When I was a boy, my father used to tell a joke about a man who found himself in prison. (To be sure, the peaceful sort of prisons in 1950’s-era black-and-white American films.) A recent meeting brought it back to mind. So… first the joke… and then the linkage to work.
On a man's first night in prison, he is in his bunk after “lights out” when he hears “NUMBER 6!” called out loudly into the quiet cellblock. Several hundred prisoners promptly erupt in laughter.
After quiet returns, another voice calls out “NUMBER 12!”. And is answered by enthusiastic laughter.
“What’s going on?” asks the new prisoner. “Well,” says his cellmate, “We’ve all been in here so long that we just tell the jokes by number, rather than telling the whole joke."
So the new prisoner asks if he can try it out. “Be my guest,” says the cellmate with a smile.
When there is a gap, the new prisoner yells out, “NUMBER 13!”. Dead silence.
“What happened?” he asks, “Wasn’t that joke funny?”
“Hmm…” said the cellmate, “Sometimes, it’s not the joke, it’s how you tell it."
This joke is a play on the shorthand enabled by familiarity and shared context. Good friends do the same thing. “Hey, we’ll both be in London this Friday, let’s meet at that pub in that passageway southeast of Trafalgar… the same one where we met after we signed that one big deal in 2013." Without shared context, this is largely a nonsense statement.
Now let’s link this to work…
I was recently in Hong Kong, where we’re working on a big software delivery. Around a conference table, our technical experts were working with client business experts, driving toward shared understanding. By my count, we had people from four countries, so clarity in communication was paramount.
At one point in the discussion, one of our technical experts was wrapping up a comprehensive discussion of the algorithm/process the system used to complete a particular business requirement. Looking around the table, I could tell that everyone had almost followed him.
There was a pause as the client team absorbed what our experts had said and contemplated their next statement.
And I shocked the room as I turned back to our expert and said: “That was great… Now please do the explanation again… but with no pronouns."
Shock from the technical expert. Confused looks all around the table… except for a wry grin from my Australian colleague. And so I continued… smiling broadly so everyone could tell my intent, which was to drive clarity… with a dash of hilarity.
“Right… That was great… please do it again… but with no pronouns… don’t say the word ‘it’, ‘that’, ‘this’… just call a thing by its name when you refer to it. This way, everyone knows what you have in your head."
Still… a lot of odd looks… and a little tension. For this is clearly a very odd request to make. Time to relax everyone. So, I told a variant of the aforementioned London pub story. (Which drew a bit of a laugh.)
And so our technical expert took a deep breath and restarted from the beginning. There were a couple of false starts as he caught himself letting a pronoun slip in to his sentences But then he gained momentum. And the wave of understanding in the room was clear.
Most interesting: not only was his explanation better, but the questions that he received were better. Proving that one really does need to know something to ask a good question.
So, the next time that you find yourself in the situation of needing to explain something complex, try the trick of banning pronouns from your explanation and see what happens. And no, you don’t need to tell either of those two jokes as a warmup.
