sacha chua living an awesome life

W- and I are getting married in less than two weeks. In preparation for that (and as a way of keeping sane during the pre-wedding hullabaloo), we’ve been learning how to argue. You’ve gotta love a man whose reaction to a challenging situation is to not only figure how to address the conflict, but also to learn more about effective communication.

You might be thinking: Isn’t rhetoric about political grandstanding, slick salesmanship, and mouldy Greeks and Romans? Isn’t “argument” just a fancy word for “fight?”

I thought so too, non-confrontational me. It turns out that learning more about rhetoric and argument can make relationships even better. In “Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion,” Jay Heinrichs points out the difference between fighting to win and arguing to win people over. What’s more, he uses familiar situations drawn from everyday life: persuading his teenage son to get him toothpaste, defusing potential fights with his wife, and analyzing the selling techniques and marketing tactics that beseige us.

My first encounter with Heinrichs was when W- pointed me to Heinrichs’ post on “How to Teach a Child to Argue.” It’s a clever example of logos, ethos, and pathos. Reading it, I thought: Hey, this is so practical. Then I wondered: Why didn’t I learn this in school? But I brought myself firmly back into a focus on the future by asking: What can I do to get better at this? When Heinrich writes about the past (forensic), present (demonstrative), and future (deliberative) tenses of arguments, I recognize my own urge to focus on moving forward–practical things we can do–during difficult conversations that threaten to spiral into blame games or overgeneralizations. Learning more about rhetoric helps me understand the patterns, working with them without being sucked in.

It isn’t easy to admit to learning more about rhetoric and argument. One downside of reading mybooks on communication and relationships as a child was that people occasionally doubted if I meant what I said. As a grade school kid, I found it hard to prove I wasn’t being manipulative. It’s still hard even now, but at least experiences give me more depth and reassurance that I’m not just making things up. I like Heinrichs’ approach. He and his family are well aware of the tactics they use, but they relate well anyway, and they give each other points for trying. I’m sure we’ll run into unwarranted expectations along the way – learning about argument doesn’t mean I’ll magically become an empathetic wizard of win-win! – but I’d rather learn rhetoric than stumble along without it.

Besides, argument – good argument, not fights – could be amazing. In “Ask Figaro“, Heinrichs writes:

“My wife and I believed that happy couples never argued; but since we started manipulating each other rhetorically (we recognize each other’s tricks, which just makes it all the more fun), we’ve become a happier couple.”

To learn more beyond “Thank You for Arguing”, we’ve also raided the library for other rhetoric books. Nancy Wood’s “Essentials of Argument” is a concise university-level textbook with plenty of exercises that I plan to work on after the wedding. “Critical Inquiry: The Process of Argument” also promises to be a good read. These are not books to skim and slurp up. They demand practice.

Results so far: I have had deeper conversations with W-, had a still-emotional-but-getting-better conversation with my mom (I’m getting better at recovering my balance), and conceded an argument with Luke about dinner. (It’s hard to argue with a cat who sits on your lap and meows – pure pathos in action.) I’ll keep you posted. I look forward to practicing rhetoric in blogging, too.

I’ve won the relationship lottery, I really have. In a city of 5.5 million people, in the third country I’ve lived in, I found someone who exemplifies the saying: When the going gets tough, the tough hit the books.

(edited for clarity)

Isabelle’s manager wanted her to get better at proactive communication. She’s comfortable e-mailing people, but she has a hard time following up when people don’t respond. Timezone differences between team members in Singapore and in the US compound delays. She reached out to me for advice, and I suggested a few things that might help:

1. Clear, dated requests. When asking for help or a response through e-mail, specify a target date instead of leaving it open-ended, and give a reason for that date if possible. This makes it easier for people to prioritize working on your task. (Don’t always ask people to get back to you TODAY, though. It looks like you don’t plan well.)

2. Clear, dated responses and priorities. If you’re working with other people on some lower-priority tasks, those tasks might never be finished. Clarify the relative priority of a task with your manager: it might turn out to be higher-priority than you thought. If it really is a low-priority project, contact the people you need to collaborate with and get an estimate of when they might be able to work on their part of the project. Find out what other important projects they’re working on, too. This will allow you to:

• give clearer reasons for delays (“We can only work on the report next week because we have to finish the keynote presentation this week”)
• negotiate better solutions (“I can do that part of the presentation if you can do this part of the report”)
• re-negotiate priorities with your manager (“Actually, this report is more important than adding animation to the presentation”), and
• give you dates for following up (“John is working on the presentation now, but he promised to work on the report on Monday, and I’ll follow up with him then”).

3. Status reports. They’re good for your manager and for you. Keep track of where you are on projects: what your next actions are, what you’re waiting for, and what you’ve accomplished. Share this with your manager frequently, so there are no surprises.

4. Concrete follow-ups. When you’re waiting for a response, schedule a follow-up so that it doesn’t slip through the cracks. Follow up by e-mail, and then move up to following up by phone or instant message if needed. I don’t do this for all of my tasks, but I do this for tasks I “own,” and it helps.

Concrete follow-up dates also help you write better status reports. Instead of reporting “Waiting for response”, you can report “Waiting for response; will follow up on ____ by e-mail and _____ by phone.” Clear follow-up plans make people feel more confident that the task won’t be forgotten.

5. Tactful escalation. When people don’t respond, sometimes you need to find other ways to get things going. Isabelle had learned how to cc:ing her manager so that her manager could stay updated, but she wasn’t comfortable with cc:ing the other person’s manager because it felt like escalation. If done tactfully, though, escalation can be a good tool.

How to escalate: Give people the benefit of the doubt, and acknowledge that they might be busy working on priority projects. Send them a gentle reminder, cc:ing their manager. In the note, explain to the manager that you understand that the original contact may be busy or your request might be a better fit for someone on the team, and ask who might be the best person to talk to.

Hope that helps!

2010-08-24 Tue 10:20

Don Cameron is working on a book about business communication, and I’ll be talking to him on Friday to share what I’m learning. In his initial e-mail, he said that he wants to learn more about my educational and career background, and my business communication insights. I figured I’d write about it here so that we can save time, use the interview for follow-up questions and interesting thoughts, and demonstrate the value of sharing. We can also translate this into printable quotes, just like I used my blog to draft informally-written sections of my thesis before I translated them into academese. <laugh>

Business communication insights

Share while you learn. This is probably the key thing that differentiates the way I work. Many people think they need to be experts before they can blog or share what they know. I think that being a beginner is fantastic for sharing, because you don’t take things for granted. Writing and drawing and giving presentations helps you think through complex topics more effectively. Along the way, you create these resources you can save for yourself and share with other people. If you can make it easier for other people to learn, they can build on what you’ve shared with them to learn even more, and you can learn from what they can do.

It’s like the difference between climbing a rope and building a staircase. Rope-climbing is hard. Not everyone can do it, and it can be difficult to get yourself up. But if you build a staircase, not only can you go up more easily and more safely, but you help other people go up too.

Share while you work. Here’s another big difference. Many people think about knowledge-sharing as something you do after you work, and they wonder where I find the time to blog and do all sorts of other things. The trick is to make sharing part of the way you work. Why?

• You can save time. Sometimes I post a quick update about what I’m working on, and someone I would’ve never thought to ask posts a tip that saves me hours of work.
• You can remember more. Saving the reflection and sharing for after your work means you’ll have a better perspective, sure, but you’ll have forgotten many things or taken them for granted. If you take and share notes along the way, your post-project summary will be clearer and more precise.
• You might not find the time after you’re done. When you finish a task, you’re usually thinking of the next one. This is why consultants have such a hard time writing down lessons learned from projects – it’s hard to focus on an optional task for a project that’s already finished when you have other priorities.

Scale up. I think about scale a lot – getting more value for the time and energy I put into something. That’s why I share things as widely as I can. Presentations and blog posts reach more people than e-mail, which is more reusable than phone calls. Taking an extra couple of minutes to share something in a wider medium can mean reaching many more people and creating much more impact. For example, I almost never give a presentation without posting the presentation online, either on the Intranet or on our company intranet. One time, I prepared a presentation on Web 2.0 and education for about 90 people. That presentation has been viewed more than 26,000 times online.

Archiving your work is a great way to scale up. If someone likes one of my presentations, they often check out my other presentations, and that helps me get even more value without more effort. I have blog posts going back to 2002, and people often come across my old posts by searching or browsing – again, more value without more effort. I might have a great five-minute conversation with a new acquaintance, but if they check out my blog, they can learn so much more about me and our common ground than we can find out in hours of interaction. Social networking tools help me get to know and keep in touch with many more people than I might be able to meet or talk to, and they scale up the effort that I put into them. 

Be human. Sharing and archiving scares a lot of people. They’re afraid of making mistakes or changing their minds, and having the infinite memory of the Internet used against them. I think learning is one of the best parts of life, and you can’t learn unless you take risks. Sometimes my blog posts have typos or factual errors. Sometimes my code has bugs. Sometimes I change my mind. This is good. If I didn’t share things, I might have remained quietly ignorant. Life is too short to rely on just my ability to figure things out, or to let other people struggle through everything on their own.

Being human also means making that connection. Don’t hide behind jargon, passive sentences, and text-heavy bullet-points. Tell stories. Surprise people. Provoke them. Help them grow. Connect. If you need to make and communicate tough decisions, take responsibility and show empathy.

Work really changes when you bring your whole self to it. I bring my happiness and passion and enthusiasm to work. It’s amazing to hear from people around the world who get inspired by that – and who then inspire other people around them. There’s tremendous joy in doing great work, and you can have a lot of fun doing so. I started hand-drawing my slides because it was fun for me, and I continued doing it because other people found it fun and engaging, too. I learn and share because it’s fun and it builds on my strengths. I build tools because I love building tools and helping people save time. Find your strengths and share them with others.

So, how did I figure these things out? What’s my story?

Educational and career background

Blogging changed everything, I think. I wasn’t particularly interested in writing until I realized that I could do more than write essays for school.

In my third year of university, while taking computer science, I decided to challenge myself by contributing to open source. One of the projects I worked on was a personal information manager that had a good note-taking feature. I added the ability to publish a blog, and I used that to share my class notes and my notes on open source. I discovered that not only did people read my blog posts, they found them useful, and they gave me suggestions on how to do things better.

My passion for building tools and helping people improve the way they work also drove me to start giving presentations. Here’s what I shared in The Shy Presenter: Why conventional advice on learning public speaking sucks, and how to really get started:

True story. The only reason I got started in public speaking was because some friends of mine were organizing a conference. By the third call for speakers, they sounded pretty desperate. I said, hey, I’m just a student, but I can talk about this if you really can’t find anyone, and I’m playing with that as a hobby. They booked me for two talks. I learned that even as a beginner, you can help other people learn.

I discovered that public speaking was a fantastic way to start conversations with hundreds of people at a time. It was the perfect networking method for an introvert like me. I could write about what I was learning, refine those thoughts into a presentation, prepare and practice my talk, and rely on my passion for the topic to get me through the nervousness I felt about talking to hundreds of people. Afterwards, I didn’t have to awkwardly stand around trying to figure out how to start a conversation – people would just walk up to me and start talking! (This was so cool, I made it one of my key tips in The Shy Connector: How to get strangers to talk to you).

I continued to blog and give presentations as a teacher at the Ateneo de Manila University and as a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Blogging about my IBM-sponsored research into using Web 2.0 to find expertise helped me meet a lot of people who were interested in social networking tools, and I learned about so many resources and tools that I would probably never have found on my own. When I decided that I wanted to continue working with such amazing people, I asked for their help in finding just the right position for me. I joined IBM in October 2007 in a role that was customized for me. Here’s how I got that awesome job.

Writing, presenting, and connecting have helped me learn from, and help lots of people. I still struggle with the idea of starting conversations in hallways or elevators, but I’ve figured out some things that work really well for me, and I look forward to trying more.

Leading Out Loud: Inspiring Change Through Authentic Communications Terry Pearce, 2003 Excellent advice on being authentic. Good point starting p133 about when not to take questions, and how to address difficult questions.

When not to take questions:

If the speech is your first advocacy for a change, it is likely to be more abstract and less specific, written to inspire with context and values. Questions could prove frustrating for you and your listeners, and could drain away the excitement that your initial speech has generated. If your audience is large, taking questions is logistically difficult. The process needs to be tailored both to allow representative questions to be asked and to avoid ill feelings in someone not recognized due to time constrains.

… More typically the size of audience and nature of material are not prohibitive, and in such cases you should always offer the audience the chance to clarify, contribute, or challenge your comments. When others can really participate, they are more likely to feel ownership and commitment. In offering to take questions, you are offering a direct relationship to individuals, in addition to the group as a whole. You build expectations of candor in the audience, and can greatly enhance or damage the credibility and trust you have constructed during the speech.

p133, Terry Pearce, Leading Out Loud, 2003

These are the five primary elements of the invested listening model:

• Answering the stated and unstated question
• Acknowledging feelings
• Finding common intent
• Distinguishing between your context, or point of view, and the questioner’s point of view
• Checking in: making sure that you have been responsive

p139, Terry Pearce, Leading Out Loud, 2003

Leading Out Loud is well worth revisiting and keeping around for inspiration.

Angelina Gan asked me if my storytelling approach is based on Peter Orton’s (wonderful!) presentation on using storytelling in business, so I thought I’d share how I started telling stories and what my favorite resources are.

I don’t know exactly why I started telling stories instead of listing bullet points. Maybe it was because of the never-ending march of bullet-ridden presentations. Maybe it was because I kept skimming through business books that were all numbers or pithy sayings without anecdotes to make those statements come alive. Maybe it was because I watched terrific presentations highlighted on the Presentation Zen blog. Maybe it was because of the books I read about telling success stories to deepen your relationships with people, influencing change through story-telling, and telling effective stories. Whatever it was, I started collecting stories and sharing my own.

I’d taken up writing flash fiction (really short stories, typically 55 words long) in 2005, and that turned out to be surprisingly useful. Reading other people’s flash fiction stories taught me that you could tell a story with conflict and character development in a paragraph or two, and that it was fun keeping an eye out for story material. I had originally gotten interested in flash fiction because it felt like a code optimization challenge, and because the stories were short enough for me to write during lunch or a subway ride, on pieces of paper or even on my cellphone. I never felt particularly literary (and in fact had gotten Ds in my English classes in university for lack of effort), but finding and telling stories (or in this case, making them up!) turned out to be a lot of fun.

So when I came across the business applications of storytelling–from social networking to influencing technology adoption–and I saw how it dovetailed with my passions, I jumped right into it. I started collecting stories. For example, I started my master’s research by collecting stories about how people used Dogear (an enterprise social bookmarking system by IBM) so that I could figure out how people were using it in their work and how they could use it even more effectively. I collected stories to help me not only convince people to try out new tools but also give them models to follow and people they could relate to. I also told stories about what I was doing and how I was doing it, and that helped me get to know a lot of people as well. Besides, I love “catching other people doing well”–telling other people’s success stories, especially when they don’t realize they’re doing well.

The results? People act on what I share. They make my stories their own. Not only that, people also tell me that they enjoy my presentations and that my enthusiasm is contagious. Giving presentations – telling stories, having conversations – has become a lot more fun.

How do I find stories? I keep an eye out for things that happen in real life, like this conversation I had with J-. There’s a seed of a story in there, and by telling part of the story, I make it easier to remember later on. I also enjoy reading people’s blogs, because they tell stories from their experiences as well. I read a lot – it certainly helps to have a public library within walking distance. Whenever I come across a particularly good story in any of these sources, I write it down, I bookmark it, I add it to my notes. When I work on presentations, I’ve got a general idea of relevant stories that I’ve come across, and then I use my notes to look up the details.

For example, I was preparing a presentation about University Relations and the Net generation. I didn’t want it to be a boring list of bullet points or advice. I could’ve rehashed the presentation I gave at the Technical Leadership Exchange, but I wanted to make the most of my opportunity to speak with a group that could really make the most of Web 2.0. I remembered that some months ago, I had come across a terrific internal blog post about how a demonstration of IBM’s internal social tools got an audience of university students really interested. I had bookmarked it as a story about Web 2.0 and recruiting, knowing that it would be useful someday. Well, that someday had come! I checked my bookmarks, went back to the blog post, refreshed my memory, and added it to my presentation. I’m sure that the story will make my point more effectively than a list of bullet points.

How can you get started with storytelling? Keep an eye out for story material. Develop a system for filing those stories so that you can find them again when you need them. Tell stories. I’ve linked to some of my favorite books in this post – check them out for more tips. Storytelling is effective and fun. Enjoy!

When I attended a presentation called “The Leadership Journey” at the Technical Leadership Exchange, I greatly enjoyed the anecdotes the speaker used to illustrate each point, but I felt overwhelmed by the 21 laws of leadership he presented, one after the other. The speaker had faithfully reproduced the structure in John Maxwell’s book, the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You. Although he had supplemented it with personal anecdotes, it came off–at least to me–as sounding rather like a book report. A detailed, lively book report, but a book report nonetheless – a laundry-list of concepts. I wondered if there was a better way to present the information. Here are the laws he presented:

1. The Law of the Lid
2. The Law of Influence
3. The Law of Process
4. The Law of Navigation
5. The Law of E.F. Hutton
6. The Law of Solid Ground
7. The Law of Respect
8. The Law of Intuition
9. The Law of Magnetism
10. The Law of Connection
11. The Law of the Inner Circle
12. The Law of Empowerment
13. The Law of Reproduction
14. The Law of Buy-In
15. The Law of Victory
16. The Law of Big Mo [Momentum]
17. The Law of Priorities
18. The Law of Sacrifice
19. The Law of Timing
20. The Law of Explosive Growth
21. The Law of Legacy

I mentioned this to another colleague who got in touch with me about an internal conference. I had put this presentation down as one of the sessions I could volunteer to present if no one else stepped up, although I admitted I had my misgivings about how to deliver the presentation well. I told him how I felt the long list of concepts made the presentation less effective than it could have been, and that a mnemonic device or a navigational aid would make this presentation better. He was amused by the idea of a mnemonic–a 21-letter acronym, perhaps?–and said he’d pass on my feedback for some presentation coaching. Hearing that, I volunteered to give the speaker feedback myself. That would be better than second-hand feedback, I thought, and I might as well stand behind my words and learn even more in the process. =)

This challenged me to think about the presentation more. If I were presenting this, what would I do? How could it be organized to present all that rich content in some more easily digested and applied form?

I reviewed every slide in the original presentation, writing down keywords on a piece of scratch paper. I thought about questions the speaker could ask people to help them think about the topic before the explanation of the law. After the fourth or fifth law, I found myself categorizing things based on questions, using Who-What-When-Where-How-Why as my original framework. My first pass through the list gave me these categories: “who is a leader”, “where you go”, “how you get there”, and “what you do”. I created a spreadsheet organizing the topics into those categories. As I moved things around, I ended up refining the categories to these five:

Who can be a leader?
2. Influence
5. E.F. Hutton

How do you become a leader?
10. Connection
3. Process
7. Respect
6. Solid ground
14. Buy-in

What can hold you back or move you forward?
1. The lid
17. Priorities
19. Timing
11. Inner Circle
18. Sacrifice

What do you do as a leader?
8. Intuition
4. Navigation
9. Magnetism
16. Big Mo [Momentum]
15. Victory
20. Explosive growth

Where do you go next?
12. Empowerment
13. Reproduction
21. Legacy

Some of the topics can be moved around. “12. Empowerment” belongs in both “What do you do as a leader” and “Where do you go next”, and it could also go into the earlier entries. I don’t have a good feel for whether “1. The lid” should be in “What can hold you back or move you forward?”, or “How do you get there?”. If I spent more time revising this, I’m sure things would settle down.

What I like about this structure is that it has a certain cohesion about it. Similar laws are together, allowing the speaker to illustrate them with a single well-chosen story or use several stories to build upon a point. There are guide questions that prompt people to reflect as they’re listening to the presentation, and these guide questions are followed by advice and examples from leaders who have taken on those challenges. There’s a chronological flow that matches the leadership journey as well. Each category flows smoothly into the next, and within each category, each law leads into the next. You tell a story.

Structure is good for speakers and listeners, too. This arrangement gives you a structure that scales: you can cover the entire thing in less than ten minutes, or you can talk for hours. And because it’s broken down into chunks, it’s easier for you remember, whether you’re presenting it or listening to it. You could probably give a speech on this from memory, and people can leave the session with a feeling of understanding the whole thing, not just the first and last chunk.

Now I’m tempted to look for John C. Maxwell’s e-mail address and send a link to this blog post. It feels weird giving feedback to an author who’s written leadership bestsellers, and maybe there’s a higher reason why he organized those topics that way. But maybe the author hadn’t taken a step back and seen things click into place… If so, then maybe he’ll like this suggestion and use it to help others in a second edition of the book!

—

What would you call what I did? I really enjoyed poking inside that presentation and bringing everything together into a structure, a story. I would love to do more of that in the future. It’s quite far from my official IBM role (although the presentation and communication practice will help me as an evangelist), but maybe I can bring aspects of that into my life sometime. Maybe one of my careers will be as a presentation coach… =) I’d love to learn and share more about effective communication!

Got this from Presentation Zen, one of my favorite resources on presentation skills:

When I grow up, I’m going to present like Steve Jobs.