The Creative Art of Reduction

Each Friday I send an email to the broad communications team at Microsoft, titled, naturally, TGIF. :) Sometimes I share these externally; below are my favorite parts from the one I sent May 21. In my #commsconversation interviews it's been interesting to practice the skill of taking a 30 minute interview and boiling it down to under 10 minutes!

Let’s consider the creative art of reduction. A lot of time we think about the work we do as being fundamentally additive in nature – we start with a blank canvas and add to it, using whatever tool is most appropriate, pictures, words, graphs, speeches, video (both short and long), soundbites, statements, Q&A, background materials. At some point we end up wallowing in content, and now comes the need for creative reduction, which tends to drive focus and clarity.

Coco Chanel once famously said “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” She was making the a clear point – in the heat of the moment, we tend to over accessorize, and in so doing can distract rather than enhance. Steven Sinofsky in reflecting about the challenge of large-scale software development said “cutting is shipping” by which he was acknowledging the cold fact that any software product ends up with too much ambition, and if we want it to see the world, we need to cut to the point that everything hangs together. Both of these concepts can be hard, mostly because we tend to fall in love harder with addition than subtraction.

I so understand the desire for more content rather than less. Take briefing documents for example. If an executive gets a question from a reporter or analyst about something that is not in a document, it can be a painful moment. But the result of this fear of the incomplete ends up being 30 plus page briefing documents, which means that even if the question is TOTALLY answered in the appendix, subsection B, odds are the exec never got that far. ??

Cutting is shipping then. But what do we cut, and when?

It always starts with a clear view of the points we want to make. Ideally only one, with supporting points underneath, but I get it, things get complicated so I’ll give you up to three points, but you better be convicted on which is the most important. Write them down somewhere, put them on a sticky note and attach to whatever device you are using to create content. They are the key touchstone around which all the content needs to rotate, and by keeping them front and center, you keep them at the center. Finish writing a paragraph and look at your points – did you make them shine more brightly, or did the new content obscure them?

Next is looking at whatever medium you’ll use to publish in, and making sure that you land that first key point fast, and at high volume. In a press release or blog, the headline and first paragraph are really all you can count on for a reader to get through. So if that point isn’t in one or both of those places, it won’t land. In a video, we need to make that point in the first 20 seconds, and back it up with something visual that also carries the message, and so on. Each medium will have its own center of attention, and our key point will have to be right there. A lot of times when I’m reviewing materials, it’s clear that the authors were so close to the content, and so in love with their creation that they’d inadvertently pushed the start deeper down than intended. If you follow Coco’s rule, you’d take out that first graf, and then all of a sudden the idea would shine. ??

Finally, make sure someone not as close to the content looks at it. I’ve inflicted what I think of as near final drafts on a huge variety of people, who I can count on to 1) tell me the truth and 2) not really be emotionally invested in the topic. They have saved me more than once!

TGIF! What will I remove next to achieve focus? I’m going to start with Friday afternoon, poof it is gone and hey here is the important part…the weekend!

fxs