by Walker Royce
trust: reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence. (Dictionary.com)
The most important dimension of trust is that it gives you confidence. Integrity is one dimension of confidence, but competence is another. You don’t trust a friend to give you medical advice (unless they are a competent M.D.) and you don’t trust an M.D. to be your divorce lawyer. Trusted advisors come in many flavors. Integrity and communications effectiveness apply to them all, but competence is context-dependent.
As we build trusted relationships with other people, both as advisors and as people we advise, our paramount need turns out to be a feeling of safety. When you package integrity, comfort in communicating, and competence into a purposeful relationship, you feel safe. A person’s competence gives you confidence in their opinion, but the person’s integrity and ability to communicate comfortably without tension is what makes an individual, an audience, or an organization feel safe and motivates them to elevate you to the position of a trusted advisor.
TABLE 4-3. Adjustments You Can Make to Various Social Styles
CHAPTER 5
Presentations:
Accuracy and
Precision
This chapter is a compilation of loosely connected topics whose common thread is two words that most people associate with science and mathematics, not writing or speaking. Communicating accurately with the right level of precision is a discriminating strength of most great communications. Conversely, communicating inaccurately or with too much or too little precision is a recurring fault in many ineffective communications. This balance, underappreciated by most communicators, is an instructive topic for some important observations on speaking and listening. While this chapter focuses mostly on presentation style, it is equally applicable to writing.
Although there are many different reasons why written and oral communications succeed or fail, there is one pattern of failure that dominates all others: information overload. Providing excessive detail can obscure your message, just as superfluous precision can obscure your reasoning about some mathematical relationship. Let’s look at this topic a little more precisely by starting with some definitions.
accuracy: mathematics. The degree of correctness of a quantity or expression.
precision: mathematics. The degree to which the correctness of a quantity is expressed.
In mathematics and scientific measurement, accuracy and precision are related yet quite distinct. Accuracy indicates how close to the truth a specific measurement is; precision indicates how much certainty or uncertainty there is in that measurement. Sometimes the units of measure give you a good indication of precision. Here are a few examples.
You have a scale that weighs a person to the nearest kilogram. That is accurate enough for most purposes, but it is imprecise. If you want to measure gold dust or pharmaceuticals, you will need a more precise scale to find the amounts to the nearest gram.
If a person asks me how old I am, I can answer 54 years (accurate), or 19,890 days (more precise), or 28,641,600 minutes (even more precise). In this case, the less precise measure remains accurate for a longer time; the more precise measure becomes inaccurate quickly.
If a person asks me how far I live from Boston, I can answer 40 miles (accurate) or 220,202 feet, or 41.705 miles. The latter two are very precise and also somewhat silly. They imply that you know where Boston is to the nearest foot (to the front door of city hall?) and where your home is to the nearest foot (to the property line? your front door? the doormat?).
Here is another example. Suppose you are in London with your family and you ask what time it is.
Your mom looks at her watch and says, “It is almost 3 o’clock.”
Your dad looks at his watch and says, “It is 9:51, but I am still on U.S. time.”
You look up at Big Ben (which you know to keep accurate time). It says 2:50.
On his computer, your nerd brother has access to a highly refined cesium clock used to measure precise time intervals. He hits a button and tells you that it is now precisely 2:50:50.397.
Your mom is accurate but imprecise. Your dad is inaccurate but precise. Big Ben is accurate and precise enough for almost any purpose. Your brother is a pest (as always) and confuses you with a long string of numbers. He is very, very precise, and gives you much more detail than you need. By being overly precise, he becomes ever more inaccurate as time passes. The longer it takes him to tell you the time, the more time elapses since he hit the button.
What does this wide range of responses have to do with writing or speaking? We encounter this sort of information spectrum every day in business meetings, academic lectures, storytelling, church sermons, and newspaper articles. People use 5 or 10 mushy words trying to be precise, when one carefully selected word would more accurately describe their thought. They confuse you with 10 digits of precision when they need only one or two. They give you 20 pages of fluff to explain something that could be covered in a few meaty paragraphs.
Right now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Joe Blow is exactly like that.” So are most of the rest of us! We feel compelled to explain the whole situation, or to provide years and years of context, or to describe how every person at the party reacted, or to say whatever it takes to describe every tree until the audience has forgotten the forest.
If someone asks me how old I am and I give my answer in minutes, or if someone asks me how far I live from Boston and I give an answer in feet, have I communicated more effectively? These extreme examples illustrate an important point.
When you communicate with more precision than is necessary, you confuse or lose your audience.
Most presentations are called briefings for a reason. They are intended to be brief, which usually means accurate yet imprecise. To give an effective briefing, you need not present every bullet on every page and every word in every sub-bullet. In my experience, oral presentations in the business and academic worlds show three common failure patterns.
Information overload: preparing written presentation material that is overly precise
Oral tedium: presenting every aspect of the prepared material too precisely
Too much foreplay: presenting too much context (being overly precise describing the problem) and not enough substance (being under-precise describing the solution)
AVOID INFORMATION OVERLOAD
The best presentations are pretty sparse. They do not fill every bit of white space with data, words, cute clip art, frilly backgrounds, and eye-catching multi-media elements. There is a time and place for all these elements, but most presentations don’t need them. If you are producing a documentary film of an important construction project, you don’t need special effects, action scenes, and nudity to tell the story. Similarly, if you are presenting your team’s budgetary status, you don’t need clip art, PowerPoint animations, and distracting background graphics.
Although there are occasionally good reasons for very detailed and polished presentations, too often people feel compelled to be complete and precise in every presentation on every topic. These tendencies simply lead to turd polishing and unsatisfactory communications. The self-defining jargon I just used is a memorable term for adding lots of details and frills in an attempt to make relatively weak or low-quality messages look better. Turd polishing, practiced both in writing and speaking, is usually obvious to an audience and is somewhat insulting. Most audiences are too polite to challenge you when they see such material, but they will turn on their BS filters and start interpreting everything you say with more skepticism. Here are a few ideas for improving the preparation and style of your presentation and avoiding information overload.
Use Illustrations and Pictures
A picture is worth 1000 words. Try to explain in words what the face of a clock looks like, how Celsius translates into Fahrenheit, how your net worth has changed over the past 10 years, or the beauty of the Aurora Borealis. These are far easier to convey with a simple illustration, e
quation, graph, and photo, respectively. These are all more memorable than strings of words.
Figure 5-1 is a relatively simple graphic that I have used for more than 20 years, in numerous variations, to explain some complicated topics in software management. I include the graphic in my presentations while explaining the topic verbally. If I were to present just the graphic or just my spoken remarks, the audience would be hard-pressed to grasp and remember what I was talking about. A meaningful graphic provides a framework for words to be reasoned through, making complex topics understandable and memorable. The figure provides an incredible amount of information in a simple graphic that compares and contrasts three project profiles. I could easily use 1000 words to explain the concepts that are well-painted with the illustration.
FIGURE 5-1. A Picture Worth 1000 Words
Simple graphics, combined with a strong argument, are vital to presenting a topic with impact. For a great treatment of the power of simple graphics, see Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin. This should be a must-read for classes or seminars on speaking and presenting. Roam tackles visual thinking and presents compelling techniques for solving problems and communicating ideas with simple pictures that anyone can draw.
Graphics and illustrations can be misused. Not all graphics improve clarity and make your message more memorable. Complex illustrations awash in boxes, lines, and arrows have become increasingly popular in presentations. Presenters throw every symbol and box they can find onto one drawing, with lines and arrows contorted in every conceivable way, trying to portray a wide spectrum of concepts such as cause and effect, process flow, relationships among parts of a system, state changes, organizational hierarchy, and sequences of activities: Ouch! I’m getting a headache!
While some complex graphics can be effective, most are simply background structures for depositing boatloads of text with a low signal-to-noise ratio. [Signal-to-noise ratio is a term for the power ratio between a signal (i.e., meaningful information) and the background noise (i.e., clutter and random background information).] Good presentations have a clear signal—namely, your message—and a low level of noise. Leave out the clutter, details, irrelevant clip art, unnecessary boxes and arrows, and false precision unless it amplifies your signal.
Figure 5-2 shows a graphic in which a rather simple message has been completely obfuscated by a plethora of arrows and text. It is a good example of illustrations that confuse more than they clarify. Such diagrams can be found everywhere in today’s presentations.
FIGURE 5-2. Overdoing Arrows and Text
The graphic might be useful to show that the relationships among the 14 teams are well understood, but throwing in all the explanatory text clouds that message. When you see almost 500 words of 7-point type shrunk down to explain 14 bubbles, the only thing your brain registers is, “I don’t get it.” By the way, 500 words typically fill an 8 ½ by 11 page of text, single-spaced. To the audience, it is all noise.
Use Mathematics
Mathematical formulae are another powerful dimension of graphical representation that people hesitate to use. For example, here is a verbal explanation of the relationship between Celsius and Fahrenheit:
To convert Fahrenheit (F) to Celsius (C) or Celsius to Fahrenheit, first add 40 to the number. Next, multiply by 5/9 or 9/5. Then subtract the 40 you just added to yield the final result. You can remember whether to use 5/9 or 9/5 for the conversion if you remember that F (for Fahrenheit) begins with the same letter as fraction. Because 5/9 is a fraction, this is the number you use to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. While 9/5 is also a fraction, it can also be expressed as a whole number plus a fraction (1 4/5). So to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, use 9/5.
I created this description by simplifying a 135-word description I found on a website down to 104 words. It is still a fogbank compared to a simple mathematical formula that is clearer and more memorable.
Celsius
TC = 5/9 (TF -32)
Fahrenheit
TF = (9/5 TC) + 32
Anyone with grade school math can understand and remember these equations. Why are people so afraid to use mathematical representations to describe concepts that are based in mathematical terms?
Figure 5-3 shows a simple graphic I have used for years to represent an important set of messages about software economics (clearly an esoteric topic).
FIGURE 5-3. Simplified Software Economics Equation
This simple equation ($ = CPTA) has only four terms. Over the years, however, I heard from numerous people in marketing and sales that no one would understand it because it uses an exponential equation. Their inclination was to dumb down the message so that everyone would get it, including them. The error in this thinking is that a topic like software economics is not presented to uninformed people. This message is for savvy professionals who are likely to spend millions of dollars to improve their organization’s capability to develop software products. These audiences have no trouble understanding a simple equation with an exponent.
In the hands of a savvy presenter, the equation provides a great framework to make the key point: These four terms are in priority order. Reducing complexity has the most impact, followed by improving the process, then improving the people, and, lastly, improving the tool automation. All the advanced mathematics within the empirical models and the underlying details about how to characterize each of these parameters are unnecessary because the equation serves to lay out a credible and accurate foundation for the subsequent discussions on those four key themes of improving software economics.
Make Things Memorable
In preparing a presentation, start with the end in mind: Think about what you really want the audience to remember. In time, it will be hard for people to recall your message out of a flood of sentences and words. Pictures, graphics, and other high-value briefing elements are more memorable. Design some mnemonic, graphic, logo, or illustration that captures the essence of your message and build your briefing around it.
You will still use many words when you craft your message. The key is to select words that people will remember. This is especially important in titles, thematic statements, and conclusions. Using words with teeth improves your communications effectiveness significantly. Consider the following example, still indelibly etched in my memory.
In the 1980s, there was a general perception among software engineers that jobs as designers and coders were cool and attracted the A players in most software organizations. The B players had to settle for the un-cool positions: testers and quality assurance engineers. There were good reasons for this view, partly because of the manual processes used at the time in software engineering. Designing and coding were creative, high-leverage activities; testing and quality assurance roles were more mundane and mostly involved paper-pushing.
Despite their less attractive responsibilities, the test and quality assurance roles had tremendous power at certain points in the software engineering process. They could halt a whole project if certain intermediate milestones were not met or documents were not approved. The A players resented this power held by the B players.
I was one of those snooty designers who looked down on the quality assurance caste as a lower form of life that slowed the engineering process. At a large industry conference in the 1980s, I scanned the program to choose the presentations that interested me the most. I usually selected the cool design and management topics, which routinely drew larger audiences than the un-cool test and quality assurance topics. But I couldn’t pass up “Software Quality Assurance, The Sphincter of Software Engineering.” The presenter had grabbed my attention with his witty and unexpected title.
I wasn’t alone: It was one of the best-attended sessions at the conference. I’ve remembered the title because it nailed the topic in a memorable way. Better yet, the author delivered a good message, and I made a commitment to follow through on it. He presented the quality assurance process (not the people) as flawed and proposed that a better process would naturally
attract better people, which would benefit everyone.
Avoid False Precision When Using Numbers
It is almost standard practice nowadays for presentations to use precise numbers that are computations from a spreadsheet or averages from a lot of surveys, or that are calculations from various models, plans, or estimates. In many cases, authors use numeric representations that imply much more precision than they should. Even though we know our planning process is only accurate to within 20%, we present multi-year contract prices for uncertain business endeavors down to the dollar (for example, $1,650,745). We claim that customer satisfaction has improved 23% when our survey is based on subjective assessments of 10 different customer satisfaction questions where the answers vary from 1 (very satisfied) to 5 (very dissatisfied).
These are examples of false precision. We don’t know the estimated cost down to the dollar. If we know our $1.65M price to the nearest 20%, it is likely somewhere between $1.3 and $2 million. Presenting a number that has seven digits of precision is dishonest. At least present the price as $1.6M or $1,600,000 so that it portrays an uncertain estimate and does not deceptively imply more precision. Similarly, a more accurate way of presenting the improvement in customer satisfaction is to say that it has increased one full unit in our five-unit scale, or to round the number to 20%, thereby implying only one digit of precision.
An appreciation of basic statistics is also crucial to accurate communications. This topic is under-emphasized in our schools compared to its importance in everyday communications. Presenting relative and absolute measures makes a big difference in communicating information credibly. For a pragmatic treatment of this topic, see How To Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard.