171: Brevity = Critical with Joe McCormack

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Joe McCormack
It’s great to join you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, among the many fun facts in your life, I’m intrigued by you’ve got nine kids. Did that have something to do with your philosophy on brevity?

Joe McCormack
I wish that it did. No, truth be told, I have a saying which is like there’s a time and a place for long conversation and those are the long conversations that I really enjoy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s nice. That’s good. So there’s no emphasis on brevity there. You’re just enjoying the ride.

Joe McCormack
Yeah, when I was writing the book a few years back and my kids got wind of it they immediately latched onto they wanted to give it to their teachers. Well, if you want your grade point average to drop, you can certainly suggest it to them. It does become a topic of conversations a ton of the time. I have in our family kind of time of dinner to talk about like the highs and lows of your days which it’s a really nice way, at the end of the day, at dinner to get the brief update from everybody what was going on in their lives so that’s a little trick that we use which has been really popular.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is good. I like that when I’m facilitating sort of workshops or leadership things. It feels good. You feel like you have a sense for what people are going through right now.

Joe McCormack
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you start us off by sharing a little bit about you’ve got a motto which is, sure enough rather brief, “Be better, be brief?” Can you, I guess, elaborate on that?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, when it comes to brevity I always think that it’s something that you could always be better at. It’s not something that you’re ever like, “Oh, I’m good at that.” There’s always areas of improvement. So the call to action is strive to be better at it, and you’re never going to achieve complete mastery and it just keeps you always getting more and more in tuned, more and more precise, more concise in the way you communicate.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so in terms of if you never will achieve complete mastery, it sounds like then you’ve got a clear definition of what you mean by brief. Could you share that with us?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, people misinterpret brief to just being concise or blunt, and it’s really missing the mark. I define being brief as being about between being clear and then being concise. So the first thing, the most important is to be clear so that you’re understood, and then concise meaning you’re trimming where other things that people just really don’t need.

So if something could take a half hour to explain, and you can explain it in 20 minutes that you’re trimming off that extra 10 minutes, so that’s the working definition of the balance of clear and concise is what I define brief to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So can you maybe lay out for us, do you have some of the top sort of advantages or benefits associated with having this brevity? Like why is it so critical?

Joe McCormack
It’s really important now because it’s really not about the person speaking or communicating, it’s really about the person listening and absorbing. The world, nowadays, I think everybody feels this, is that we’re reaching a point of hyper-saturation where we’re consuming so much information on a day-to-day basis that it’s almost like you’re consuming everything but you’re retaining nothing.

And I liken it to people are becoming a little bit deaf or certainly hard of hearing. So brevity is like an adaptive strategy because people just can’t focus. They don’t know what the important things to focus on so they’re just consuming information but they don’t necessarily focus or know how to focus on what’s most important.

So when people are communicating, like to their boss, or they’re talking to a customer, or they’re giving an update with a key client, they just start talking. And then the person is like hearing every third word because they have trouble with focus. So it really is an adaptive strategy to help people focus more in an information age.

Pete Mockaitis
So you’re saying just by practicing being brief ourselves we’ll also increase our capacity to focus.

Joe McCormack
Yeah, really what you’re doing is you’re making it a point to focus yourself on the most important things and then the people that you’re talking to to do the same. One of the things that when people, when you think about, the way people are educated, whether it’s in high school, college, grad school, you’re not really trained to be brief.

Legal briefs or things that are mottos, but the art of brevity is something which you just are expected to be good at but you’re actually not formally taught, and there’s a lot of discipline that takes to be good at this because the impulse is to kind of share your knowledge which certainly is important.

But the world is just starving for people that can kind of get to the point and then frame things which are complex in simple ways, make things really pointed and easy and organized and flow so it’s easy for people to follow along when, honestly, a lot of other things that are competing for their attention at the same time and you’re not the only one that people are listening to at that point.

So it becomes a really important skill, an essential skill really for professionals to achieve the goals that they want to achieve.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. So can you maybe give us a little bit fuller background there? Now, The Brief Lab, I understand you started that out of work with a curriculum for the US Army Special Operations Command. Can you tell us about some of your findings in putting that together and working with them?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, about five or six years ago I started a consulting company in Chicago and then at it for a number of years, and really my mantra at the time or my work was to help executive teams develop and deliver a very concise message or clear message so it’s corporate narratives and things like that. And out of the blue I get a call from the leaders of Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and they said, “We want you to develop a curriculum for us.”

And at the time I wasn’t doing any leadership development or training certainly so I was doing consultant work, “Really, we understand that but we really need our people to be more precise when they’re communicating and make their briefings,” because that’s what they communicate in the Army, “and to make these briefings brief.”

So I went down there and I developed a curriculum, an experiential curriculum that would really help them take at times ridiculously complicated and lengthy topics and shrink them down into like three- to five-minute briefs where they would be able to go to high levels of State Department or Department of Defense and be able to brief people in significantly less time. And that was something that they really were keen on doing and I was in the right place at the right time and I developed that curriculum for them. The book became the byproduct of that work with them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. Well, so then can you maybe open us up and share a little bit about kind of the challenges, the hang-ups that prevent things from getting brief? You have some nice little literation starting with the letter I information, inundation, et cetera. Can you walk through a bit of that?

Joe McCormack
I think one of the key things for people when they think about learning how to be better, this is the recognition that there’s a temptation to say everything. And you have to create a system for how to organize information which makes it easier for people to follow along. So we developed a system which are BRIEF maps. They’re visual outlines and they follow a formula where each of the letters BRIEF spell a certain part of the message.

So the first, B, is like, “Okay, what’s the background?” Oftentimes you need context. In the absence of context people get confused easily. “So give me a little bit of context.” And then the R which stands for the reason, “Well, why are you telling me this right now? Why is this important? Why should I care?” The I is sort of like, “What is the information or the instruction or the insight, maybe the body of the information that you’re giving them?”

The E stands for the ending which is often the hardest part. People get on a roll and they don’t know how to end, and they talk right through their ending and they start a new beginning and then the whole thing goes sideways. And then the F stands for a follow-up or follow-on which is, “What do you want the audience to do once you’re done? Do you want them to ask a question? Do you want them to make a decision? Would you like them to do more research? Like what is the expected outcome? How do you know if you were clear?”

So we make that the system and we lay it out on our mind map or visual outline so the people have a way of presenting the information or sharing it that makes it very easy to consume so it’s a method of preparation which becomes very, very effective for taking mounds of information and putting it into a format that’s easy for people to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, now, when you say ending, can you share a little bit there? It’s like you just want to have thought through in advance, “What’s the end? When am I done?”

Joe McCormack
Yeah, think of it when you go to a comedy club or you listen to a good joke. You know that you’re done when you hit the punch line and at the end of the joke people laugh because that’s the whole point, right? Like it’s leading you somewhere. One of the keys of being brief isn’t saying nothing, it’s being clear and concise but it really is you’ve got to be clear when you stop talking so somebody could start talking to respond.

And I say that when people get good at this it actually starts conversations because people can respond or ask a question or lean in a bit, and the ending and the absence of a good ending people just hog the mic full-time and that’s never good. You always want it to be balanced where people are in conversations and they have a chance to ask a question or respond or tell you what they’re thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I understand what you’re saying now. I have had those encounters in which someone just sort of stops talking and it’s unclear, and it’s like, “Is that the end or you’re just breathing right now?”

Joe McCormack
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so what are some of the maybe indicators or tricks or best practices for ending? I think part of it, I think, is just intonation. Like sometimes that alone could say, “I’m done,” or, “Thank you.” What are some other approaches?

Joe McCormack
I think one of the things is just finish the thought that would require or might prompt a response.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Joe McCormack
And the best conversations people do this so it’s nothing new but it’s something that people overlook because they’re not aware of, “Hey, there’s two people talking here,” or, “I’m sending this email and I’m writing it but how are they going to respond to it?” So the ending is the prompt for response. One of them is, “So what do you think?” or, “Give me questions,” or you think of some way of phrasing it where a person would be able to have a role of responding and make it respectful for them. So it’s like, “Hey, listen, my intention is to have this conversation not have it be kind of monologuing.” I think a lot of people miss that.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Very nice. And so now I’m thinking, it’s funny, I’m just in a meeting agenda recently, and there were times in which it felt like some segments of the agenda were just sort of informing, like, “This is something that happened. This is something that you should know.” And so how do you think about that when it comes to meetings, agendas and informing?

Joe McCormack
Well, most people who go onto meetings and their agendas are broken, that people haven’t done the preparation in advance about the meeting itself and who’s there and what are they going to discuss. It’s usually very broken or at least it’s not prepared well. If it’s going to be an information exchange, that’s fine. If it’s going to be conversation, you need to set some rules.

I’ve even seen people use things like talking sticks where if you’ve got a bunch of people in a room. Spread the time out so nobody dominates the conversation is one trick I’ve seen as pretty effective. But having a good printed agenda, like, “Okay, this is what we’re talking about. This is why we need to talk about it. Here are the things we’re going to talk about,” to put some lanes to it so you’d know if you’ve gone off the highway. And I think, oftentimes, Pete, those agendas are just absent or, if nothing else, they’re not well designed for really good conversations to ensue. Information is just your point.

Pete Mockaitis
So you’re saying that the meeting agenda itself will kind of cover off each of those components of BRIEF.

Joe McCormack
Yeah, if you think about getting people, “Okay, what’s the meeting about?” That’s the first thing. So in this BRIEF map that we’ve designed is like that will be the center box. And then is there any background that people needed to know before the meeting that may be pre-read. The relevance, “Why are we meeting? Why is it important we do this now?” That needs to be clearly stated. “What’s the information or the exchange that needs to be covered?” some topics for discussion. And then the ending, “What do we need to end it by?” And then some follow-up.

I think in the absence of that, there’s no formula for it so people just, they mistake talking for exchanging information but there’s no structure to it. So the thing can be, you’re hearing people talk but it’s like it’s not leading to insight or action. And, obviously, the best meetings are the ones that are going to produce traction and progress.

Everybody has experienced this, when you sit in rooms and you’re saying everything but nothing is actually moving anything forward. Those questions, that preparation a lot of times doesn’t even been done.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Can you maybe give us an example sort of make this all come to life in terms of before, not so brief, not so great, and after, something that you’ve been involved with?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, I think one of the mistakes that people make when they go to meetings is they kind of roundup, “We’ll have a meeting for half hour,” or, “We’ll start for an hour.” That’s the first mistake is allotting yourself sort of a chunk of time that you’re just guessing what you need. And I had a conversation actually with one of the guys in the Special Operations community, he had a meeting. It was a very important meeting for a decision and he clearly stated it upfront like he needed a decision coming out of the meeting. But his mistake was he prepared this whole thing where he was going to end this meeting trying to convince somebody to do something and it was really wrong persuading this person to change his mind.

But he asked me to help him prepare for this meeting, and I asked him, I said, “Why are you trying to convince him? Do you know if he thinks it’s a bad idea?” And he’s like, “No, I was just assuming that I have to convince him.” And I’m like, “Well, sometimes you’re pushing at an open door. How much time are you going to spend?” And he’s like, “Well, I think it’s going to take us an hour.” And I’m like, “Why would it take you that long? Could you give him a shorter summary upfront and do it that way?”

So I actually met with him a couple of weeks ago. We have an office down in Pinehurst, North Carolina. We have one in Chicago, a Brief Lab in North Carolina, and one in Chicago. And I saw him a couple of weeks ago and it was like the shortest meetings I ever had, like 10 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful.

Joe McCormack
He said he talked upfront, he prepared, which is one of the things you’ll always want to do, when we talk about the tendencies of people don’t prepare. He took some time to prepare, “What am I talking about? Why is it important? What do I want to share?” He did that. He really trimmed and it took about three to four minutes. And then he just worked out the details and the thing was done in 10, maybe 15 minutes tops. And he said if he’d done it the other way that meeting would’ve been a little bit more confrontational, lasts a lot longer, he probably would gotten the ask.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Well, talk to us a little bit about the trimming process. Like what are some things that often can go or you see time and time again are shared and they don’t need to be shared?

Joe McCormack
It’s one of the hardest part, it’s trimming. Like what’s essential versus what’s less essential? So you think of it like telling somebody a story, if you think about the short version of the story you’ll tend to leave out the details that are like a little bit more color or like the dates and things that are like important but they’re not that important. So trimming is like, the way I like it is the analogy is packing a suitcase on a trip. I can’t tell you what to put in or what to leave out unless I tell you where you’re going.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Joe McCormack
So the point of what I’m communicating is the first thing it starts with, “What are you saying?” And then from that I can tell you what should stay and what should go, “And is that absolutely essential?” And I think the biggest mistake that people have is they say things that they’d like to say but that person doesn’t need to hear.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Joe McCormack
And it’s like if you’re treading water it’s like handing somebody a brick. Well, if you don’t trim it’s like handing them a cinder block. You’re like, “Well, I’m just getting it out my hands and you could figure it out.” Well, all you just did is just make them drown, and they’re already drowning. So I look at trimming as respecting, Pete, the peril of how people are just drowning in information, and we come along and we fill an already filled glass or nearly filled glass. So, out of respect, more than anything, and it’s hard to do because people can’t resist saying the extra thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you say they want to say it. I’m intrigued. Is it just because it makes them look good? Or what are those motivators? Like why do you want to say more?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, there’s a lot of different reasons. It was something that I really thought long and hard about when I was writing Brief. There’s reasons why people struggle with it. Sometimes people just get comfortable. Sometimes they get overconfident, they want to show how smart they are. Some people just lack compassion for people, it’s all about them. There’s a number of different reasons why people do this. There’s not one in particular but the common one is that they don’t necessarily respect how difficult it is for the person they’re talking to to absorb and consume what they’re saying.

It’s kind of like when you read something which is really long, and you’re like, “Why didn’t you take time to edit that down?” And there’s the famous saying which is, “I would’ve written you a shorter letter if I had more time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Joe McCormack
It takes discipline to do this. This is something that you can be very, very good at if you have discipline. If you lack discipline everything tends to be a little bit long, and that’s why the motto is “Be better, be brief,” is you can always be a little bit better when it comes to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so in executing that trimming, do you have any additional kind of guidelines? I think that’s great in terms of what’s absolutely essential, what they must hear versus where I want to say. And are there any other kind of rules of thumb or guidelines to trim well?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, I had a conversation with the Chief Creative Officer of McDonald’s, this woman is brilliant. She came up with “I’m loving it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joe McCormack
So talk about an expression of real great clarity and it says everything but it’s in very, very few words. She would tell me, when we were talking about this, about being the need to be clear and concise, that she’d go to meetings and say, “What’s the singular most important thing I need to walk away from this meeting with?” That’s one way of trimming. “So, like all the things I need to know, what do I really need to walk away with?” That’s one way of trimming.

Asking that, just being brutally honest with, “What is the audience absolutely, the most important thing that they need to know?” And then another way of looking at trimming is just imagine level of detail. Like level one detail, level two detail, level three detail. In level one detail I would define as the most essential information in the shortest explanation. So this would be like the movie trailer.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Joe McCormack
And if you do that it looks something like this, “Alright, in 30 seconds explain to me.” You give yourself a time limit, what are you going to word limit? “In 15 words or less, summarize what I’m trying to say.” And it’s funny because when I was talking to this woman at McDonald’s she said, “When people struggle with that, it’s often an indication it’s a bad idea.” It’s not a guarantee that it’s a bad idea. It’s an early indication that it’s a bad idea.

Einstein said, like, “You don’t understand something well unless you can explain it simply.” So giving yourself a word count or a time constraint is a way of ensuring it’s clear. And that rigorous trimming is a way for you to test. “If I got into an elevator, or if I got into a conversation by chance with a person and I had to sum it up, if I had a chance to prepare, what would I say?” And there’s a lot you would leave out and what you’re left is what you’ve trimmed. And that discipline to do that, for a lot of people, is what makes them stand out or makes them stand in a crowd, to speak like that or communicate like that and present.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting, I guess when I ask other people the questions along these lines to arrive at this brevity, it’s funny, I feel – I guess, I don’t know, it’s just a feeling – I feel bad because it’s like, “Oh, I’m putting you on the spot and you’re actually not ready.” But at the same time I kind of need to know the brevity in terms of what is success for this component of the agenda. And it’s sort of like I feel bad because I’ve put them on the spot and they often don’t know and often can’t deliver the brief thing that I’m asking for. And so, I don’t know, help me out. How should I cope with that?

Joe McCormack
Well, you shouldn’t feel bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you.

Joe McCormack
And your show is about how to be awesome, right? So how do you take your game to another level? I tell people, “This is an essential skill that people that are in positions of authority that make things happen are desperately looking for, and when they find it they really notice it.” And when you can deliver that, that expectation, it’s so rare. It’s a rare skill. And when people do it, Pete, the people that you want to connect with, they notice. And when you can’t they also notice.

There’s three mistakes that I found in my experience that people have that gets them in trouble. And one is they over-explain, so they tell you it’s like think of a glass that’s three quarters full, they keep on pouring when the glass reach the top.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Joe McCormack
You have to realize that your audience does not have an infinite attention span. It’s maybe 10 seconds, 30, however long they can focus, so really you have to honor that. That’s the first thing – never over-explain. The second thing is they don’t prepare enough, in that they think, “Well, it’s going to take me forever.” Something is better than nothing.

So when you ask them, “So what do you think?” They have a hard time because they haven’t prepared. You know, “Give me five minutes, give me two minutes. You just can’t show up empty-handed. You’ve got to prepare.” And the third thing is they don’t really frame up what the point is or what the point they’re trying to make or the point of view is. And I liken that to a headline, like, “Give me the headline first.”

And when you do, when you over-explain, and you don’t prepare, and you don’t have a point, and you mix all those things together, it’s long and it’s confusing. And they think that the more they talk it’s going to get clear and it doesn’t because people can’t hear like that and they start tuning out over time or being caught and they’re not listening where they’re sort of listening to you but they’re set at multitasking and then you’ve lost them. But the good news is you can correct it, you can learn, and this is why I wrote the book so you can teach people how to do this if they have discipline, they take the time, and they’d want to play to have it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so now, I want to follow up on that piece in terms of the headline first, and I have learned this and taught this as a former strategy consultant with your slide headlines, answer first, answer first, hypothesis-driven, all that stuff. And so I’ve had an interesting chat back in Episode 136 with Ted Frank of Backstories Studios, and he said that often people go with the answer first approach because folks are tired of being bored.

But what would really compel them in an exciting is if there were a degree of tension and story arch which is sort of like the opposite of answer first because it’s sort of like you get your spoiler right up front. Where do you come out on this controversy?

Joe McCormack
Where we come out is actually the secret is, because I teach this on our courses, the secret in constructing a good headline is you steal a page from journalism. There’s characteristics of good headlines. One is they’re brief, so they tend to be short. There’s no magic word count but it’s three to six, three to eight words, 10 words or something like that. So they’re concise. They create some level of intrigue when you need to hear more but you’re not giving it all away.

So you’re like, “Yeah, I get it.” And then the third thing is it really speaks to what you’re talking about. The example I’ll give you we practice all the time. It’s funny because when you’re sitting in a room, unless you’re presenting, the presenter will make an opening statement about what we’re talking about, and people often confuse that for the topic. Well, topics don’t necessarily create intrigue or interests. Topic say what you’re talking about. So that’s only one of the characteristics. It says what you’re saying. That’s good. It’s brief but it doesn’t create an interest or intrigue.

So there was this session I was in, it was actually really funny. We give homework assignments in these two-day courses with Special Operations, and between the first and the second day I have the guys provide a brief summary of the course to somebody and it’s got to provoke interest so they’ve got to be able to learn all the tools.

And they do that and I tell them to have a conversation with somebody, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, where they have to actively listen to somebody, and it’s like being interested and asking questions and things like that. And I just tell them to kind of note where their mind is drifting and what they’re hearing, and could they stay focused because oftentimes they have to like be able to summarize things that they hear, and if you’re not a good listener you can’t do that.

So the next day they come back and we do a headlining exercise. And the headlining exercise is really pretty simple actually, I just say, “Think about what you did for your homework and then answer this question in a headline. How was the homework?” It might take five minutes to do that and it’s got to be brief, it’s got to create interests and then it’s got to tell you what really speak to what happened.

So I go around the room and this one guy in Special Forces, I’m like, “So, Brian, how’s the homework?” And he says, “I discovered that I really don’t care about people.” It hits those three criteria. It was brief. The word count was less than 10 words. It created interests and it really spoke to what he was talking about. So it hit those three things, and he didn’t give the whole thing away because you needed to hear the brief.

And he gave the brief and it was hysterical because he was talking to somebody and he’s like, “I’m doing the homework like you told me to do, and I gave you some background. I’m not married. I’m single and I have no roommates so I literally had to go out to dinner. And I saw somebody at the bar and there was a guy at the bar who had a beer, and I sat next to him and I struck up a conversation with the guy.” And this is a true story.

“And it’s like I’m listening to this guy, and I’m asking him a lot of questions, and I’m being interested, and I’m actively listening, and in my mind I’m thinking, and the guy was a mechanic and he worked on sports cars, and he’s telling me all about being a mechanic. I’m asking questions.” In his mind he’s like, “I really don’t care about mechanics and cars, but I’m doing the homework and I care about my homework.”

Then he’s like, “We’re in the middle of a conversation,” and he’s like, “I really don’t care about mechanics or people in general.” And it was a breakthrough for him because he’s like, “My listening was so poor. I never really… I just tune people out if I’m not interested.” But the headline really was what worked for him, and it took him… I tell people maximum three minutes, minimum a minute. And people tell me, “I don’t have time for it.” I’m like, “How do you not have two minute to do this?”

Pete Mockaitis
Two minutes of thinking or what’s the two minutes for?

Joe McCormack
Thinking about a headline, just think about a headline before you went to like a meeting. This is one of the things that I see time and time again that many people listening right now will happen when they have bosses or clients, people ask what’s seemingly a harmless question like, “How is it going? What’s new?” What they’re really looking for is progress. But the way a question is framed is like, “Oh, it’s fine.” And then the person who’s asking the question is like, “That’s not what I was looking for.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is a great distinction.

Joe McCormack
They’re looking for progress, and they’re like, “How is it going? Good?” And you’re like, “Good is not a headline.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Oh, it’s so good.

Joe McCormack
Imagine like they’re in a beach, they’ve got one of those devices looking for metal detectors, and they’re detecting metal, in this case the metal is your progress. Well, the headline is the indicator of progress, and if you don’t give them a headline they’re like, “I didn’t find anything,” which means that, “You’re not as useful as I thought you were.” The thinking go downhill from there.

So I think having a headline, that pocket could be like, “How’s the thing going?” “I’m really excited about the progress I’m making. I’m a little bit ahead of schedule,” or, “I’ve got some really good insights on what’s going to happen the next quarter.” It takes a bit of time to do it and you win every time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Joe, that is so brilliant because I think in the grand scheme of how impressions are formed versus who’s high potential, who’s a rock star and who’s not, I think that “How is it going?” is asked so frequently, and that’s just an opportunity “We’re leaving money on the table to…”

Joe McCormack
Always. In Special Operations they have a saying, which is, “Selection is an ongoing process,” meaning “Get fired at anytime.” None of the people that I worked with think that they’re there forever. They always think that they’re going to get fired because they’re always showing up with their A game. Now, what motivates me to do this work and teach people how to do this is if you’re a rock star and you don’t do this, people don’t think you’re a rock star.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Joe McCormack
And maybe you have the talent of a rock star but you’re missing these elements which are in desperate need which is frame it, lead with it, be intentional, and when you do it, it works and you get credit for the work that you’ve done, and that’s often, often, often is the thing in business today.

Pete Mockaitis
I can just imagine. It takes some energy to think about, and you can do that while you’re walking to and from the bathroom, just whatever.

Joe McCormack
Yeah, there was a story that a guy I was working with who had a brief, he had to brief the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, so at the time this is Gen. Martin Dempsey who was a four-star general. He reported to the President. So this guy I’m working with, with his team, and I had a follow-on course workshop with him, and I said, “Okay, how’s it going?” He goes, “Exceptional.” That was his one-word headline. And I’m like, “Tell me more.”

He says, “Well, I had to brief the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff.” I’m like, “What happened?” He says, “I was in this location, he was incredibly busy, he had no time in his calendar, his Chief of Staff told me so, but I really need to speak to him. It’s urgent. And he’s like, ‘The only time he could speak to you is when he leaves his next appointment and they walk to the front of the building which is about a three-minute walk.’” And the guy said, “I’ll take it.”

So he’s like, “I briefed him in three minutes and I got exactly what I needed,” because he prepared, he had a point, he led with it upfront, he told him why he needed to talk to him, and at the end he got exactly what he needed. He said, “I would not have done that had I not done the work,” which is the methodology of preparing and headlining and trimming. He’s like, “I would’ve needed a half hour,” and often you don’t have it.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Joe McCormack
It’s three minutes or nothing, or five minutes or nothing. So that, for me, was very motivating. There’s a lot of room for people to be able to elevate their game into even higher levels.

Pete Mockaitis
And extraordinary, it is brief and it is intriguing, it’s like, “Tell me more,” and it is the answer. So you’re not sacrificing tension to offer the answer upfront. So thank you for resolving that in my head.

Joe McCormack
Yeah, it’s fun to see people that are not creative who think that, “Oh, you have to be super creative to do this.” You don’t, you just have to take time to think through it, like, “Is it brief? Is it interesting or a little bit intriguing? And does it speak to what I’m talking about?” And if it does those three things, you’re good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Joe, tell us, do you have any other quick tips or tricks or tactics you’d like to share before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, I think one of the things that I like to tell people is that it’s really important for professionals to really obsess about, or almost obsess about, how difficult it is for people to focus. And I think the only way people will start to get good and really be motivated to be good at being brief and concise and clear is that they really feel a deeper compassion with how hard it is for their co-workers, for people nowadays, to really focus their attention and how much information they consume.

The analogy I use is like, “If I told you that you’re talking to somebody that was slightly hard of hearing, what would you do differently?” And people immediately, “Well, if they were slightly hard of hearing, I’d probably talk a little bit louder, I might slow it down a little bit, and I might use some more visuals.” So I’m like, “Well, those are the three very specific things you’d do right away.

But what if I told you that they had a hard time focusing? What would you do differently?” And they’re like, “Uh.” I’m like, “Everybody nowadays, because they consume so much information, has a hard time focusing. They don’t have enough time or they don’t have enough mental bandwidth. You need to be convinced that focus is their biggest issue, and your job is to make it easier for them to focus. And what you do, when you’re clear, when you’re more concise is you help hone their attention on what’s the most important and away from the things that are less important. And when you do that you’re helping them.”

And that, for me, is like the biggest thing, is brief is not just like, “Oh, just don’t say anything.” It’s like really an adaptive strategy to help people that are really, quite honest, they’re just buried.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Oh, Joe, thank you so much. Now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joe McCormack
Well, I don’t want to quote myself because that would be absurd. But there is a quote that I use in my class that I kind of came up over time. And the quote is, it’s kind of a cautionary quote, which is, “Tell me, don’t sell me.”

And the point behind that is people are often not as effective because they’re trying to convince people, and they really should just be informing or explaining something. And people don’t want to listen to people that are like really pushy and overly persuasive and sales-y, but if you just tell them and you don’t sell them, I think that’s a quote which I think helps people a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite study or a bit of research?

Joe McCormack
There’s one about that they came out a couple of years ago and it just has to do with shrinking attention spans which really caught me. Microsoft just came out with it again that people’s attention spans are dropping from like 12 seconds to eight seconds, and there were some studies there which is pretty alarming. Sustained attention is really, in peril right now that was kind of noteworthy for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Joe, maybe you could set this straight once and for all. Okay, these attention span studies, 12 seconds, eight seconds, goldfish comparisons, so what exactly is that measuring and how is it like, I guess the TED Talk people have landed on 18 minutes as a magic number?

Joe McCormack
The thing about is there was an article recently in the Wall Street Journal about that. My takeaway on that is the big picture point is people’s ability to focus is declining. That’s the bigger idea. Actually if you measure it, if it’s eight seconds or 12 or 15 or a minute, that’s less important than the fact that it’s declining. I work with thousands of people on this whether public speaking or workshops or what have you, I’ve not met a person who thinks it’s increasing. So the issue is the brain’s ability to focus as it consumes more and more information, and it’s almost addicted to information, loses its abilities to sustain focus over time, and that’s the bigger takeaway.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you.

Joe McCormack
Goldfish probably have better focus than people, I don’t know. But who does that job begs another question.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And how about a favorite book?

Joe McCormack
I read a book recently that I love, and it’s called Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson. It’s a great story of a meteorologist in 1900 in Galveston, Texas who failed to predict a Category 5 hurricane. It was amazingly told. He was the same writer that wrote The Devil in the White City and about the sinking of Lusitania, but it’s called Isaac’s Storm, it’s just a really moving story of the advent of meteorology and technology but how through a whole series of missteps, he just missed it and a lot of people died, a couple of thousand people died in Galveston. Galveston, at the time, was like one of the biggest ports in the United States. Now, it’s a shadow of its former self but it was a really great historical novel.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you flourish at work?

Joe McCormack
An egg-timer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah?

Joe McCormack
Believe it or not, yeah. I have one on my desk, and it measures a minute, and I will put myself on a task where I’m like, “I don’t want to do that,” and I’m like, “Alright, I’ll just flip it over,” and I’ll just do that. It’s very relaxing to just kind of let… it’s just a sand dial, like a sand dialing timer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Joe McCormack
That’s a minute long, and I have it on my desk, and I use it all the time. It’s just a fun little tool to just, very old-school way of the moving of time through the dropping of sand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell me what sorts of things are you doing for one minute?

Joe McCormack
Writing notes from calls, brainstorming topics for podcasts and blogs. I think in spurts and my best thinking kind of comes in short spurts and then what I do is I come back to it. And I’m really big on anchoring and minimalism like when I have a core idea and I play with it like that. For me to work long periods of time is harder for me to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share is there a particular nugget or articulation of your message that seems to really connect and resonate with folks, nodding their heads, taking notes, etcetera?

Joe McCormack
I think the “Be brief.” I think that when people hear the book it’s just the concept of being brief it just feels like, it’s almost like, it sounds like relief.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice.

Joe McCormack
Yeah, it does. It’s like people feel like this is something that would make their lives so much better if people around them were better at this and could excel. What’s really interesting was when, to be completely frank, this is not a book that I’ve been thinking like my whole life about. I was in a place in my life where it needed to be written.

And when I pitched the idea to Wiley, I was really quite surprised that nobody had written a book yet. So I spent a year in it, and when it came out it really resonated with people, and it’s like this is something that people need to be good at and it just continually motivates me to do the work and to lead people through this at The Brief Lab.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Joe McCormack
We have the website called TheBriefLab.com and we have blog articles that come out, like once or twice a month, we have a podcast called Just Saying, there are some insights, we have tools for people to download. You could download two free chapters. Certainly reading the book, the book has links to it on the site.

One of the things that we’re doing quite a bit of now is working in small teams. And I found that on the site we have an online boot camp which is a blended learning, a series of webinars and video exercises where small teams of professionals and organizations can learn how to be better at this through very practical fun exercise, and we do those with teams all over the place. But a lot of that information is right there at TheBriefLab.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Joe McCormack
Yeah, when you’re really being clear, don’t try to be clear. You hear it sometimes when people and they’re saying, “Oh, one more thing.” Just because you think it doesn’t mean you have to say it. Leaving something out will give a person the space and the time to be able to respond and say something, and that may be the beginning of a long really meaningful conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Joe, thank you for sharing these tidbits, very valuable and I wish you lots of luck with Sheffield and The Brief Lab and all you’re up to.

Joe McCormack
Wonderful. Pete, thanks so much for your time.