soft beats loud. Funny beats humorless. Wise beats clever. Actionable beats ponderous. Accurate beats comfortable.
What have you learned about effective communications? How can we become more efficient without losing efficacy?
April 8, 2010
Interesting post, George. I like this and think that you (and the others who are saying this) are right.
What I find particularly interesting about what you’ve written, however, is how you would value both blunt and soft.
How do you see that playing out in a real-life communication context?
April 8, 2010
I think that’s the essence of telling the truth in love, Ken. Blunt, for me, is another way of not hiding the facts or reality from someone – it’s telling it like it is. Speaking softly suggests my disinclination to want to dominate the other person, and to engage in a discussion that may help them at least understand my view, if not embrace it. Why engage at all? It can be to satisfy my ego (e.g., note my achievement, generate attention, claim my superiority, etc.), to honor God by serving His purposes and His people, and/or to express my care or love for the other person. Two of those strike me as viable motives…
April 9, 2010
Love it, George. Thanks for walking me through that!
April 9, 2010
I actually don’t agree George. OK, well I sort of agree. There are many times when clearly my valuable time has been lost, and sometimes that occurs in relationship communication.
However, I also value clarity and having spoken for 25 years and working in ministry that time, I know of far too many times when less was said, more was assumed and crisis comes because of the communication breakdown.
Sometimes one cannot communicate clearly in a 5 sentence email. I, for one, enjoy a lengthy conversation that happens electronically with paragraphs in an email. Often, it is the second or even third illustration that nails the point for both parties of a conversation.
April 12, 2010
Carl,
that’s a great point about the need to not only communicate an idea as an idea; it’s another thing to put some meat on it and show it happens in the world.
Perhaps the challenge we starts when we forget that God both comes in the Word and incarnate in the live of Jesus.
The gospel was first written with Jesus body and blood; perhaps the challenge for the church isn’t one of time spent talking about concepts as much as one of time spent putting God’s word into our lives.
thanks for the good counterpoint
John
April 17, 2010
Good input Carl but I think that the point of the material is efficiency not length…I do not think that he meant the 5 sentence thing as a rule…it is about being efficient in what you communicate…if it takes you 6 lines or 20 lines…fine…but make sure you are efficient. It is great that you value lengthy conversations but if you repeat yourself in that conversation why should you waste ones time? Of course there are things that take lengthy conversations but it takes efficiency…I mean…you need to come to Romania and attend a 3 hours wedding service with 4 messages to see what lengthy is
)
April 12, 2010
less talk = more influence
That is at least one reason that the founder of our family business (Jesus) may have spent his first 30 years doing nothing (in terms of public ministry
April 13, 2010
Interesting…these are comments by men. Women need to use more words, because we have more to use. At times brevity is good, however, there is a certain amount of pleasure to be had from reading a lengthy book, essay, letter. Life need not always be a hurried state. A conversation develops..
Re the remark by Jim henderson – Jesus, as a Jew, would not have been able to be a Rabbi before the age of 30, that is when He came into His maturity.
April 13, 2010
The author’s lists (above) of wastes-of-time are things that are impossible to avoid.
Medical doctors must sometimes order and weigh a greater number of medical tests than just those few tests that finally identify a condition – the excess information really is needed to rule out non-relevant conditions.
Psychological counselors intake more information from subjects than what turns out to be relevant later on: because “real” needs are often buried under a cascade of irrelevant initial information.
Lawyers going to court have an ethical duty to do broad and wide “discovery” of facts: not just to find relevant facts, but instead, to find facts that will lead to relevant facts. Only at trial are the relevant facts reduced back down to a simple few – a few relevant facts threshed out from hundreds or thousands of irrelevant ones.
Science proceeds by nearly uncountable “failed” experiments recorded as – failures.
Random samples in the sociology of religion aren’t really random if designed to prove the cute and simple bias of the researcher.
Spiritual journeys in faith may (if we are honest) involve walking experimentally down a dozen dead-end streets in order to find the way of the Way.
It’s easy and cliche to say – get to the point.
As if Jesus was as a terse, proverb-vending machine.
To know what’s relevant in my faith – my daily faith in real life – not in some cliche-spitting proverb realm where points are fast and cheap, I often need to know and research through tons of “waste.”
To sweep the whole floor to find the penny.
Getting to the simple “it” (God’s specific will for today) isn’t always simple.
Oh, for a few good friends willing to wade through it all.
April 14, 2010
To Jim
What an excellent reply – as though you were reading my mind! Thank you for the eloquence…
April 14, 2010
Thanks! Your hard-won conclusion is a masterpiece I’m going to quote on my blog. Also appreciate the follow up on “blunt.” I still want to be careful with that one!
April 15, 2010
Most authors of such communications do seem to adhere to the ‘more is better’ philosophy.
But… when concise points are given which influence decisions and an appropriate ‘context’ is not provided, it is like firing at a target without knowing which one you were supposed to hit.
One of the challenges again of the inability of some of these modes of communication to take place without feedback.
For some of the other modes, perhaps we need to get better at asking our questions; ie knowing what we want. Ex. When the boss asks a vague question, her employee is apt to adopt the ‘more is better’ philosophy in the general case to ‘cover her bases’.
April 21, 2010
Jesus’ sermon on the mount by Matthews’ account can be read in 9 minutes and covers a certain amount of issues.
When teaching, I usually use about 10 slides in 50 minutes and start out with a slide that has S.I.R. in which I ask the audience what was significant, interesting, and relevant about the lesson plan for the previous week.
From experience, I discard the fillers and address what I consider crucial issues for today.
Too much presented these days is what the speaker is interested in and puts the audience into suspended animation >>>One sided , non fat dry milk , typical topical sermon/lectures.
April 21, 2010
Is there any credible criteria or generally accepted concensus on speech/communication or do we just resign to the modern trend…..everyone does what is right in their own eyes?
Does it matter that colleges teach communication classes using textbooks?