Being Visual
About 24 minutes into Chapter 12 of Season 1 of Netflix Original Series, "House of Cards", Frank Underwood is sent by POTUS to visit businessman Raymond Tusk in St. Louis to convince him to be the next Vice President of the United States. During their first official conversation, Tusk's phone keeps continuously ringing, often interrupting Frank. Seeing Frank annoyed, Tusk makes an interesting revelation.
"I have eight people representing me at eight simultaneous meetings in six time zones right now. I sit here and answer their questions, provided they come in the form of a single yes or no proposition."
In my mind, this summarises how we should enable our leaders. The business decisions flow bottom-up, not top-down. We are responsible for enabling our leaders to make the right decision. However, often when we talk to the leaders, although they would love to, they do have very little time to analyze and process the data presented. Therefore, to quickly convey the message across, it is important to always be visual in our messages to leaders.
However, it is easier said than done. We hear "a picture is worth a thousand words" all the time, but how do we exactly create the picture and make the message visual? I always try to learn from my filmmaking and storytelling experiences and apply that knowledge to my technical world, so here are a few of my learnings in this regard.
Change drives attention
Look at this picture.
And look at this picture.
What draws your attention? Naturally, the yellow square. Why? It is visually different from the standard pattern of grey circles that draws your attention towards it.
The same is true for any message. Any visual change attracts attention. When you are making a film, your customers are the eyes and ears of the audience. The frames are deliberately designed to manipulate what the eyes of the audience see. And change is the key. If something changes or is different in the frame, that is where we look. If there are 5 objects in the frame, and only one of them is in focus, that draws your attention. Similarly, if your message is a text, make sure to draw attention to your core message by making that text bold, or increasing the font size. Try to remove adjectives, propositions, pronouns. The rule is if you only read the visually different words, you should get the core message.
Let us take the famous example of our dear quick brown fox.
What is important in this message? Basically a fox jumps over a dog. So if I disregard objectives, propositions, and pronouns and only make the core message bold, it will look like this.
By reading this, I can quickly understand what happened, and then if I need more information, I can find it right there in the sentence, such as the color of the fox, or behavior of the dog. Additionally, if I change the font size and color of the bold words, that would work towards quicker delivery of the core message.
In film-editing, we say "the editing is complete, NOT when there is nothing left to add, BUT when there is nothing left to remove." The same principle goes here. The core message should be what remains when there is nothing left to remove from it.
Text 'with' graphics, no standalone text
Try to minimize standalone text in your message. Human beings are wired to comprehend pictures quicker than text (a kid understands shapes much quicker than letters). 'Almost' every single word in your message needs to be part of or directed towards some kind of graphic or shape. Less standalone text, quicker comprehension of the message. Let me illustrate with an example.
We were setting up a manufacturing plant, and in the then 'current' situation, we had three suppliers supplying consumables to the break room. It was getting difficult to manage logistics from three suppliers, so we found a single supplier for everything we needed in the break room and proposed that to the senior management. With this, we could simplify and streamline the supply chain.
The same message could be described visually as follows.
The message is same, however, the complexity of three suppliers in the current situation is illustrated by three identical boxes next to each other, and simplicity of single supplier is illustrated by eliminating two boxes from the earlier graphic and very importantly, keeping everything else the same (changing three boxes to one and keeping everything else same introduced a change in the graphic which drives attention). Also, the red color of the word "CURRENT" can illustrate it is something undesirable, and the green color of the word "PROPOSED" indicates a better solution. Don't forget to notice that there is text in this message, actually even the same words from the text message above. But every single word of the text is accompanying some graphic or shape. The text is with graphics and no standalone text. Again, drawing inspiration from filmmaking, "Show, don't tell".
Always tell a story
I cannot emphasize this enough. Please do not bore your audience (or confuse your manager) with just some randomly ordered thoughts. Always tell a story in your message. There are some key principles to storytelling (More about this in this article).
Always trust a structure
One idea at a time
Have a flow to your ideas
Always have an "Ask" at the end (Remember, Raymond Tusk's direct reports are not calling him to report what is happening in the meetings. They are "asking" him to make a decision.)
Be visual. It is a very happy place to be at.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
