If I'd Had More Time, I'd Have Written You a Shorter Letter
Hari explores why getting to the point is harder than it looks – and shares what Hollywood can teach us about it.
I've been on so many projects where I've spoken to different people and got completely different answers about what we're actually trying to achieve. One person says we're doing X, another says we're doing Y, and a third says we're doing Z – and suddenly I'm sat there thinking, "Hold on, these objectives are starting to contradict each other."
If we can't explain our objective clearly, nobody else is going to understand it either. And that's when things start to go wrong.
The Telco Confusion
Let me give you an example. I was doing work for a big old telco, and one person said, "Oh, this project is all about getting off copper wires onto digital phone lines."
I was like, "OK."
Someone else said, "Oh, this project is about saving money on customer services."
"OK."
Then someone said, "This project is about improving our customer experience rating."
At this point I started to get a bit confused because, as a rule, if you try and cut customer services to save money on customer services, if that goes down, your rating does not often go up.
We were heading into this circumstance where we had different aims for what we were doing. I gathered all of my team at that point in the room and I said, "We need to figure out what our objective is here, because if we can't explain what our objective is, nobody else is going to explain or understand our objective and we're going to get confused."
The French Mathematician's Wisdom
There's a wonderful phrase: "If I had had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."
The internet says that Mark Twain said that, but it also says that a French mathematician called Blaise Pascal said that, although obviously in French. And it's an interesting concept.
I have two ways of explaining this, and both of them slightly show my age:
The Holiday Postcard Problem
Have you ever gone on holiday and bought a postcard? You write your friend or family member's address on the postcard and put a stamp on it, and then you start writing in quite big letters: "Dear Mum, weather is great, flight was awesome."
You start doing this and then you're halfway down the postcard and you realise you've got lots of things you want to say. So you start writing in slightly smaller letters and smaller letters and smaller letters until it goes all the way along the bottom and maybe up the side.
You didn't think enough about what you were going to write on the postcard, and you wrote too much. You start with letters that are this big, and you end with letters that are tiny.
If I'd had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter.
The Meeting Notes Trap
I also think of this as meeting notes, because back when I did a lot of work for other people as opposed to working for myself, I often took meeting notes. Sometimes I took them with my notebook – love a good notebook. Sometimes I took them with my computer.
One of the things that used to drive me absolutely insane was I would get to the end of a meeting where I had not been the person who was officially taking the notes, and somebody would say, "Oh, Hari was taking notes, you'll just send them around."
My notes for my purposes that I've been taking to basically help me keep track of what's being said – they're not designed to be sent around. But if I was feeling a little bit annoyed about this, what I might just do is copy all of my notes out of my Word document or my notepad document and just dump them in an email and send them off.
That'll take me about two seconds, right? And everybody will receive this jumbled set of notes, not in order, somewhat random. There might be typos, there might be abbreviations and spelling mistakes.
Whereas if I stop and I put my notes into a Word document and I fix the typos and put them into order, maybe I put a list of actions at the bottom and group things together with bullets and subheadings, it'll take me longer to do it, but my notes will probably end up half the length.
If I'd had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter.
If we have the time to think about what we're going to say or what we're going to write, we can say it in a much more efficient and effective way.
The Hollywood Solution
Taking the time to try and figure things out ahead of time is valuable because it's really hard to be concise when you are put on the spot to explain something. But there are structures that we can use to help us do it better.
One of the things that I think is the hardest to do sometimes is to articulate an objective. What am I trying to achieve?
In that situation with the telco, I took a lesson from Hollywood. Years ago – oh, twenty, thirty years ago – I wanted to be a screenwriter. One of the things that you have to be able to do as a screenwriter, somebody who writes movies, is you have to be able to summarise the plot of your movie.
You literally have to be able to do it in twenty-seven words or less, and that can be tricky. But there is some structure and some templates that we can use:
The Log Line Formula
We can say: Character must take action to achieve goal or risk the stakes.
Luke Skywalker must team up with a smuggler to rescue Princess Leia from the Death Star or risk the destruction of the universe.
Tony Stark must escape from terrorists and build a super suit to take back control of his company or risk being killed by his enemies.
Two twins must defend their speakeasy to keep the vampires out or risk being eaten. That's Sinners, by the way – brilliant film, a bit bloody, received the most Oscar nominations ever (and won four).
You can simplify it even more: Character must take action to achieve goal or risk the stakes.
Name That Film
Let me try a few out. See if you can work out what these films are.
A disheartened child psychologist must overcome his scepticism to help a young boy who claims to see spirits.
That's The Sixth Sense.
A prince cursed to spend his days as a hideous monster sets out to regain his humanity by earning a young woman's love.
It's Beauty and the Beast – although if we gender-swap it: a princess cursed to spend her days as a hideous monster sets out to regain her humanity by earning a young man's love. That's Shrek. Hollywood only has about six ideas.
How about this one: A reluctant team of talented people must overcome their differences and learn to trust each other in order to save the world from a terrible threat.
Avengers, Fantastic Four, Stranger Things, X-Men, Independence Day, Magnificent Seven – this is probably what we call a trope rather than a particularly good summary. And this is actually the problem sometimes.
The Wizard of Oz Warning
Sometimes when we try too hard to summarise something, we start to miss some of the detail.
Here's one: Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
That's The Wizard of Oz. It's actually an official summary from a 1998 article in a film magazine.
You can see how if you make your summary too vague, or if it's technically true but that's not really what happens in the movie, you're following the letter of the law but not the spirit. That's when things start to get a bit difficult.
Log Lines for Business
I do think that log lines are a really effective model for defining goals. I quite like to get a team in a room and get us all to say what's our goal. Because when everybody's got that goal in mind, it does better for prioritisation. It helps people decide whether they're going to do this or whether they're going to do that. It brings it together.
Character must take action to achieve goal or risk the stakes.
It could just as easily be: Company must take action to achieve goal or risk the stakes.
It's exactly like a user story. A user story is basically: as a character, I want to take action so I can achieve goal. There is nothing new under the sun, my friends. The way that Hollywood summarises movies and the way that agile developers like to receive their requirements in a user story is very, very similar.
There are loads of hack codes like this for communications. There are loads of them that we can use to become better communicators. Sometimes you just have to identify a structure that works for you.
The Real Challenge
Summarisation is hard. It requires a lot of mental energy to do it. It's one of the reasons why it's one of the biggest uses of AI now – meeting notes and summarisation. Because it's hard.
But if we don't actually learn to do it, we are doing ourselves a disservice because we're not getting better at communicating.
If you can't explain what was needed on one side of A4, you didn't understand it yourself.
The Value of Structure
In general, taking the time to try and figure things out ahead of time is valuable because it's really hard to be concise when you are put on the spot to explain something. But there are a number of structures that we can use to help us do it better.
When you find good templates like the Hollywood formula, make a note. It makes life so much easier. It really, really does.
When I got my team to articulate our objective using this structure for that telco project, everything became clearer. We could make better decisions about prioritisation. We knew what we were working towards. We stopped contradicting ourselves.
Getting to the Point
One of the things that I find comes up an awful lot is that people just try and say too much in a status update or a short presentation. Everybody's like, "Oh, I've only got five minutes, I have to say everything." And that can be overwhelming to your audience.
There's a huge amount of value in getting to the point. Life is too short. This meeting should have been an email, as they say.
But getting to the point requires thinking time. It requires structure. It requires the confidence to say what matters most and leave out what doesn't.
If I'd had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter. If we have the time to think about what we're going to say or what we're going to write, we can say it in a much more efficient and effective way.
Your Log Line
So what's your log line? Can you summarise your current project in one sentence using the Hollywood formula?
Your team must take action to achieve goal or risk the stakes.
If you can't, perhaps it's worth gathering your team in a room and working it out together. Because when everybody's got that goal clear in their minds, everything else becomes easier.
And the next time you're tempted to send out those jumbled meeting notes or write that rambling status update, remember: if you'd had more time, you could have written something shorter. So take that time. Your audience will thank you for it.
Our Storytelling for Business training course includes practical frameworks for clear, concise communication – helping people get to the point faster without losing the essential details. Our next open course starts on Friday, 6th June – places are limited.
