CRA Inc

Presenting Visual Data—Intelligently

For those of you who struggle to create unique, interesting presentations, we’ve talked a lot about presentation design (see here and here). The basics: each presentation’s content should be inherently interesting or important to your audience. Also, your audience’s information needs should dictate your presentation’s content.However, engaging audiences with your presentations often requires one more element: an interesting visual data display. Here’s the rub: you’ll likely think your data sets, by virtue of findings, are meaningful. But consider your audience’s understanding of complex ideas or messages. For example, many business-oriented presentations endlessly cite statistics, ROI, growth, and more to prove the value of projects or initiatives. But to most audience members, even basic percentages, currencies (foreign or domestic), and raw numbers aren’t meaningful without bases for comparison.

That’s where visual data becomes important. And I’m not talking about PowerPoint’s extensive selection of clipart. Pretty pictures simply aren’t valuable if they don’t speak 1,000 words—at least. You have a limited amount of time to make your points, and visuals should help you make them. Consider this: if your visuals are meaningless to your audience, you might as well put together a 12-page position paper and post it to your Intranet.

Also, your audience should have no questions about why you choose any single example or illustration in a presentation. Visuals should make difficult points clear, and illustrate your strategic messages in ways words simply can’t.

We’ve extolled Edward Tufte for his data design genius, but a number of great resources are available. One in particular, IBM’s Many Eyes, provides a website where you can load nearly any kind of data, choose a format for display, and the result? A simple, visually appealing way to display numbers, percentages, ratios, etc. The site will help you to add texture to simple, bivariate data, as well as lengthy spreadsheets’ worth. Granted, you may need to understand data analysis to use this site effectively, but it’s worth a look when you’re building presentations… Check out some examples here.

No matter what kind of resource you choose, be sure to think through your visual presentations. Treat them as what they are: crucial opportunities to reach your most important stakeholders. Done well, these assemblies will help build awareness of your strategic messages, while intelligently-presented data will drive critical messages home.

Reverse the curse of knowledge

Internal communicators are all too familiar with business buzz words—shareholder value, excellence, compassion—intended to engage employees. On the contrary, organizational strategy is often unclear to employees who don’t understand how their work fits into the mission. A Harvard Business Review piece (subscription required) explains that the “sweeping, general language” used in many organizational strategies and missions disconnects executives from staff. Authors and brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, explain this phenomenon as “The Curse of Knowledge” and offer the following definition:

Top executives have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads. But frontline employees, who aren’t privy to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. As a result, the strategies being touted don’t stick (HBR, December 2006).

To reverse the “curse,” Heath and Heath suggest making strategic messages sticky. Sticky messages are relevant and clear to staff, and encourage them to (1) remember what they learn about their organization’s mission, and (2) carry out that mission daily.

This is consistent with what we advise our clients. Perhaps more simply put, all strategic messages must be:

1. Universal
2. Simple
3. Broad
4. Actionable
5. Accurate
6. Explanatory of what you’re doing and why 

The challenge, then, is how else you can increase stickiness. Like the Heath article, a chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (which we recommend highly) identifies ways to do just this. For illustration, Gladwell presents two empirical studies of some of the least sophisticated, least biased audiences: preschoolers. From those studies, Gladwell highlights that people pay attention, and subsequently learn, when they understand the messages they hear and see. Taken together, Heaths’ and Gladwell’s arguments make a point that all employees echo: organizational strategies should appeal to common sense.

So how can you reverse the curse of knowledge? You can read more on sticky messages here, and consider these final tips. First, give people concrete language—even if it seems overly simplified. For example, “raising the value of our stock” is more concrete than the ubiquitous “creating value.” Next, the component parts of an organization’s strategy should be intuitive. Anyone can understand a phrase like, “Satisfy our customers’ needs.” The ways staff can satisfy their customers, of course, can be more complex and specific to each department or role. And finally, construct memorable stories that illustrate your organization’s values in action. Base the stories on what’s familiar—using well-known parables or examples of your staff doing great work—which will help eliminate business-speak, and create usable context for your staff.

The Crystal Ball Post-Mortem

As part of my 2007 reading regimen I’m working through Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which is a fantastic if slightly academic text on how people make decisions—especially in time-compressed, high-risk situations. In the book I came across something that strikes me as a practical and powerful tool to use as you prepare for important communication events (be they an important speech, presentation to the board, or a face-to-face with the CEO). Klein calls it a “Pre-Mortem” strategy, and it’s a means of identifying assumptions and mitigating risk. The original approach comes from Choen, Freeman, and Thompson’s “Crystal Ball” method (PDF), which the US military uses in war game exercises. The Crystal Ball method goes like this:

• Select a critical assessment, no matter how confident you are that it is true (e.g., that the enemy will cross the river at point X).
• Imagine that a perfect intelligence source, such as a crystal ball, tells you that this assessment is wrong.
• Explain how this assessment could be wrong.
• The crystal ball now tells you that your explanation is wrong and sends you back to step 3.

The Pre-Mortem is a slight variation on this: After laying out a plan, look several months into the future and assume the plan has failed. The task is to explain why. The idea is to break the emotional attachment to the plan, and turn your creativity and experience toward identifying its flaws and opportunities for breakdown. These are contingencies to revise the plan against, making the plan as a whole stronger (and your or your team’s view of the plan more realistic).

Here’s why it’s important: The research shows that people tend to “fall in love” with their own plans. We lend them more credibility than they deserve, especially if we are not highly experienced in the area and do not have a good sense of what’s typical. As a result, we tend to underestimate risks and be under-prepared for contingencies.

In our work with leaders and communication professionals we’ve taken a similar approach for years, building what we call a “Risk Mitigation Checklist” for any significant communication event. It’s the list of all the things we know can introduce significant risk into a communication, all other things being equal. A small example might be “Test the TelePrompTer equipment” before a speech; a more significant example might be “Brief the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors about any change to the capital budget” for a multi-million dollar technology initiative.

We arrive at the items for the Risk Mitigation Checklist through our experience. The issue is that with the communication opportunities or problems you face day-to-day, you don’t (and shouldn’t) have us by your side to identify problems in the plan and craft contingencies. So here’s what you should do: Before your next important communication, project several months into the future and assume the thing failed—miserably. Then explain why it failed, and come up with as many explanations for failure as you can. Then work alone or with your communication staff to resolve those failure points in the design of the message and plan.

We have an adage at CRA that is one of the first things we tell a new employee, regardless of their level or experience: “Plan for the worst, expect the best. Find the worst thing that can happen, and eliminate it. Repeat.” It’s served us well for years, and I think the Crystal Ball / Post-Mortem method is a great little tactic to keep in your back pocket while you communicate as a leader.

Are you guilty?

I posted some PowerPoint advice a couple of months ago, but then just last week I found the chart below that might help to bring the point home even more.

Look here for additional information about how you can avert death by PowerPoint and here for more reasons why you should rely on yourself as the message and not the tool as your message.

How to combat a culture of excuses and promote accountability

Whether the goal is elevating employee performance, SOX compliance, strategic alignment, spurring innovation, or something else, leaders earn their keep by creating the conditions of accountability in their organization.

What conditions lead to accountability? Our research has shown time and again that most people in organizations will be accountable—that is, they will do what’s needed and expected—to the extent to which…

• Expectations are clear to employees.
• Employees perceive that those expectations are credible and reasonable.
• Employees anticipate that positive consequences will follow performance.
• Employees anticipate that negative consequences will follow poor performance.

Strategy & Leadership has just published an article that elaborates our Accountability Model, highlights from our research the factors that most frequently promote and inhibit accountability, and provides a case study of how we helped one organization assess and address its accountability problems.

You can download the complete article, “How to combat a culture of excuses and promote accountability,” here.

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Getting the Goods: Ten Tips for Interviewing Effectively

As noted in the post, Managing the survey process, researchers must be mindful of the methodology we use to gather data. While a survey containing closed-ended belief statements make it easy to gather input from many people in a timely manner, interviewing allows us to delve deeper, examining the nuances of an organization’s culture and providing context for our work. As the author of InterViews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing notes, “[Interviewing] goes beyond mere fact gathering and attempts to construct meaning and interpretation in the context of conversation.” 

If you’ve decided that the right methodology for your project is an interview-based approach, you’ll need to be prepared. After you’ve chosen your sample of participants and designed the interview guide, you can use the following interviewing tips to help make the most of your data. 

1. Ask questions that require descriptive answers. Start with “Why, how, where, what kind of . . .” 
2. Make the interview conversational. Don’t worry if you haven’t specifically asked each and every question in the order that it appears in the guide. Focus on getting good and useful data. 
3. Encourage participants to share – don’t commiserate. Avoid telling your “story.” Rather, listen to what the participant has to say and encourage them to share. When they do share, try not to bias the interview by commiserating with them. 
4. Ask about what others would say or do. For example, “What do you think are the perceptions of others in your group?” Or, if you think someone is holding back… “It may not surprise you to hear that other people feel X. Do you know people with this perception?” 
5. Let a good story be told. Don’t interrupt because you have thought of a question or because the participant is straying from the outline. If the information is pertinent, jot down your question so you will remember to ask it later. 
6. Stick to the topic. If the participant strays into irrelevant subjects, try to pull him/her back as quickly as possible. Example: “Before we move on, I’d like to find out . . .” 
7. Listen for inconsistencies. Probe to uncover detail and determine reality. 
8. Probe early and often. Some examples you might use:
• Would you explain that further?
• Can you say more?
• Why do you say that?
• How often does that happen?
• Is that the norm / usual practice?
• I’d like to hear more about this
• What’s your assessment of how this came about?
• Can you give me an example? 
9. Pause to probe. Don’t let periods of silence fluster you. Give the person a chance to think of what he/she wants to add before you move into the next question. 
10. Recap throughout. By doing this after each section, you will help to clarify thoughts and make sure that you’ve captured the intended messages.

(Source: Kvale, Steiner (1996). InterViews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.) 

The Power of Upward Feedback

I drove to the Toledo airport Friday evening amidst a flurry of NPR commentary about Scooter Libby’s indictment and Harriet Mier’s stepping down (gotta love All Things Considered). At the end of the segment, Bob Siegel made an interesting point…and one that many of us make almost every day: One of the most out of touch people in any organization (if not the most) is the person at the top.
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Managing the survey process

Gathering data from employees and stakeholders (both internal and external) helps us make smarter decisions. But if we want our audiences to continue responding to our surveys and to take our improvement efforts seriously, we need to make sure that all data-gathering efforts:

* Reflect the Right Methodology (the right sample, questions, data collection method, and analyses)
* Send the Right Messages�implicitly and explicitly, to the respondents whose perceptions we�re trying to improve
* Have the Right Follow-through Strategy (we know how we�re going to translate the data into action)

Here are some questions you may want to ask before deploying a survey.
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Embracing Instant Messaging

It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about the backlash from messaging.

Not anymore.

According to a recent article on CNET, “Businesses are getting the (instant) message.” While some companies have locked down their systems to prevent personal IM use, many companies (including those) have implemented enterprise-specific applications for employee communication. It seems that financial industry is one of the first to take hold as a group:

“If you don’t have IM in this business, you’re not there,” says Sal Morreale, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. “I tend to have 10 or 11 IM windows open at a time.”

Organizations face obvious challenges, too. Go here to read the CNET article…it outlines the cons, as well as pros, to implementing IM.

Radio Shows, Cocktail Parties, & The Encyclopedia

Earlier today I took a call to help a client think through how they could use message boards and blogs to manage and disseminate competitive intelligence among their employees (+/- 10,000 folks, globally distributed). In doing so, I sprung wikis on them � a tool with which they (like many people) were unfamiliar.

Here�s how I described the three tools:

* Message boards are like cocktail parties. Walk in, poke around, start a conversation about nearly anything with nearly anyone. Of course, like a cocktail party, you miss a lot, and finding the conversation you want can be difficult.

* Blogs are like radio shows. Get one or more passionate experts together, give them the mic, and let them go. The audience may be hundreds of thousands, and they�ll vacuum up the content as long as it�s relevant. And if they want to engage, they can call in and be part of the conversation (through comment threads). What�s more, the broadcasters will talk about what each other is saying, and in doing so, drive the discourse along.

* Wikis are like encyclopedias. Or archives. Or a filing cabinet. They�re where the reference documents go. You don�t know you need it until you look for it, but with a simple search what you�re looking for rises to the top. What�s more, the material is in pencil, not ink, so the people before and after you can improve the article as they see fit, making it more and more robust over time, and adding any articles they think should be part of the reference set along the way.

In this schema, my suggestion was:

* Find 10 or 20 opinion leaders in the company who are passionate about competitive intelligence. Give them each a blog, or let them all contribute to one blog, and let them start broadcasting. Don�t worry about the ones that don�t post often or do a poor job � the best will rise to the top and the audience will read the best.

* Set up a wiki to which all 10,000 of the employees in the audience can create and update topics related to individual competitors and matters of competitive intelligence. Link to it from the blog / blogs, and encourage the opinion leaders to archive their wisdom there as they see fit.

* Create a message board just for the heck of it. Use it as a �tip line� where any of the 10,000 employees can start, join, or eavesdrop on a conversation about competitive intelligence. Have the bloggers prowl the message boards for things worth broadcasting, and when you find stuff that�s worth keeping, archive it in the wiki.

That was my thumbnail take. I�ll add to it this article from CommonCraft (a very strong blog by Social Design Consultant Lee LeFever that�s worth a regular read, by the way; tip of the hat to CorporateBlogging.info, and tip of the hat for it to CommEcon � see how this �blogs linking to blogs� thing works?) about how blogs and wikis can interrelate. It�s consistent with my thumbnail, and goes to the next level of granularity.