Details Distract and Detract | Working Principles

I’ve joined a meeting and we have 30 minutes to understand a situation and to make a couple of decisions.

A team has been working on understanding the decisions that are before us and come to the meeting armed with a PowerPoint deck.

They open the slide deck. My eyes immediately recoil from the detail shown.

There are shapes scattered across the page. Each shape contains words, acronyms and abbreviations in different sizes, directions and colours. Some of the shapes are inside other shapes, none of the shapes are aligned, not one of them is the same size as another one. Each box is connected to other boxes with straight lines, curved lines, dashed lines and coloured lines. Some of the lines do a lap of the page before happening upon a shape with which to partner. Other lines navigate through the middle of the boxes shapes and curving as they go. Each lines has a legend in different font sizes and various colours. It takes me a little while to digest the salad of acronyms and abbreviations.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this is a story, a meaning.

After 20 minutes we miraculously get onto the second slide where we are greeted by 25 bullet points in an 8 point font. The slim hope of finishing in 30 minutes evaporates.

Each bullet point is a fully crafted sentence with many caveats and conditions, but there doesn’t appear to be an order to the them. Each bullet stands next to another bullet to which it has little in common.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this is a story, a meaning.

Those of us who are trying to understand the situation are utterly bamboozled by the level of detail being displayed to us.

From what I understand of the situation the decisions that we need to make are quite straightforward but we are so distracted by the level of detail that the only thing that we can do is ask that the team schedule another meeting.

The team are frustrated by our lack of progress, the reviewing team are equally frustrated and take that frustration into their next meeting.

What I’ve described here is a caricature, an embellishment, an exaggeration, but not a massive one. Many will recognise this scene.

You may think that I’m blaming the presenters here, but those of us who are reviewers are as much at fault here. How well did we define the brief? Were the team clear about the purpose of the meeting before they attended? How many of the team have been trained in communication skills, or design?

Is the team expecting that reviewer to be there, the one who always wants to go digging, deeper and deeper. Have they previously experienced the embarrassment of not having enough detail and are determined, even subconsciously, not to go through that humiliation again.

Did anyone do a pre-review with the team?

We are taught in our academic years to be thorough. We are given assignments that a defined by length – “1,000 words on the life and times of a ping-pong ball”, or was that just me. In business the requirement is different, most of the time we want to get to decisions. I don’t need 1,000 words if 10 will help me make the decision. This, however, is where business is far more challenging. Take a quote by the very detailed Albert Einstein:

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler”

What a great manifesto for so much of business communications but how do I know that I’ve gone too simple? How do I know that I’ve done enough to communicate?

Various organisations try to embed the idea of simplification into their working processes and standards. An example of this is the Amazon press release approach. The simple idea here is two fold, the first one being to get people to think with the end-in-mind, the second idea is one of constraint. If you can’t communicate it in a couple of pages at the level of a press release then there’s a problem.

I like the idea of giving people a framework that creates constraints on the level of detail, but it doesn’t work in every situation and many have a tendency towards detail and away from simplicity.

Back to Einstein:

“Genius is making complex ideas simple, not making simple ideas complex”

“If you can’t explain it simply you didn’t understand it well enough”

If Einstein is right and it takes genius to make complex ideas simply then we shouldn’t expect it to be easy. Genius is normally demanding work.

We live in a world where we can generate huge amounts of detail on seconds, but explanation doesn’t come from the detail. Explanation comes from understanding. Personally I find that metaphor and story are often much better ways of helping the meaning to come out. The best stories are the ones that we can tell in our own way because the storyline is simple and understandable.

We have to acknowledge here that for many there is an internal fight going on. I’ve already mentioned the fear of embarrassment from a lack of detail, but I think there’s more to it than that. Sometimes we want to demonstrate that we’ve put in the effort and detail shows effort in a way that simple doesn’t. There are times when we use detail to mask our lack of understanding, using it as a smokescreen.

The important thing is the principle, we should be aiming to simplify not to complexify. We need to fight against those inner urges to add detail and strive to remove the distractions.

Header Image: I thought I would use something complex to communicate simplicity just to show that detail can be glorious. This is the entrance to the Niyo Art Gallery in Kigali, Rwanda.