August Newsletter : You Can Herd a Cat to Water?
Cat herding should be an Olympic sport.
In the aftermath of our Economy project I’ve been privileged to witness some champion cat herders, marshalling their staff or clients to attend my presentations and workshops. Twenty of them already scheduled or done – oh yes it’s a championship event.
Everybody loves it when they finally get to the presentation [with the possible exception of people whose brands have been deemed “wrong for the times”], but the act of physically getting together in the same place at the same time is incredibly demanding.
As my timetable whirls around me with its constant re-schedulings and uncertainties I have the feeling of sitting in the middle of a complex system – a concept I’ve often use to explain the more complicated aspects of change or daily life. It’s funny being in it though. You really can’t do much more than just go with it – let it pick you up and carry you along. Ultimately everything gets done but rarely when you thought it was going to. No wonder Raglan values are alive and well. A control freak would go crazy in this world.
It’s even worse with the workshops. Five hours on a given day with up to ten people to accommodate. You do the maths! Is there actually maths you can do to work out how very difficult that must be?
Modestly I feel that every major organisation and company should see the findings of this study – not least because I think that if they adapt fast enough to what we’re calling “The Time of the Hunter” they can avoid major lay-offs and contract cuts and thus save us all from a major recession. And themselves, of course.
But the question remains as to how to get the message to all of them in a specific enough way that they can action it and still make a dollar or two out of the information we paid to discover. I mean if you want to spread the word, the mass media’s there and good at what they do, but giving them your findings is like giving a meatball to a carnivore. They swallow it, but did they notice?
The key problem is time. Most of the people who need to know what we found out in our study are so short of time and so limited in their attention span that just sitting down and listening to someone trying to tell you something new about your situation is quite an effort. Unless the level of interest is overwhelming they just won’t bother. And unless the architecture of that communication is right, they just won’t hear it.
When it comes to explaining your findings in person, I find a 30 minute presentation of the kind that boards and CEO’s seem to like requires you to leave out a lot of the richness and the back story. Maybe I’m all about the back story. I hope I’m never important enough to be invited to the TED conference – you only get 18 minutes to talk there. I’d love to go some time though, just to discover what it’s like to have your head so full of ideas – do such rich snacks make a full meal?
I can see the point of that kind of snacking and grazing if it’s incidental information that may or may not be relevant to you. But even when it’s very relevant there are issues of size. An e-newsletter I subscribe to is full of fascinating information, but almost always too long. Too much well-written information, too many different topics.
On the other hand I almost always read the weekly one-pagers I get from another source – and the short topics in magazines, papers and websites. Headlines with a brief summary and links to the full story – that’s great. Bits of information, not streams of thinking. Unless you choose to engage.
As I’ve often said – research is just another means of communication – but the corollary to that is that in spreading its message it needs to play by the same rules as every other form of communication. That’s harder. We researchers can deliver a good title and an interesting elevator pitch when we need to, but market research is certainly not the place to learn to be as succinct as a sub-editor.
Traditionally our communication architecture and our sense of value has been governed by size and scale. Bigger has been better. Or at least more expensive and profitable. Reports that double as coffee tables, masses of tables or verbatim comments, presentations that show slide after slide of impenetrable graphs, larger samples, international comparison studies. They all cost more – even though the marginal effects of that size may be small or even negative when it comes to putting plans into action. We’ve been indulgent.
Now with time of the essence, the communication of results and insights is even more critical than ever. You need to discard so much 2nd level information to let the insights fly free. At the same time, those insights – newly over-used marketing term of the 21st century – need to be well-honed and specific if they’re going to get where they’re needed – into the minds of readers, viewers and listeners. The relevance has to virtually hit them over the head.
It’s hard to sell the absence of clutter. Someone suggested that I double side my 40 page report because a smaller report is more likely to get picked up and opened. There’s probably an optimum size for pick-up-and-open-ability. And it’s definitely not 40 pages. But despite the increased value of brevity in complex times, I think there’s an older relationship between value and size. Perhaps even primordial. Because I guarantee that if I offered you a 20, 40 and 80 page report on the same topic you’d expect to pay much more for the largest one. Whether you would or not is another matter.
The most time-friendly output of the current Time of the Hunter project is my three page project summary. Read that and you know what’s what. It’s perfectly weighted to the needs of busy people, packed full of great insight and specific recommendations, pared down to essentials.
But despite all the time pressure out there I still think clients would be a little bit bemused if I announced that this summary was the primary output of the study. That’ll be 6K thanks! 2K a page. Even though the true costs of the subscription lie in the gathering of the information, and the mental wrestling required to turn them into insights and recommendations, there’s still a need to provide a little bulk at the finish – to let people know they’ve had something more substantial than a snack.
Even if they don’t read it, a big report still seems more substantial than a slim volume. And a presentation they only see the slides of is still more weighty than a little document that distils the wisdom of those slides.
So I’m selling my 40 page report for $720 plus GST with an extra 3 page summary thrown in. . . interested?
Cheers
PS Ironic that it took over 1,000 words to discuss the time we don't have to read things- isn't it?
PPS For more information on the Time of the Hunter presentations and workshops or the proposed 8 Tribes as Consumers research please contact Jill Caldwell directly.
Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers and legitimate Windshift contacts only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2006]
NB this cat isn't copyright to me - don't know where he came from but I just had to use him. Don't sue me.
Distribute [unchanged] with impunity. Quote with attribution.
", the mass media’s ...good at what they do, but giving them your findings is like giving a meatball to a carnivore.They swallow it, but did they notice? ]