The cost of waffle

In the battle for people’s attention, why do we waffle?

🔆 Did we run out of time to read and edit?

🔆 Do we think more words sound smarter, clever, impressive?

🔆 Do we feel our idea or content is ‘weak’ and so more words might bolster it?

Waffle, jargon and filler is wasteful. Visually in a report or document, it looks like too much hard work to read. Our eyes tire and our brains are exhausted from working through slabs of wordy text.

Long sentences lose people.

If it’s too much hard work, your audience will go into cognitive overload and they'll distract (or rescue) themselves, looking away, disengaging and disconnecting. Keep it clear, clean, as many words as needed. No filler.

Q: What does wordy waffle do to you?

The cost of leaving the room

What’s the cost to your attention and cognitive load when you leave a meeting room, to step outside to take or make a call?

If we knew, we may think twice about even looking at our devices or having them near us.

Breaks are good, yes, and responding to an emergency, we have to.

But ‘just stepping out for a moment’ creates ‘Swiss cheese moments'. That yummy cheese has holes in it. So will your sense, the threads of understanding you’ve been holding together!

It’s not only that you miss content when you leave, it’s the switch of context and the impact on your attention, thinking and focus.

- A leader stepped out of a one-day workshop six times last week.

- Another leader thought they could be in 2 meetings at once: one via a webinar/online coming in through a single ear pod, but sitting at the table of the other meeting they’re trying to attend.

No wonder why:

😩we struggle to make sense and manage information overload

↩️ we need to go over information again and again, and

🐢why meetings take so long!

The cost of overwhelm

When it hits you, that information overload feeling, what do you do? Panic? Get a coffee? Look at your phone?

None of these are helpful.

The feeling of overload, that ‘full sponge’ feeling isn’t pleasant.

Disengagement, distraction and withdrawal are all behaviours connected with information overload.

We try to cope. How often do we nod to say we understand something or have the information in hand, but in reality we're scrambling to catch up, struggling to stay awake or fed up with feigning interest?

Could it be career limiting if we don’t appear smart, sharp and “all over it”, having all the information under our control?

Enough.

It’s time to call out when something doesn’t make sense or the pace, quantity or style of information is overwhelming us.

It’s most likely overwhelming others too. We have a responsibility as communicators of information to guard against information overload in ourselves, and creating overwhelm for others.

We don’t need to suffer. Cognitive load coping is very much a skill for today....and the future.

The cost of confusion

How much time do we spend trying to make sense of things, re-reading, scanning, skipping through information trying to piece it all together.

While the world’s productivity gurus are keen on selling us a new app or habit, what if we looked at the cost of confusion and sought to reduce the time we spend confusing people.

Rather than acting like we’ve got it together, what if we set aside a few minutes in a meeting to make sense? What if, instead of saying ’Now, let me give you some context’ and embarking on a 15-minute explanation of the history going back to the 1900s (yes this happened recently) we asked, ‘What do you need to make sense of?’

What if we shut up first.

What if we asked them about the parts they need to make sense of.

Imagine all the unnecessary detail, the overly long ‘context’ monologues and the long-winded ‘let-me-tell-you-about-the-history-of-this-thing’ stories.

Check first. What do they need? Where is their knowledge now; where does it need to be? Don't add to the overload; make sense instead.

Q: What’s a topic you’re confused about right now? 

Explore the depths

I'm posting on thinking and sensemaking skills - so far, we've

✅Clarified the context

✅Traversed the breadth and now...

⬇️ Explore the depths.

With big picture knowledge of 'why' a topic, and an idea of the breadth of the topic, you can go on in and dive dive dive!

Where would you dive in? If you're on a train from say, London to Paris, would you get off at one of the stations along the track, or continue to the end of the line?

We can dilute our sensemaking efforts by time-wasting non-sense making! It's when we dart from here to there, back to that, up to there and then back again! It's hard work when we don't know the context and haven't seen the breadth of a topic. It overwhelms us because it takes brain-processing energy to keep making sense of where we are again and again. It's like how a GPS freaks out when you don't follow the suggested route. It displays the 'recalculating route' message.

We repeatedly have to do this when things don't make sense.

Context. Then breadth. Now depth.

Q: Do you like diving into the details?