Confusion, it’s just utter, utter confusion.
Tony Hancock, The Rebel
I once did a note for a confused CEO. His company had done several months’ due diligence to see whether to buy a group of companies, yet he was struggling to see whether to do a deal and on what terms. The problem wasn’t too little information – during the due diligence, he’d received lots of weighty reports. And the problem wasn’t insufficient ‘executive summaries’ – he’d received lots of those too. The problem was: he’d received information that was poorly presented, poorly structured and poorly written. It didn’t inform.
The CEO asked me to review the information and fixed a time for us to meet. However, it coincided with my son’s School Sports Day, so I gave him my apologies and instead sent a three-page note of my thoughts. The thoughts weren’t technical. They weren’t new either. They’d all been seen in previous reports and notes. But they were clear.
And because I’d used many of the principles in this book, the note didn’t just have clarity, it had impact.
It clarified and galvanised. Within two days, he’d called off, then drastically renegotiated the deal – and I saw my son win the Hoop and Hat race. Clear information saved the company a lot (millions of pounds) and saved me enough time to go to Sports Day.
It shows that neither one-page notes nor 100-page packs were enough. What was needed was information that had clarity and impact.
Clear work gets results. Your documents and analyses get read; they are more inviting for readers. People understand and absorb your points faster. You’ll help them reach better decisions more quickly.
Also, your business proposals are more likely to succeed – decision-makers look more favourably on proposals they can quickly understand. Clear information shows clear thinking, and clear thinking impresses.
Every day, so many of us grapple with unclear information. We wade through uninviting documents crammed with impenetrable bullet points, graphs and tables.
It wastes so much time, and also leads to bad decisions. I’ve heard that managers post-rationalise their decisions, that they reach them based on intuition and then look selectively at the information to support their hunch. I’m not surprised. They have to resort to intuition simply because they can’t make head nor tail of the information they get sent.
When we’re confused, we often don’t even admit it. Just as in The Emperor’s New Clothes, we don’t want to seem stupid. We rationalise away our confusion. We blame ourselves: ‘I’m no good with numbers.’ Other times we blame the topic: ‘It’s a big complex subject, it takes time to understand.’
Or we say: ‘Miggins, this topic that you did a note on, it’s quite complex … can you pop over to my desk and talk me through it?’ But if information is clear, it stands up on its own. I’ve investigated complex frauds yet didn’t have to ‘talk through’ my reports. Many business journals and newspapers write about complex issues, and I’ve never had to invite a journalist to my home to ‘talk me through’ an article.
Also, people don’t realise just how much clearer their information could be. Before 1932, the London Tube map was a literal representation of where trains went and everyone thought it was fine. Not Mr Harry Beck, though. He straightened twisting lines, magnified central London and shrunk outer London. His map was launched to public acclaim and highlighted just how average earlier maps had been. It has since become one of the world’s most iconic images.
So it is with much business information – until something better comes along, management aren’t aware they are being short-changed with poor information.
To add to the problem, many people think that showing information is common sense. Got a lot of numbers? Then do a pie chart – we learnt about them at primary school. The only difference is we now use computers, not crayons. Got a complex point to make? It’s easy – just carve the text into brief sections, each preceded with a little black dot known as a ‘bullet point’. Computers really do fool us into thinking our documents are well written and our presentations interesting and informative.
And people think that because showing information is just common sense, they needn’t spend time learning how to do it. They spend lots on a new system to produce management information, yet spend nothing learning how best to show the information. When I trained as a chartered accountant and MBA, not once did anyone teach me anything in this book. That’s quite a statement.
When people try to improve, they misguidedly sign up for Advanced PowerPoint, Excel or Word courses and learn how to do groovy swinging-in bullet points, zany 3-D graphs and fancy fonts. Yet these courses tell us what things we can do but not whether we should do them – we can’t make informed choices. They not only miss the point, they make it worse. They encourage style to triumph over content. Don’t worry about clarity, learn instead how to be stylish. If your work is funky, people might not notice it’s confusing.
This is a shame because we’ve got brilliantly powerful software on our desks. Now, more than ever before, all of us can produce beautifully clear work that has incredible impact – at least, we could if only we knew what we should be doing.
Some people realise that computers aren’t the answer, and instead sign up for writing courses. Yet as we will see, often the best way to show information is not to improve words but to get rid of them altogether and show it a different way instead.
Some people believe one-page notes solve the problem of bad reports. Granted, a confusing one-page note wastes less time than a confusing ten-page report – but it’s still confusing. Many CVs are just one or two pages but most don’t show the information clearly.
Some people think that it’s a communicating problem. They surmise that everything would be fine if people thought more about their objectives and messages. But knowing these won’t get you far if you don’t know how best to convey them clearly.
Finally, there is one last reason why the problem prevails: people don’t know where to find the answers.
This book provides the answers – and as we see in the next section, it provides more, much more.
This book will inform and inspire. After reading it, you will do reports and slides that are clearer than you thought possible. Also, they will be more inviting – the book has simple design tips to make work look sharp.
But it’s more than that. Next time you’re pondering what to put in that note, report or slide, you’ll be in control. Because you know you’re doing the right thing, you’ll feel more confident, and that confidence will shine through in your work.
Chapter 1 will change for ever how you view bullet points. It’s my signature dish, something I call ‘WiT’ – ‘Words in Tables’. Bullet points simply don’t give impact to your work. ‘WiT’ does. It gives incredible impact. It visually lifts ideas from slides and reports. It is also how to do a dramatically improved CV.
This book will also change for ever how you view graphs. If you think that a graph should be memorable and make instant sense, hold that thought, then read Chapter 2.
Tables get a bad press in business, but that’s because many people do bad tables, not because tables are bad. Chapter 3 gives the principles and tips for fantastic tables that communicate your points clearly and concisely.
Many reports, notes and slides make comparisons between alternatives, e.g. outsourcing or staying in-house, but are bad at showing the pros and cons of them. Decision-makers struggle to have informed discussions about the alternatives. Chapter 4 on making comparisons changes that.
If you are tired of bullet points on slides, Chapter 5 is the answer. It gives ideas and inspiration for slides, ones that will better help you meet your objectives.
Chapter 6 looks at how to show numbers so they clarify, not confuse.
If you’ve ever wasted time tinkering unsuccessfully on a computer to make your work look good (‘Let’s try some bold there and upper case here’), read Chapter 7 on document design. Learn quick, simple tips to do reports and slides that really impress.
If you prepare KPIs, variance analysis and ‘flash’ figures – or even if you just review them – Chapter 8 shows some brilliant layouts you will want to adopt and adapt. If you thought your variance analysis was as good as it could be, think again.
Chapter 9 is how to do a much better organisation chart. I once used it to show 250 reporting units on a single A3 sheet of paper. Try doing that the conventional way in PowerPoint.
Chapter 10 is on next steps (just four pages), then there are some computing tips in the Appendix. This book is about what to do, not how to do it on a computer, and most tips are easy to do in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Nevertheless, this appendix gives computing tips for some ideas in this book.
Throughout the book you’ll see how to improve even reasonable-looking work. Many of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ redos are based on real work I’ve seen and which aren’t too awful, yet the ‘after’ is significantly better.
By the end, you’ll be ready to play Info Bingo. If you’ve heard of Buzzword Bingo, you can guess roughly what it is. Visit www.jmoon.co.uk and click on ‘Downloads’ for a single sheet of A4. Then either hand it out at the next presentation or tuck it into the front cover of the next information pack you hand out.
You are unlikely to have seen a business book like this. How many business books have you seen with whole chapters on alternatives to bullet points or better organisation charts or making comparisons(!) or document design?
And because it’s different, here are some pointers about what to expect – the good news and bad news (well, more like minor qualifiers actually): Finally, note the following:
| Its ideas are easy to understand | But you will need your brain in gear more for some bits. In particular, the chapters on ‘tables’ and ‘graphs’ have a lot of detailed ideas to absorb. |
| It’s good sense | But please don’t dismiss it as common sense. If the tips were common sense, we would all be following them. Few people do. |
| Collectively, its tips will improve your work hugely | But individually, many will only make a small difference. This book is a few big ideas and hundreds of small ones. |
| It will improve most of your documents | But it won’t help annual reports much. A lot of their layout is prescribed by accountants and cannot be changed. As for format, business expects a particular style for annual reports, regardless of its rights or wrongs. That’s why most annual reports contain presentational gimmicks and charts which hinder clarity, not help it. Chapter 2 explains more. |
| It will help readers understand your points more quickly | But it won’t help readers that refuse to engage. Some people just don’t make an effort to read something even if it is simple and clear. When people are confused, sometimes it’s their fault, not the information’s. Also, think of your audience and their personal preferences. I once worked for someone who hated decision trees, so even if a decision tree was ideal for what I was doing, I wouldn’t do one. |
| It covers most things in reports and slides | But it doesn’t cover everything, e.g. flowcharts and other useful but rarer ways to clarify, such as isobars and scattergrams. Also, it doesn’t have specific sections on writing or communicating. I did write chapters on each, but there wasn’t room for them. Anyway, both topics are well trodden paths — there’s numerous books on them already, should you wish to find out more. |
Finally, note the following:
After having read this book, you may wish to redo your templates or apply some of the ideas to a note you are doing. In which case, visit www.pearsonbooks.com/impact or www.jmoon.co.uk/downloads; they have examples from this book that you can download. If you’re trying to get a table or graph or whatever to look like one in this book, check the websites – it might be there, along with annotations and explanations. If it is, download it and adopt and adapt. Getting reports and slides ready on time is tough enough already. Hopefully, these downloads will help you more quickly benefit from the ideas in this book.
As it is, some of this book improves your work and saves time. If unsure how best to do something, you experiment – and often still fail to get it right. If you know how to do something, you go straight to the answer. You quickly get it right, rather than slowly get it wrong. Also, when preparing big documents, much time is wasted chasing people for information they forgot to include in the first draft. As you’ll see, there’s a neat by-product to some ideas in this book – they help you get complete answers first time.
If I’m honest, though, other ideas will create extra work. But the extra time is often a fraction of the time spent up until then. Maybe you’re working on a client pitch or a big investment proposal. Whatever it is, you’ve already spent a long time getting the words and numbers to the final stage, and the extra time created by the ideas in this book is a drop in the ocean. It’s such a waste to do all that work, only then to present it badly.
But with a bit of extra effort, it could have been so much clearer and had so much more impact. Yes, it is quicker to click robotically on the Excel Graph Wizard, but to do something that has impact often can take a little bit longer.
It doesn’t matter whether you are in sales, marketing, strategy, communications, finance, IT, HR, compliance or on the board – every part of business wants to present information in a way that influences, informs, impresses and has impact. They all want to get results.
This topic is relevant for all levels of seniority in business. I have given my courses and talks to executive boards at group conferences and away-days, to secretaries, to MBA classes at business schools, to senior civil servants. It’s not just for those that prepare the information or decide what goes into the reports and slides, it’s also for those that review them all. If that’s you, you’ll realise how you can demand so much more from those that send you bad reports and show you bad slides. You no longer need to waste hours on unclear work.
The glib cliché is ‘information is power’. So, people deduce, if they’ve got the information, then that’s enough, they reckon they’ve got the power. But they haven’t if that information is confusing and has no impact.
I would like to rephrase the cliché and say ‘impact is power’. Information without impact is useless – and clarity is how to give impact to your information. Don’t strive for information. Strive for impact and clarity.
Finally, I will borrow a phrase from a great book I mention later. It’s by Robin Williams – the female designer, not the actor. She says: ‘I guarantee you will never look at a page in the same way.’ You might not like or agree with everything in this book (I hope you like and agree with most) but one thing is certain: after reading it, I guarantee you will never look at a table, bullet point, slide, graph, note, report or information pack in the same way.