The Friday Thing #700

Thanks for all the great feedback on the last five weeks chronicling the 5 P’s of storytelling. If you missed the book, it’s available from edition #699 on LinkedIn.

The Friday Thing 700 rolls around and this week I’m remixing a piece I wrote for Gapingvoid a few years back. The topic is an often overlooked tool in the communications toolbox.

I’ve had the chance to work on lots of different types of communication both inside and outside of Microsoft over the last eleven years or so. It’s been a brilliant journey watching how communications, when done well, can affect the internal culture and external perception of a company so positively. I now get the chance to talk with lots of our customers as well as groups internally about this journey and am often asked what lessons I have learned along the way. As I shared a few weeks ago, one of them is the power of visual communications – in particular photography. Another lesson I share is about a storytelling tool that is often overlooked and may be the most powerful. I call it relentless repetition.

When communicating in any format it can become tiring very quickly to repeat yourself. For people who give lots of presentations this is especially true. As you hear yourself saying the same thing over and over and over again it’s easy to fall in to the trap of assuming that everyone has heard what you have said. I know this because I have fallen in to this trap and have sought out new material – mainly to keep myself interested in delivery versus any real benefit for the audience.

Of course, there is merit in saying something new, but repetition is tool not to be overlooked. Almost every time I am asked to talk about storytelling, I begin by repeating “the wrong Steve story”. It’s a good device to engage the audience but have some people heard it more than once? For sure….has everyone I get the chance to speak with heard it? Not yet…

The same is true of the Skype translator demo I have talked about A LOT over the last few weeks. I talk about it a lot because it helps convey a principle around personal storytelling. I sometimes worry that it’s too old a story to tell given it was seven years ago, - but it’s still a good story and there are approximately 7 billion people who have not heard it – so it still has some mileage in it ??

photo credit - Jonathan Banks.

Where I have seen this concept of relentless repetition work most powerfully has been with our mission statement at Microsoft and the language we use around culture. Growth mindset as a concept had plenty of cynical sideways glances when we first introduced it as the bedrock of our culture – but today, it’s part of the fabric and language of the company. Quite simply, it is the culture. Similarly, though we worked hard to come up with our mission statement – to “empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more” – there was inevitable cynicism. People asked how long it’d last, they asked why those words were chosen, they asked if it was as a good as the original mission statement – which technically was a vision statement but that’s a topic for another post. I believe one of the big things that chipped away at that cynicism was relentless repetition – in particular by our CEO, Satya Nadella. Since 2015, when Satya introduced this new mission statement I’d estimate I have seen him speak well over 500 times at different events, internally and externally. I cannot remember a single speech/talk/company email he has delivered that doesn’t include the mission statement. It takes real commitment to do that over the course of many years. It’s a really hard thing to do – and incredibly powerful. But repetition makes things stick. It ensures people know you believe in those words. Repetition is a very powerful tool when used wisely.

Well, that’s all I have for this week. Rinse and repeat.

Happy Friday,

-Steve