“Say It Like a Normal Person”

I facilitated a team’s strategy retreat a couple weeks ago in which we did a series of exercises to articulate what their product needed to win in the market and to prioritize the product features accordingly.

During those exercises, I kept urging the team to "say it like a normal person." That became a running joke, especially when, as the facilitator, I gave unclear instructions. 

But here’s why I kept harping on that point:

1) Using normal language encourages an external orientation.

Because most people’s day-to-day interactions are with others inside of their organization, it’s easy to have an internal orientation. We spend most of our time explaining features in language the engineers use, explaining to our bosses how we’re navigating the company’s processes, or convincing the lawyers that what we want to do fits with regulations. 

None of that is the language of how customers think about the product. 

For example, we might talk internally about an effort to “create a 2-click sign up process.” On the face of it, that intent seems clear, but it’ll also surely drive an opinion-oriented debate. 

The engineers might say, “It’s easier if we can split it across a few pages. How important is 2 clicks?” 

Or the lawyers might say, “We want to make sure the customer reads the terms and conditions clearly, so we can’t do 2 clicks.” 

However, if we stated the intent with an external lens—e.g., “redesign the sign-up process so that the customer believes it’s as fast and easy as the competing options”—then the objective function is much clearer. And instead of an opinionated debate on 2 clicks versus 3 or 4, the various teams can discuss the tradeoffs and get data on how best to achieve the intended impact.  

2) Saying it like a normal person often leads to greater strategic clarity.

In the example above, “redesign the sign up process so that the customer believes it’s as fast and easy as the competing options” contains strategically meaningful assumptions—e.g., that “fast and easy” is important to customers’ decisions, and that customers don’t find the process to be fast and easy today. 

Those assumptions are testable, which can lead to better decision-making! 

Perhaps the sign-up process is good enough already. Perhaps making it too fast makes it seem trivial, so it’s actually better to get more information during  that step.

In the conversation from a couple of weeks ago, this came up in a discussion about whether “brand” mattered. But when trying to restate it using normal people’s language, it became, essentially, “Customers want to know they’re getting a fair deal, and our brand already signals that to them.”

It takes a few more words to articulate that, but it makes a big difference in the work that will follow (in this case, little work at all).

3) Saying it like a normal person helps avoid shorthand, which helps with clarity even in internal conversations.

For the businesspeople among us, the reference to “brand” seems like normal language. But that’s far from the case! 

First, most people don’t actively think about a company’s brand at all. We might have an impression of, say, McDonald’s, given their commercials and our experiences with them, but few of us would describe their brand in the same terms that the company’s marketers would.  

Second, “brand” can have different meanings to internal audiences. For example, I’m currently working with an organization in which the previous leaders talked about improving the brand in terms of the logo and website design, whereas the current leaders think about improving the brand in terms of its reputation with external stakeholders and potential employees. Using the shorthand is thus confusing! 

During the strategy retreat, new people on the team would sometimes ask, "what does that mean?" This usually happened when their colleagues were using internally-relevant shorthand terms and acronyms, forgetting that those might not be common language.

Elon Musk once wrote an email to Tesla employees about why acronyms hinder the ability to communicate within the organization. He wrote: “Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time, the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. [...] No one can actually remember all these acronyms, and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.”

So in all these dimensions, forcing ourselves to abandon jargon and embrace normal talk will create more impactful communication. 

Leadership Wisdom

“To a CEO, ‘maximizing shareholder value’ may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not. To a physicist, probability clouds are fascinating phenomena. To a child, they are incomprehensible.”

— Chip and Dan Heath, in Made to Stick