How to explain first time

‘If you’re explaining you’re losing.’ That phrase recently came out to bite President Obama, after he gave a 17-minute answer to a short question about healthcare and taxes.

Healthcare and taxes, human rights, banking, the environment … too many of the most vital messages get beached like whales in our attention deficit disordered world. People have to understand first time. Get it? Got it. Good. If not, you lose.

To avoid losing, answer these questions before you try to explain:

1. Who cares and why?

2. How will I make a difference?

3. What’s the big idea?

We use this approach for scripting everything except Post-it notes. You can too.

Step One: Who cares and why?

Who’s your audience? What are they thinking? And why exactly would they be interested in you? Great if you know these people as individuals. If not then imagine them into life — and don’t be afraid to get creative. One trick is to find and print off an image that fits the person you imagine, then brainstorm the page into a collage of all the things that matter to them, personally and professionally, publicly and privately. (This is also a great way to profile customers. You can go further and turn the collage into a magazine cover.)

When you’ve decided what they want, ask how they’d like to be told. You can do communication preference analyses, or just use gut feeling: would they prefer a slick presentation, a detailed document and time to reflect, quick-fire emails, a phone call, or lunch?

Step Two: How will I make a difference?

What exactly are you going to explain and what will be the outcome? President Obama spent 17 minutes attempting to explain the inexplicable. Healthcare and taxes? That’s a game without frontiers: you lose before you begin.

So take time to define an outcome that is specific, achievable, positive, imaginable and measurable. A well-formed outcome sets the parameters for explaining. And there’s a good reason why this is step two: to set a relevant outcome you need to see through the eyes of your audience.

Step Three: What’s the big idea?

You wanted to explain something, remember? Since then, you’ve worked out who wants to know, why they’re interested and what you can do for them. So take all this insight and sum up your message as one big idea. You can do this using the situation/challenge/answer method for introductions: if you describe the situation and the challenge first then the big idea should fall into place as an answer to the challenge. You should be able to state your big idea in no more than a Tweet (140 characters).

Get this right and you’ve won: from here it’s just a matter of reinforcing the message. By explaining first time you can start to change the way people think. Here are three starting points that have helped shape our world:

Earth moves round the sun – Galileo

People are basically good – Ebay

Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do – Dyson

Unusual advice on how to begin a proposal

Decision makers love to say ‘I only ever read the executive summary’. And the way you start your proposal tends to seal its fate. It’s your Dragon’s Den moment: 45 seconds to convince a tough audience. Better make it good.

But I see many proposal writers get overwhelmed by the occasion. The point gets lost in a parade of corporate niceties, with much cap doffing and polite procrastination: ‘we’re delighted to submit this proposal for your attention… the company is committed to…’. That kind of thing.

Look up advice on writing executive summaries and you’ll find differing lists of items you might want to include: mission statements, team members, and so on. Combine those lists together and you’ve got a monster. Meanwhile, your dragon’s flown away.

What to do? First be clear what ‘executive summary’ means:

1. You’re summarising an idea, not a document.

2. You want an executive outcome — decisions, action.

So how can you use the executive summary to sell your idea and achieve the outcome? By telling a story.

Seriously. All stories have three basic parts: a situation that interests the audience, a challenge to that situation, and an answer to that challenge. Smart thinkers such as Barbara Minto and Neil Rackham have shown how these ingredients make a magic mixture for winning hearts and minds. Here’s a recipe*:

1. Say something positive about the situation, which is undeniably true (obvious, in fact) and sparks the most interest.

2. Describe the challenge or complication to the situation that’s prompted this document and ask: what’s to be done?

3. Present your answer to this challenge — with fanfare, because this is the big idea that defines and organises everything else your document should say.

Can you see the story structure in this post? I began with the spark: executive summaries matter. I described the challenge: how to make them effective? And I gave my answer: use the power of storytelling.

It works whatever the subject of your proposal:

Engineering contract:

- Situation: pipeline safety matters
- Challenge: safety being compromised
- Answer: this gadget will fix it.

Customer service policy:

- Situation: our products can empower our customers
- Challenge: poor technical support is holding them back
- Answer: we need this new support package.

Procurement decision:

- Situation: we depend on our suppliers
- Challenge: we’ve now got to choose: A or B?
- Answer: Supplier B is best (as our document will explain).

Something for the weekend:

- Situation: We love family outings
- Challenge: how to keep up with Grandpa + little Ben
- Answer: Let’s go surfing.

So — to sell your idea by the end of the executive summary, ditch the niceties, look your reader in the eye and tell them a story.

*based on guidelines for introductions from Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle.

Why you should start at the end, and why we don’t

Remember science at school? That’s where I learned to dice rats, mix volatile substances, handle electric shocks and melt biros with a Bunsen burner. It’s also where most of us were conditioned to save the main point until last.

Writing up experiments was always the same: start with objectives, talk through the method (saying ‘this was done’, never ‘I did this’), set out the results, analyse them and … finally … give your conclusion. It was similar but more vague for essay subjects: start by saying what you’re going to say; say it, then say what you’ve said.

This format is ideal for Teacher, who already knows the conclusion and wants to see how well you’ve understood.

(Heath! See me about the Bunsen burner…)

But in the real world our reader won’t know the answer until we tell them. And they need to be told at the start, so they can make sense of everything else we say. For example, by stating your conclusion that X is best at the start of your document, the reader can see that what follows is the proof that X is best.

The problem’s easily fixed with a quick cut & paste to move your conclusion up to the start.

But it’s a hard habit to break. School has set the template most of us use to plan documents, with the answer at the end and all workings shown. Think of insurance claim resolution letters. The bit we want to read – do I or don’t I get paid? – sits at the end of a vast essay explaining, so diligently, how the decision was made.

School is where we learned to read and write. But it’s time the professional world noticed we’re not writing for Teacher any more.