Lean Speak

By Kevin Meyer

Consider the following:

In order to accomplish a best-in-market customer experience, instill a differentiated skill-set, and bring the relevant institutional knowledge, skills, and facilitation expertise in-house, we have identified five mission-critical goals.

Or

Designers work to envision and create spaces, systems, languages, tools and infrastructure that afford specific kinds of relationships and predispositions towards each other and our world.

Now I know I probably have a touch of ADD since I stop at "differentiated," but does anyone really understand those two statements?  At least the first time?  Megan Hustad penned a piece for CNN Money that discusses how even in the age of Twitter we seem to have a propensity to cram multiple thoughts into a single sentence.

So, what if the problem isn't incomplete sentences but the fact that we are using lists to convey big, unwieldy ideas that lists aren't capable of communicating?

Megan even talked to our old friend Matthew May:

I asked Matthew E. May, author of The Laws of Subtraction, where the compulsion to stuff multiple ideas into a single sentence comes from. He faulted a lack of self-control. "Without the discipline, instinct takes over," he says. "Our hardwired instinct is to add, as slack resources make us feel safe."

In competitive work situations, overstuffing your communications often seems like a safer bet than running the risk of leaving something out. But that instinct for self-preservation may be doing more harm than good, says May.

Perhaps.  Although I seem to think unnecessarily complex sentences are sort of like unnecessarily complex words: the mark of an insecure intellect.  The same reason I immediately ignore anyone that uses the term "vis-à-vis" - always the sign of a wonk that doesn't live in the real world.  Ok, maybe I'm just a simple man and I should stick with Matt's thesis.

Here's an interesting concept from the article, in the same vein as applying 5S concepts to email and such: how about 5Sing your actual writing?

A routine revision process also helps. May says he scans his paragraphs for every instance of the word "and." Then he tries -- "not always successfully," he adds -- to eliminate what follows each "and." Hot and sticky becomes hot, period.

Deciding what can go unmentioned is hard work. It involves, as Bezos suggested, clear thinking. It means assessing the importance of each element in isolation and as part of the whole.

I like that idea.  Scrutinize "and" and (oops) I'd probably add commas, and (oops) harshly evaluate what comes after. 

As Matt May points out in his recent book, The Laws of Subtraction, what isn't there can often convey more meaning that what is.

Comments

[Liz Guthridge]

Yes! We need more lean speak, which is easier said than done. As part of my lean communications commitment and movement, I advocate that you need to add value to your customers while you cut clutter from your messages. Making an effort to maximize people's time, attention and effort with lean communications is respectful, responsible and rewarding. Yes, the latter is a complex sentence, but I hope it sends a strong message!

[David Hallsted]

Well, you got me.
Here I am writing up the next PDCA and …..
Let me start again.
I use too many and’s when I write my PDCA’s.
Thanks for the advice.

[Mark Graban]

While we are talking about grammar, that should be PDCAs, with no apostrophe, David. :-)

[david foster]

George Orwell noted that fuzzy thinking leads to bad writing...and bad writing leads to more fuzzy thinking.

He was talking about politics, but the same principle applies in business.

[Jeff Hajek]

There's an old quote attributed to Mark Twain: "If I'd had more time I would have written a shorter story." (or something like that.)

[Rick Bohan]

"unnecessarily complex sentences are sort of like unnecessarily complex words: the mark of an insecure intellect."

I think it's more laziness than insecurity (and maybe there's not much difference). I have a whole bunch of fuzzy, unrelated thoughts but, rather than develop them, I dump them all into a single, unorganized paragraph or two.

Folks who write about lean are some of the worst offenders. (Not you guys.)