Simplify, Simplify
Dear Erin,
Hope you had a good weekend. I am so looking forward to seeing the dance film you are making with your friends for Jocelyn’s show. I hope it goes online soon after the in-person premiere!
I mentioned to you when we spoke last the communications workshop I attended last week. Lots of good nuggets, but the one that spoke to me was “simplify.” You also could say “focus” or “target” or “essence.”
DeRondal has us each answer the question “tell me about your organization” or “what you do.” Each person started with the usual rapid fire word salad trying to combine mission statement with activities with impact with my own title with a bit of fundraising-driven persuasion. I’ve even spoken about it before: the “elevator speech” within which you have seconds to distill everything you want this person to know in a few short sentences.
Except that the sentences turn out to be not-so-short but rather a mix of dependent clauses, run-ons, and adverb-packed phrases of buzzwords and cliches.
After you pitched your answer to the group, DeRondal said something polite and then commanded: do it again, but shorten it by half. Wow - the answer got way better, way clearer instantaneously. Yet, he challenged you to do it again: “Better. Now cut out half of what you just said. What do you do?” In all, for each person, one at a time, he got us to boil our message down into a single clear sentence. It took three or four tries for each of us. Once we got to that final simple statement, it was like putting on eyeglasses for the first time. Everything came into focus with the shorter sentence.
(And here’s the thing: he had seven people do this, one at a time. Even though you knew your turn was coming, you still tossed out the word salad the first time. And another thing: he didn’t coach you on the language you chose AT ALL. All he said was “take it down by half” enough times until we had boiled down the essence of our organization to a single line.)
A shorter, punchy answer is an invitation to the listener to ask for more. It allows the listener to choose what interests them. it keeps them engaged. DeRondal described it as you keeping control of the narrative - and I get that. You are feeding the right information based on what the person wants to know. But I also thought it was putting the listener in the driver’s seat. Either way, you were not dumping a bunch of information on a person in a single exhale, hoping that somewhere in that mess the person could pick out the piece that resonates with them. First, not likely that you guessed correctly and second, people don’t have the attention span to hear you out anyway. Even for more than one or two sentences.
He doubled down on that last point when he referenced networking events, and other large gatherings. Very few people have the bandwidth to pay attention to our whole introductory speech. They may have had a few drinks, and it’s probably pretty noisy. They were just asking to be polite…
Think of your one sentence as your hook. Your invitation to engage. Beware devolving into a tagline - that’s not the point; slogans aren’t answers to interested questions. But when someone asks you about your organization, say something simple, true, authentic and designed to pique curiosity. This isn’t a relay race in which you’ve been handed a baton and asked to run around the track as fast as you possibly can. It’s a tennis game. My turn, your turn.
Your first answer is important, but it’s not everything. It’s the follow-up question that leads to real conversation, which should be your real goal.
Love, Mom
