Scott Berkun's Blog, page 49

The Art of Explanation (book)

Explaining things is my job. A living hero of explanations is Lee Lefever, one of the founders of CommonCraft. They popularized the style of hand-drawn explainer videos, including ones about Twitter in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English and the entertaining Understanding Zombies.

He’s put together everything he’s learned about explaining things to people in a new book called The Art of Explanation. Serendipitously his cover design matches the cover for Mindfire.

I have a promotional copy and while I haven’t read it yet, I’m intrigued by the practical approach he’s taken with chapters like Why Explanations Fail, Stories vs. Facts and Simplification. It’s in my reading pile and when I get to I’ll be writing a review. Here’s the explainer video for the book itself:

You can buy The Art of Explanation or grab the sample chapter and more.

 

Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds

If I could give every single business writer, guru or executive one thing to read every morning before work, it’d be this essay by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language.

Not only is this essay short, brilliant, thought-provoking and memorable, it calls bullshit on most of what passes today as speech and written language in management circles. And if you are too lazy to read the article, all you need to remember is this: never use a fancy word when a simpler one will do. If your idea is good, no hype is necessary. Explain it clearly and people will get it, if there truly is something notable to get. If your idea is bad: keep working before you share it with others. And if you don’t have time for that, you might as well be honest. Because when you throw jargon around, most of us know you’re probably lying about something anyway.

The people who use the most jargon have the least confidence in their ideas. The people who use the least jargon have the most confidence.

In honor of Orwell here’s a list of jargon I often hear that should be banned rarely used. Flat out, these words are never used for good reason.

Words that should be banned:

Breakthrough
Transformative
Next-generation
Seamless
Game-changing
Revolutionary
Ideation (oh how I hate this word)
Disruptive
Incentivize
Innovation Infrastructure
Customer-centric
Radical

These are the lazy words of our time and whenever I see them used I feel justified in challenging the claims. To use these words with a straight face is to assume the listener is an idiot. They are intellectual insults. They are shortcuts away from good marketing and strong thinking since they try to sneak by with claims they know they cannot prove or do not make any sense.

Marketers and managers use jargon because it’s safe. No one stops them to ask: exactly what is it you are breaking through? What precisely are you transforming, and how are you certain the new thing will be better than the old (e.g. New Coke)? If no one, especially no one in power, challenges its use, jargon spreads, choking the life out of conversations and meetings forever.

Pay attention to who uses the most jargon: it’s never the brightest. It’s those who want to be perceived as the best and the brightest, something they know they are not. They use cheap language tricks to intimidate, distract, and confuse, hoping to sneak past those afraid to ask what they really mean.

I’m going to do my best for the rest of the year to question people who use these lazy, deceptive, and inflated terms. Maybe then they’ll use their real marketing talents and tell me a story so powerful that I believe, all on my own, will transform this, or revolutionize that.

What jargon do you hear these days that you’d like to add to the list above? Let me know.

[Note: this post was first published at Harvard Business Review and has been edited]

Idea beginnings and endings

The beginning of a very bad idea often feels very good. And the beginning of a very good idea can feel very bad. Even the sharpest intuition is wrong much of the time about where an idea will lead. Sometimes what seems like a great idea at first falls apart as you develop it, but then eventually you find your way through to making it work. Sometimes you don’t.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.  -Neils Bohr

Many creativity exercises force you to spend time with ideas, or problems, that seem absurd or uninteresting. Often, but not always, with enough persistence an idea can transform, invert, pivot, or crystalize into something very different from what you thought it was. That transformation may never happen if you don’t spend enough time getting to know the idea to see where it can go.

But as is always the case with ideas there are no guarantees. Your best idea may lead you for years in a direction that, in the end, is impossible. Other times what seems your worst idea, given enough attention, might be the best idea you’ve ever had.

The only true mark of a creative is someone willing to entertain any idea for a time, to play with it and kick it around, for they know you never know at first glance what an idea really is.

Hat tip: Jessen suggested the vice-versa second sentence

Lessons from 24 hours offline

On a whim I decided to spend all of yesterday offline. No email, no Facebook, nothing. I used to have a habit of doing food and other fasts, but its been a long time since I’ve done a fast of any kind.

Here’s what I learned:

I was twitchy and cranky for the first 2 hours.  I continually had the sense there was something I needed to check. But with everything off I was forced to ask “wait – why do I need to check that? And if I need to do it, why do I need to do it now?” I never had a good answer. NEVER. Email, facebook, twitter, looking up some obscure fact, could all wait until tomorrow, or whenever. There was no reason to be online, other than the habit of being online. It was fascinating to confront this same loop of logic again and again in my mind. Slowly my mind fell into a calmer loop of behavior.
By three hours I’d forgotten about the internet completely. I was more relaxed and noticibly better at concentrating on things. I went to the gym, to the supermarket, and not once felt at a loss for not having something in my palm to fiddle with. I did notice how rare anyone makes eye contact with anyone else anymore.
The Web didn’t notice I was gone. My ego might have silently believed I was missed (“Wait, I have to post/tweet/status about this! If I don’t the world will explode!”), but it was clear I wasn’t. There was no organized search party on twitter looking for me. No one even noticed.
I had more attention to spend which made things more interesting. While watching the NFL I just watched the game, instead of frequently fiddling with the web while watching, and it was better. I didn’t feel the compulsive need to have a second thing to do. I noticed more things and enjoyed it more (I wrote about this phenomenon in Attention and Sex).
My  concentration improved. Without the availability of instant distraction my brain eventually settled down into a state of mind where I was more patient with my own thoughts. By the afternoon I had improved peace of mind and clarity.
I am a calmer person today. I don’t know how long it will last, but I’d say I am 35% calmer and more relaxed simply from this Internet fast.

How I did it:
As dumb as this sounds, I’ve been asked this already. Its as if we forget everything has an off switch:


The night before I turned the wi-fi off on my Mac.
The morning of I turned my phone’s web connection off.
The only cheating I did was to look up a recipe on an iPad.
I told my wife I was doing it, which helped keep me honest.

It’s easier to do if your family and friends do it with you. The idea of a sabbath makes much sense, as its good for people to separate from daily things, and having social rituals around those fasts increases the ease and value of doing them. Thanksgiving was a good day to try this as there were people around (social) and activities like cooking and cleaning that required my full attention (concentration).

What’s next:

I highly recommend doing an Internet fast sometime this holiday season. It will help you sort out what’s important and why. You’ll be surprised. Even if you continue your current habits you’ll do so with intention, not addiction.



 I’m considering doing this regularly – possibly weekly, definitely monthly
National Day of Unplugging is March 1, 2013

Eight ways to avoid killing your family over the holidays

We love and hate our families. We want to be with some of them, but after a few hours can’t stand others. Going home for the holidays means confronting an intense mix of pleasures and fears that we never figure out until its time to leave. Here’s some advice for surviving your family this holiday season:

How to avoid killing your family over the holidays:

Put a tack in your shoe: you’ll be distracted by a different kind of pain.
Pretend you’re visiting an insane asylum on another planet. Your mission is to survive and report back.
Invite your most abrasive friend/family member along to draw fire as a decoy (e.g. Home for the Holidays).
Play hide and seek with your entire family where you are the seeker. Once they’re hiding, take a nap.
Have a competition offering $10 to whoever can hold their breath the longest. This is a cheap way to buy silence.
Two words: gin & tonic (Two more words: often & early).
Make a list every family member’s deepest secret. Write each secret on a piece of paper with no names. Jumble in a hat. Give one to every family member and ask them to guess whose is whose. Stand back and watch.
Put a tack in your most annoying family member’s shoe.

Those were for fun. Here’s some real advice.

Here’s some practical advice:

Get exercise every day. Everyone abandons their routines, exercise and otherwise, when they travel, amplifying their stress and anxiety. A day of holiday travel puts everyone on edge before they even arrive. This makes you, and your family, like caged animals. Go for a walk every day or every evening. Even 20 minutes of light exercise will reduce your stress and restore your tolerance for annoyances. Get as many people up and outside for a game of touch football, tag, or just a walk around the block. Fresh air can do wonders.
Read how to discuss politics with friends. Some basic ground rules make it easier to stay civilized in the face of ideas you don’t want to hear.
Ask your partner for help. Who are your favorite family members? Enlist their help as an oasis of serenity (“Can you help me calm down when Dad’s driving me crazy?”). Offer to reciprocate with whoever it is that drives them crazy.
Participate. Helping in the kitchen, raking leaves, or doing chores are all ways for you to choose participation with people you get along with best (Volunteer yourself and them for a specific task). It’s a mild form of #1 and gives you a useful distraction and preferred company while you do it.
Read How to keep your mouth shut. Keep in mind your real goals and it will help you pick your battles, or get past the need to engage in any battle at all.
Look at old photos. The past can be a safe place to go to spend time with family you don’t see often. Bring old photos of good times to reminisce in ways palatable to you. Bring a memory for each family member that’s positive and mention it to them.
 Play games. Board and card games are an age old tradition for sharing time with people you love but who also drive you crazy. Games have rules and the rules eliminate many frustrations of interacting with certain people. The better the game the more positive that experience is. If you bring a game you like, you get to take a lead role in teaching it to others (I highly recommend Apples to Apples, Carcasonne or  Settlers of Catan).
Last resort: movies. It’s an odd American tradition, but movies do create a passive and non confrontational shared experience. Everyone is a nicer person after watching Finding Nemo. Bring a movie on your iPad with the proper cables, and if all else fails fire it up.

If you have a comical or serious suggestion, leave it in the comments.

What I learned from Powerpoint Karaoke

Everyone has fears about regular public speaking, but what if you have to present someone else’s slides? And see them for the first time as the audience does? And only have 5 minutes? And the slides auto-advance?

I believe in the theory of trying something insanely hard to make normal work feel easier. As a public speaking expert I had to try this at least to see what I could learn for you readers.

Earlier this year I participated in what’s called Powerpoint-Karaoke (or BattleDecks) at the Makers co-working Space in Seattle (part of Seattle Creative Mornings). It’s as crazy as it sounds. I participated precisely because it’s crazy. Other space monkeys willing to try were Adam Tratt, Hillel Cooperman, Jon Culver (the winner) and  Michelle Mazur.

The rules were simple:

We get five minutes to speak
The slide decks are made for us
The slides auto advance every 15 seconds
There are no other rules
Audience votes on the winner

Here’s what I learned in preparing:

There was no effective way to prepare. Surprise! Good advice for presentations hinges on having good material and practicing it. Neither is possible in this format. This was both terrifying and liberating.
I tried to  prepare anyway. I found videos of others doing PowerPoint Karaoke. They were strange to watch since the presentations are unavoidably bad in any formal sense, but the live audiences have unusual responses. They expect it to be bad and have an unusual set of expectations for what they’re going to experience. Some of the best received presenters disregarded the slides, which was effective but felt like cheating. Although there were no official rules, I decided if I did this I should buy into the spirit of it, at least the first time
Crash course in improvisation. A decade ago I took a course in improvisational theater. I reviewed the lessons, including a refresher on “Yes, and…” which is shorthand for the mindset of faithfully committing to whatever happens.Powerpoint Karaoke is at its heart an exercise in improvisational theater.



Here’s what I learned after I presented:


You play for comedy. There is no way to take the slides seriously since by design they are ridiculous. I didn’t realize the full extent of this, as obvious as it seems now, until later. At best you are making the audience laugh, at worst they watch in silence as you struggle on stage. It’s purely stunt presenting. No one is there to learn or be inspired, at least not directly.
The audience wants spectacle. Mid-way through Cooperman’s talk he abandoned his slides, and the format. In what was one of the most interesting experiences I’ve seen at an event like this he politely, but firmly, confronted the audience about why they were there. As awkward as it was he was entirely accurate – it is a weird kind of theater that wants to see speakers work against so many difficulties. There’s  an element of wanting to watch cars crash in this event. It’s all in good fun, but also schadenfreudian.
The energy is weird. Good speakers (and comedians) build a rhythm with the audience through their material. The pacing of jokes, how certain facts are revealed, all build to something. But here since the speakers don’t know the slides the energy is weird – sometimes very funny things happen, but often there are complete misfires. Sometimes the audience laughs but the speakers don’t know why. Sometimes the speakers think the audience should be laughing, but doesn’t know why they aren’t.
Michelle Mazur is brave.  There were only 4 speakers on the agenda, with an extra battle deck for a volunteer from the audience. Michelle volunteered after seeing the four of us perform. I thought for sure no one would be brave enough, but she proved me wrong.


Advice:


There is no way to be good at this. This is liberating. It was very hard for me to say who of the five speakers did the best job. They were all weird, funny, awkward, and interesting in different ways. It really is more like experimental theater than anything like a public speech.
Make sure you trust the hosts. Luz Bratcher made the slides for this event and did a great job. If the person making the slides wants to screw all the speakers it’s easy to do, as if the slides are thoughtless speakers won’t have much to work with. You want the hosts to make it a challenge, but to give you well crafted slides that are funny all on their own and give the speakers plenty to work with (You can see the slides Luz made below).

 What I’d change about the format:

Let speakers control the slides. If you kept the 5 minute limit, but let the speakers control when a slide advanced, they’d have slightly more power over delivery. That adjustment would dramatically improve their ability to make the slides work. It would still be very hard, but the auto-advance works against everyone’s interests in this case.
Do it at night, after drinks. We did ours as part of creative mornings, which means IT’S THE MORNING. People are going to work right after. It’s not the right time for crazy and absurd. Crazy works better after work, or at night, or following a happy hour where everyone is midway through letting off steam after a long day. Mornings mean people are going to work afterwards, they’re charging up, not winding down.
Use real presentation slides.  I’ve always wanted to get the slide deck from a medical conference, or a corporate retreat for a company  I’ve never heard of, and make up a presentation in real time for that. Real slide decks have a continuity built in to them that fabricated battledecks never do.

Here are the slides Luz made for each speaker:

Seattle Creative Mornings: Battledecks! from Luz Bratcher

John Cleese on Creativity

I recently re-watched this excellent talk by John Cleese (of Monty Python) on creativity. The best parts are after the 10 minute mark, and I suspect many people give up before then. His ideas reminded me of Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, since they both emphasize modes and frames of mind.

Here’s the video with my notes and choice excerpts below:

Five factors:

Space to be undisturbed
Time (for play to take place in space)
Time (persisting in uncertainty)
Confidence (to be truly serendipitous)
Humor (to aid moving from closed to open)

These are his main points, influenced heavily by the work of his friend Dr. Donald W. Mackinnon. Cleese specifically advocates taking 90 minutes to create space and time. It takes him about 30 minutes to calm down and open his mind, leaving an hour of creative time working on something.

The (flawed) romantic view of creativity is it’s a thing, but really it’s a process:

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

The quote below evolves into a  funny riff at 14:50 that’s worth watching:

“It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking, It’s also easier to do little things we know we can do, than  to start on big things we’re not so sure about”

He reflects on the counterintuitive ‘work’ element of creativity. The mythology of epiphany makes this seem wrong, since it assumes creativity is a thing and not a process. Persistence is something involved in how to be good at anything:

“One of my Monty Python colleagues who seemed to be more talented than I was never produced scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem and saw a solution he was inclined to take it even if he knew it was not very original.  Whereas if I was in the same situation, while I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out, and finish by 5 o’clock, I just couldn’t. I ‘d sit there with the problem for another hour and a quarter and by sticking at it, would in the end, almost always come up with something more original. It was that simple.

My work was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer. So imagine my excitement when I found this was exactly what MacKinnon found in his research. He discovered the most creative professionals always played with the problem for much longer before they tried to resolve it. Because they were prepared to tolerate that slight discomfort, as anxiety, that we all experience when we haven’t solved it.”

In the talk he explains closed vs open modes of thinking. Most work cultures are (necessarily) dominated by  closed thinking. It’s no surprise most people in power are fond of displaying decisive powers:

“The most creative people have learned to tolerate (that) discomfort for much longer. Just because they put in more pondering time there solutions are more creative.”

Most work cultures are political and repressive with fear of offending people. Despite the rhetoric for “be creative” if there are penalties and instant judgements creativity is impossible:

“The people I find it hardest to be creative with are the people who need, all the time, to project an image of themselves as decisive. And who feel to create this image they need to decide everything very quickly with a great show of confidence. Well this behavior I suggest sincerely is the most effective way to strangle creativity at birth.”

 ”You cannot be spontaneous within reason [-Alan Watts]. You have to risk saying things that are silly, illogical or wrong… any drivel may lead to the breakthrough”

This last quote is pure awesome:

“There is a confusion between serious and solemn..  Solemnity, I don’t know what it’s for. What is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor. And it somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity serves pomposity. And the self important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor, and that’s why they see it as a threat. And so dishonestly pretend that their deficiencies makes their views more substanial, when it only makes them feel bigger… ptttttth.

Humor is an essential part of spontaneity, an essential part of playfulness, an essential part of the creativity we need to solve problems no matter how serious they may be. “

 

The hypocrisy of bosses asking for ideas

I discovered the CBC Comedy The Newsroom a decade ago, while watching PBS late one night. I didn’t know what it was, but found the first season of this well written, darkly funny show thoroughly entertaining.

One favorite scene captures the hypocrisy of claiming you want ideas. Acerbic self-obsessed news director Finkleman asks his staff for new ideas, but rejects everything anyway.

Hasn’t everyone had a boss that has done this to them?

How to find your voice

You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself – Miles Davis

There is a paradox you must accept if you want to find your voice: it takes work. This is counterintuitive because all of the great voices we admire, whether we find them in reading John Updike or Ray Bradbury, or see it in a Georgia Okeefe painting, seem as if they were always present in those creators. This is a falsehood. If you asked any of them, or any master of any craft, they’d tell you in painful detail how many years of work it took to develop the thing we, as consumers of their work, take for granted. It took them a long time to learn how to create like themselves.

We find this hard to believe because our view of other creators is inverted. We know them after they were famous. The works we know best are rarely an artist’s early works. We don’t see their many experiments, their uncertain output during the long years they developed the craft they’d become famous for. All makers require long, disciplined hours to develop their talents, hours they will never be shown at a museum or on a postcard. Go find the early works of Jackson Pollock: it took him years before he discovered the all-over style he’d become most famous for. Who knows how many plays Shakespeare wrote that he burned, or poems Emily Dickinson tore apart and buried in the dust.

We are all born with a gap between our ambitions and our abilities, and ambitions rise much faster than abilities can. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, explained the gap this way:

“What nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish someone had told this to me… all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste…. there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff what you are making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell why what you are making is a disappointment to you. You can tell that it’s still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.

And the thing I would say to you with all my heart is that most of the creative people I know when through years of this… Everyone goes through this… the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work… it’s only by doing a huge volume of work that you will close that gap and the work you make will be as good as your ambitions.”

Many very talented people never develop their skills only because they can’t stand the feeling of this gap. They’re embarrassed and tortured by it. They expect to be great quickly and when they’re not they feel they’re a failure, despite their foolish comparisons to ghosts of their own invention.

Some legendary writers and makers struggled with their own opinion of their work even after their success  No matter how popular they became they felt their work was flawed, inferior and immature, never reaching the standards invented in their own minds. Even the great ones felt doubts and held themselves in judgement. They failed to see how much value they’d brought to their readers in spite of their own criticisms. Some very successful artists never close the gap and you might not either.

Have patience. Be willing to experiment and try different things. Realize you might need to wait a week, a month, or a year to see something you’ve made with eyes objective enough to learn from it. Enjoy making things for the sake of making: what a gift to have the time to make at all! If you were born 100 years ago, or to different parents in a different country, you wouldn’t have the time to feel bad about your work, because you wouldn’t have the resources to make it at all. If you feel love for your craft honor it with the discipline of showing up, even when it’s hard. Take pleasure in small progressions when you see them, and know those hard won gains are the only way anyone in history has ever achieved anything noteworthy, for themselves or for the world.

Best posts of the month (October)

Last month was one of the best months of traffic ever at scottberkun.com. These posts led the way in views, comments and attention.

How to be good at anything
Should you always trust your gut?
Can Self Awareness be Taught?
Are design exercises in interviews unethical?
History of religion: explained

Enjoy.