resources – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

July 5, 2019 By David Terrar

My head’s SPINning with storytelling acronyms

A few days ago I was the latest victim on Sam Sethi’s Marlow FM 97.5 radio show and podcast – Sam Talks Technology (and there’s a Facebook group here). Sam and I go way back to the start of the London social media scene in the mid 2000s and it was a delight to be a guest on his show. His format is to mix technology and personal history, with a smidgen of “Desert Island Disks” thrown in. He splits an hour and a half of chat in to what’s happening now, some history and then the future. The time flew by. He only had a chance to play one of my chosen tunes (the Mary Black with Emmylou Harris, Transatlantic Sessions version of my favourite Sandy Denny song “By The Time it Gets Dark“), and we didn’t get to half the topics we had planned, but it was great. For some reason Sam asked me about SPIN and that got me thinking about useful acronyms and formulae I’ve picked up over the years to help with talking business, presenting and storytelling.

SPIN

What’s SPIN? Well, way back when I came in to the technology industry, straight from University, I was being trained to be a Systems Engineer by IBM. I was lucky enough to be on the first course on SPIN® Selling that they had commissioned from the Huthwaite Research Group. My course was actually taught by Neil Rackham, the founder of Huthwaite and the researcher who had devised the technique. Actually he had analysed the questioning techniques in thousands of sales calls and distilled the ingredients that were most successful in to a model process. It’s an acronym for:

Situation Questions – to understand the customer’s current situation
Problem Questions – to identify current problems, issues and difficulties
Implication Questions – where you tease out the consequences of what those problems cause
Need-Payoff Questions – where you set up the value and importance of a potential solution

You might iterate around these questions to properly quantify the need and build up the value before you come in with the potential benefits of your solution. As a model it works in all sorts of circumstances. I’ve been using it ever since and I still carry the laminated card (see above and left) that I was given on the course in my wallet to this day (40 years on, but don’t tell anyone)!

So what about those other acronyms and formulae? Whether it’s a long form article, a presentation, an email marketing piece, your next 250 word post on LinkedIn, or 280 characters on Twitter, these will help you be more effective.

The 4 Cs

Clear
Concise
Compelling
Credible

In your writing, presenting or explaining keep things clear and concise, and make sure your arguments are compelling, with evidence or examples to ensure it’s credible.

The 4 Us

Useful – Make sure it’s useful to the reader or audience
Urgent – Provide them with a sense of urgency
Unique – Focus on your main benefit and convey the idea that it is somehow unique
Ultra-specific – Do all of the above in an ultra-specific way for this audience or reader

The Us are universal, but if you’ve got to get your message across quickly, like on social media, maybe this is where you start.

AIDA (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action)

Attention – Grab their attention
Interest – Make sure what you are saying is interesting, fresh and appealing
Desire – Make them want the idea or service with proof that it does what you say
Action – You must have a call to action – make sure they know what you want them to do next

This has been a staple approach of copywriting, advertising and marketing for a long time, in fact since it was developed by the American businessman, E. St. Elmo Lewis, in 1898!

FAB (Features – Advantages – Benefits)

Features – Explain what your product or idea can do
Advantages – Explain how it helps them
Benefits – Translate what that really means for the audience or reader

This is deceptively simple, should be obvious. However, it amazes me how many people in our technology space spend so much time explaining the features and ingredients of their products, and not enough time on the benefits and business outcomes that their solution, concept, or idea could achieve.

BAB (Before – After – Bridge)

Before – Show them the world before your idea or solution
After– Help them imagine what the world would be like after your solution
Bridge – Present your solution as a bridge between the two worlds

Describe a problem, describe a world where that problem doesn’t exist, and then take them on the journey to get them to the new place. People are motivated to take action to avoid pain, or look for pleasure. Psychologists like Sigmund Freud have explained how we tick, and you can use that. The added benefit of this approach is the shift in focus to benefits and outcomes, not products and features.

PAS (Problem – Agitate – Solve)

Identify a problem
Agitate the problem
Solve the problem

Here’s a formula that I’ve seen on Copyblogger, which is another great resource for writing ideas. Identify the reader or the audiences’s pain point. Go round the loop a few times to increase the discomfort. Deliver a solution.

Storytelling

The core issue here is storytelling. Whether it’s 280 characters on Twitter, 1,200 words in a blog post, 50,000 words for that book you are going to write, or the outline of your next podcast, we have to get better at it. All of these formula will help you get your message across more effectively, whatever job you do. It will also help you to think in terms of the basics of any story. Christopher Booker wrote The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories in 2004. It contains a Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning and the key thesis of the book is that all literature, scripts and stories are structured in terms of 7 archetypal plots:

Overcoming the Monster
Rags to Riches
The Quest
Voyage and Return
Comedy
Tragedy
Rebirth

I’d recommend you learn more about the art of storytelling, and of how to be a better writer and communicator. My own writing mentor is my friend David Tebbutt. He’s the best writer and editor that I know. I won’t steal his thunder here. You can download his writing tips from his website, and you should definitely watch this playlist of 9 videos he did with Alison O’Leary called Develop your Business Writing Skills. Like so many things these days, you can learn it free on YouTube!

I’ll leave you with David’s own 3 Bs maxim on writing:

Be clear. Be credible. Be read.

If you want help with telling your technology story, or finding your way through current business landscape, please contact us, or join the conversation below.

October 1, 2015 By David Terrar

Essential TED Talks – Simon Sinek – Start With Why, how great leaders inspire action

Following on from Sir Ken Robinson on education and creativity, this next TED talk recommendation is about inspiration. It explains something that is so simple, and yet so powerful. A vital ingredient that is missing from many of the companies we work with, or work for, or buy products and services from. An idea that can galvanise action, or if it’s missing can make the message fall flat so that we say – meh!

This talk comes from the independently run TEDx talks rather than the main conference. It is from TEDxPugetSound which happened on 16 September 2009. The video was loaded to YouTube a few days later and to date it has 1,382,600 views. Simon Sinek explains that we should “Start With Why” because that is the way great leaders inspire action. It applies to marketing, business, politics – anywhere that you need to inspire action.

Simon’s talk doesn’t use fancy graphics. It’s low tech, using a flip chart and some coloured pens to draw diagrams, but he amplifies the message with some great stories and examples that we already know from history or our daily lives, but he shows us something different, something that should be obvious – like so many great ideas.

His examples include wondering why Apple is so innovative and loved, when they are just a computer company. He wonders why Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement in the United States in the 60s – many people were involved, but we focus on Dr. King – why is that? And he tells us the story of the Wright Brothers taking flight.

The core of his idea is what he calls The Golden Circle. Every single organisation in existence knows what they do. Most of those organisations know how they do it. Very few know or express why they do what they do, and that’s Simon’s key point – so many companies have forgotten their why. It’s not about profit, and it shouldn’t be about shareholder value. Even the great Jack Welch, CEO of GE, said “on the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world”. Actually when people start companies it is based around a cause or a belief or an idea about doing things better. Simon’s first example is Apple, and he highlights the difference between those technology companies that just make products against Apple’s “why” which they had at the start and then lost, and then found again when Steve Jobs returned to the company. For everything they do they believe in challenging the status quo, and that drives them to make beautifully designed products that are easy to use and desirable. If you ever heard Steve Jobs speak, it was always about why, with much less emphasis on the what and the how. Simon suggests it’s too easy to start from the outside of the circle and work in. If you want to inspire people you start from the inside and work out.

He goes on to suggest that the golden circle mirrors the structure of the brain, with logic and language controlled by the neo cortex, but the limbic brain controls feelings of trust and loyalty – that’s where we make our gut decisions (which we then rationalise with the neo cortex part of the brain).

He uses TiVo as an example of a great product which failed because the marketing and positioning never properly explained its “why”, and then moves on to the story explaining why the Wright Brothers were the first to take flight. His final example goes back to the Civil Rights movement in the US and Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. It was delivered to 250,000 supporters – there were no formal invites, no websites to tell people where to go and when – it was word of mouth and the power of Dr. King’s message that brought the huge audience. Importantly, Simon Sinek quips:

“by the way, he gave the I Have a Dream speech, not the I Have a Plan speech!”

Simon tells us there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leadership is not about power and authority – those who lead inspire us. Simon’s message can help you do the same. Watch the TED talk and then go to his website for useful (free) resources. You could also read the book.

If you want to understand more of our Agile Elpehant thinking, check the rest of our blog material and take a look at the Enterprise Digital Summit London in October. We’d love to hear your comments or suggestions or to see you in London next month.

September 29, 2015 By David Terrar

Essential TED Talks – Sir Ken Robinson – Do schools kill creativity?

As I explained in my “setting the scene” post, this is the very first TED Talk that I saw back in November 2006 (although it was filmed in February 2006). Titled “Do schools kill creativity?”, it has become the most most viewed TED Talk of all time – 35 million views and counting! Sir Ken Robinson has been an advisor to the UK government on educational matters, and is a thought leader on creativity and innovation in both education and business. This talk covers ground that you will find in his book Out Of Our Minds, and I would also recommend his more recent book The Element which presents the case for finding what you really enjoy doing, and then turning that activity in to your job. This talk, delivered without PowerPoint slides, visual aids or props, demonstrates what a great speaker and story teller Ken is, as well as showing he has the timing of a stand-up comedian.

Ken talks about our education system and the future. Nobody can predict what is going to happen in 5 years, yet we need to be educating our children for way beyond that horizon. All kids start with tremendous talent and we squander it. In our schools creativity should be as important as literacy – it should be treated with the same status, but today it isn’t. Through as series of great personal stories and anecdotes Ken highlights how children will take a chance because they’re not frightened of being wrong – if you aren’t prepared to be wrong how can you come up with something original? But actually in our schools, and then in the companies that we go on to work at, we have systems and processes in place that stigmatise mistakes. He goes on to explain how the education system in the UK and most other countries around the world were designed in the 19th century for an industrial age with a specific set of priorities, a hierarchy that put mathematics and languages at the top, then the humanities, with the arts at the bottom. Even within the arts music has higher status than dance. Maths is important, but so is dance. He asks what is education for, and worries that the whole set up is designed to produce university professors – is that right?

One of the best stories explains how Gillian Lynne, at school in the 1930s, was believed to have a learning disorder because she couldn’t concentrate and was always fidgeting. Her mother took her to a specialist who recognised immediately what she was, and sent her in a completely different direction. Watch the talk and you’ll find that you know of her work.

Ken’s talk is a plea to change the way we educate our children in the 21st century and reprioritise our thinking so that ideas, innovation and creativity are brought to the fore. I’ll use Ken’s own words of conclusion:

“What TED celebrates is the gift of human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we alert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face the future.”

September 28, 2015 By David Terrar

Essential TED Talks – Setting the scene

Let me tell you a story (about story telling). Once upon a time, back in November 2006, I was working with a couple of friends, Toby Moores and David Tebbutt, on a project connected to commercial creativity. We were meeting up at Toby’s office in Leicester to discuss our ideas, having just come back from what we (and others like Dennis Howlett) believed was the must attend gig of 2006 – the first Office 2.0 show in San Francisco which had been organised by another friend called Ismael Ghalimi. Back then we had been bouncing ideas around about how creativity isn’t really taught properly in our schools, colleges and universities and wondering why? Easy to find a study skills course or module in the curriculum, but where are the thinking skills courses? There are plenty of tools and plenty of material from the likes of Edward de Bono or Tony Buzan, but why isn’t creativity being given the prominence and status that it should within the education system, and more importantly the workplace? During our discussions we had been speculating on the nature of a system which was designed in the 19th century for a different industrial age, and which seems to have a set of priorities that don’t match the way the economy works now and how business is done in the 21st century. We had been working around the way to express these ideas, when the day before the meeting in Leicester I came across a video of Sir Ken Robinson on a website called TED.com and that changed everything. I was so excited to play the video to Toby and David when I got to Leicester. I wish I’d taken note of how many times that video had been viewed at that point in 2006, not many compared to the count now….

That video changed and focused our thinking around the backdrop of the creativity project we were working on, and introduced us to one of THE most important resources I’ve found while surfing the web and making serendipitous social media connections over the last decade. As of today The Sir Ken Robinson talk has become the most watched TED Talk of all time, but for me it was just the start of something really valuable.

Back in 2006 it was the first time I had taken notice of TED, a conference on Technology, Entertainment and Design which already had a 22 year history. It is run by a non-profit, private foundation, started as a one off event in 1984 conceived by architect and graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman, but became an annual event from 1990 onwards in Monterey, California with a strap line of “Ideas Worth Spreading”. In 2009 it moved to Long Beach to cater for a substantial increase in attendees, and then moved again to Vancouver in 2014. Originally the three words described the converged topics covered, but over time it has broadened to showcase the best of science, business and smart thinking on global issues. As well as the main conference there is a more International sister conference TEDGlobal, and independently run TEDx events to help share ideas in communities around the world – for example the other two Agile Elephant founders, Alan Patrick and Janet Parkinson, were heavily involved on the team organising TEDxTuttle, one of the first independent TEDx events to be run in the UK.

By 2015 you will probably have heard of TED.com, and if you haven’t it’s a resource that you need to go check out and mine immediately. “TED Talks” have become synonymous with high quality, have redefined the elements of a successful presentation and the way people approach a talk. The term “TED Style” is often heard as a shorthand. At the conference speakers are given no more than 18 minutes to make their point. Some just speak from the heart, some use presentation material and visual aids, but the stature, quality and standard of the speakers that have gone before, and the quality of the audience at the event, mean a TED talk must be outstanding. There are a number of books that explore the style, but I would recommend one by Carmine Gallo, the presentation specialist, called Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds. He has interviewed many of the top TED presenters and distilled things down to the key ingredients and a step by step approach to help you emulate the best.

Some suggest that TED is elitist as it costs $6,000 to attend the main conference. However, as of today there are over 2,000 TED talks published and available for free at TED.com, viewed by over a million people each day – an amazing resource of ideas and important thinking. They have even started the TED Open Translation Project to bring the material to the 4.5 Billion people on the planet who don’t speak English.

Of the 2,000, where do you start? This post sets the scene for a sequence of posts highlighting the best of TEDtalks online – those we think you will enjoy and why. I’m not sure how many there will be in the sequence – at least 10, maybe 20 or more. Many have key messages about business and how to be successful at a time of massive digital disruption and transformation for all industries. One of the sequence that I’ll recommend is, on the face of it, about music but has a profound message about leadership. The first recommendation, in the next post, will be that talk by Sir Ken Robinson mentioned earlier – it’s about education but so much more.

My head’s SPINning with storytelling acronyms

Essential TED Talks – Simon Sinek – Start With Why, how great leaders inspire action

Essential TED Talks – Sir Ken Robinson – Do schools kill creativity?

Essential TED Talks – Setting the scene

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