Effective communication - 3 easy steps to boost your leadership!
Morten Moller Pedersen
VP - Integration, Operational Excellence @ Noble Corporation | Adaptive Leadership, Global Operations, Portfolio Management, Strategy
How can you refine your everyday communication? It’s a skill set which you can significantly improve by applying a simple 3 step structure!
In three strategic steps, you’ll be able to create messages that resonate with precision, ensuring your professional impact is maximized.
Achieving communication goals necessitates packaging messages with the utmost clarity, conciseness, and logical coherence.
The Business Value of Structure
Why embrace a structured approach? Picture communication as a strategic business plan. A well-defined structure serves as your roadmap, akin to a meticulously crafted business proposal. The benefits are manifold:
Clarity
A structured message eradicates ambiguity, ensuring that your communication is lucid, easily understood, and diligently followed by your audience.
Retention
Ideas presented within a structured framework are more likely to be retained, making your communication inherently impactful. Our cognitive architecture is naturally inclined to encode and remember structured information.
Persuasion
A logical structure systematically builds your case, facilitating persuasion by guiding your audience through a meticulously reasoned argument.
Efficiency
Structure is an efficiency tool, saving both time and mental energy. It transforms complex ideas into digestible, actionable points, streamlining the communication process.
Reduced Anxiety
A predefined structure significantly mitigates communication anxiety. It equips you with the confidence to convey your message with precision, minimizing the risk of oversight.
The “Why, What & How” Business Framework
The strategic trio of “Why, What & How.” Much like a Swiss Army Knife renowned for its versatility and reliability, this structure adapts seamlessly to diverse business communication scenarios.
Why!
Establish the context and/or what you believe. Why should your audience invest their attention? It serves as the prelude, aligning your audience’s focus with the strategic importance of your message.
What´s the purpose of your message, what´s your belief?
What!
Present the facts, defining the key elements. This is the substance of your communication, providing a clear overview of the situation, product, or position.
How!
Conclude with the actionable steps or call-to-action. Outline the next strategic moves, fostering engagement and setting the tone for subsequent actions. Include deadlines to underpin urgency if required.
Why sequence matter!
If you communicate the how initially, it becomes uninspiring, e.g.: “This is our new car, it has great mileage, extensive safety features, and leather interior - You should buy our car….”
Try always and communicate the why first, e.g.: “In everything we do, we believe in challenging status quo, we believe in thinking differently and challenge ourselves to make our products beautifully designed and an extension of yourself, we just happen to be making great cars, you should take one for a spin…”
The Human Brain is broken down into 3 main components, which correlates perfectly with the “Why, How and What” approach.
Our newest part of the brain, our Homo Sapiens brain if you will, the Neo Cortex, corresponds with the "What". It´s responsible for all our rational and analytical thought processing, but also language. The neocortex comprises the largest part of the cerebral cortex and makes up approximately half the volume of the human brain and controls attention, thought, perception and episodic memory, i.e., the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life.
The "Why & How" corresponds with our limbic brains, also known as Hippocampus and the Amygdala which is responsible for all our feelings like trust and loyalty, but it´s also responsible for our behavior, decision making, and emotional responses and it has no capacity for language. In other words, when we communicate how initially people can understand vast amount of complicated information, like benefits, features, facts and figures, but it just doesn’t drive behavior.
When we communicate the “Why” followed by the “How” & “What”, we are talking directly to the part of our brain that controls behavior and we later allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from.
Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures and they still say: “I hear what you are saying, but it just doesn’t feel right”. The part of the brain that controls decision making, doesn’t control language, hence if you don’t convince the limbic system it´s a lost cause from the outset.
So, if you don’t communicate “Why”, you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will anybody then decide to follow your leadership, buy your product or more importantly be loyal and want to be part of what you do?
Don’t be in pursuit of the result, be in pursuit of the dream – The vision!
Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) Theory!
Developed by E.M. Rogers in 1962, is one of the oldest social science theories. It originated in communication to explain how, over time, an idea or product gains momentum and diffuses (or spreads) through a specific population or social system.
Why is this important?
The diffusion of innovation is important because it considers adoption in context of a larger social system. The first two groups on the diagram, the “Innovators” and the “Early Adopters”, are the only ones willing to accept the risk of purchasing a product first, follow your novel idea, etc., whereas the other/subsequent groups are willing to wait, and have others they trust try it first prior to making a purchase commitment themselves, or start supporting your leadership direction.
If you want mass adaptation, you need to penetrate the tipping point of approx. 15-18%. This applies regardless of if it´s a new way of working or a product being launched on the market. The early majority will not try something before somebody else have tried it first, but the first 2 groups are comfortable trying new things in which they believe.
The real life example!
Why did more than 250.000 people show up to hear Martin Luther King speak? They didn’t send out invitations, and they had no website to check the date and time. How do you do that?
Martin Luther King did not go around telling people what needed to change in America, he went around and told people what he believed…
People with similar beliefs followed him and made his story their own and spread the word… And by their own initiative created structures to spread the message… They didn’t show up for him – They showed up for themselves and to support what they believed. It wasn’t even about being black – approx. 25% of the audience were white, but they shared the same belief.
He gave the “I have a dream speech” – Not the “I have a plan speech” …!
That makes you question why so many politicians keep coming up with their comprehensive 10-point plans for what they want to change – It simply don’t inspire anyone…
There are leaders and those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority vs. those who lead and who inspire us, whether they are individuals or organizations.
We follow those who lead, not because we must, but because we want to… We follow those who lead not for them, but for ourselves. Those that start with the why are far more likely to hold the ability to inspire those around them or find others that inspire them.
Three Core Take-Aways
If you want more inspiration on effective communication, you might find this article of interest:
Chartered Engineer | Operations & Maintenance | Reliability Engineering
9moGreat article as always Morten Moller Pedersen. Just wanted to add that Simon Sinek's youtube video "Start with the Why" explains it very well. Also wanted to add that Geoffrey Moore's book is a great read on crossing the chasm between Early Adopters and Early Majority, which is missing in the the Diffusion of Innovation theory.