“In reality there has not been an information explosion, but rather an explosion of non-information, or data that simply doesn’t inform.”
– RICHARD SAUL WURMAN21
Anyone who has used a cell phone, pager, or BlackBerry knows what Postman was talking about. We have all felt the crush of information overload. Anyone who has gone into an hour-long meeting and come out to find 35 new e-mails has felt it. Anyone who has witnessed a 95-page PowerPoint presentation has felt it. And anyone who has had to explain to their spouse why they are bringing the laptop on vacation has felt it.
I put a slightly different (and more positive) characterization on our inability to deal with the deluge of information. I believe we have created for ourselves another incredibly widespread disorder called “story deficit disorder,” or SDD. Like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or, more commonly, ADD), SDD causes leaders to jump from one communication or task to the next without thinking through the impact they are having on their own performance or the performance of their people.
“It’s hard to remember that movies were once just a high-tech gimmick under the control of the engineer. Movies didn’t flourish until the engineers lost control to the artists—the writers, actors, musicians, and directors (Heckel, 1984). Thanks to their imaginative manipulation of technology, a film’s content now transparently connects to our minds.”
– MARTY SIEGEL22
DEFINITION: Story deficit disorder (SDD), noun: 1. Common disorder caused by misuse of bits and bullets and resulting lack of stories; symptoms include disorientation, stress, information overload, numbness of the thumbs, immediate onset of narcolepsy at company meetings, rampant sarcasm, and cynicism. Recommended treatment: become a farmer. If farming is not an option, demand more stories in all aspects of your work and life.
Although a bit tongue-in-cheek, there’s a very real drawback to story deficit disorder. Because people bounce too frequently from one thing to another and their attention span is shorter and shorter, people pay less attention to the communications that really matter. And when, as leaders, we can’t reach our people with an important change, performance of the organization suffers and our own performance suffers.
BUILDING MUSCLE, NOT FAT
Over the past 20 years, we have figured out how to put most of what happens in business in a system of some sort, and the beauty of this is that it makes things like sales performance, claims processed, call times, and delivery schedules much easier to measure. But the challenge we have created for ourselves is that the muscles (our people) that hold the skeleton (our systems) together are really hard to measure. Building those muscles requires what I call “performance skills.”
“It’s the people, stupid. You can take any management discipline from the past few years: total quality, reengineering, enterprise-resource planning, and now CRM. In every one of those instances, the failure has been addressing behavioral issues.”
– PAUL COLE23
DEFINITION: Performance skills, noun: 1. Hard-to-quantify skills like leadership, ethical decision making, teamwork, coaching, giving and receiving feedback, building client delight, strategic selling, negotiating, business acumen, sharing insights, and inspiring the true “muscle” of business. Skills that require judgment and a high EQ. Skills that require constant practice and reinforcement through leadership, mentoring, strong communications, powerful learning solutions, and a little bit of luck.
DEFINITION: Showing up skills, noun: 1. Easy-to-quantify skills that come “stock,” such as computer skills, basic communications, presentation and project management skills, honesty, and integrity. 2. The “please” and “thank you” skills that every employee (and every person) should “show up” with.
In Figure 1.4, we see how bits and bullets have a diminishing impact on performance. To expose people to information such as policies and procedures, there is nothing better than bits and bullets. But as we expect people to build new skills or apply their existing skills to a new situation or set of goals, we must move into story territory.
Just as we often shape our messages into bits and bullets to accommodate our devices, many companies have organized their communications and learning solutions in such a way as to accommodate technology, not the other way around. For example, just like most companies bought CRM systems, many organizations have now purchased and installed a “learning management system,” or LMS. The purpose of an LMS is to, of course, manage learning by distributing and tracking courses taken and compliance achieved.
“We have spent all of this money and built all of these systems to house information and ‘learning’ with the expectation that we are creating value. What we’ve created instead are just corporate landfills.”
– MARTY SIEGEL24
Systems like these offer some clear benefits, such as providing a common access point to materials, logistical information, and training for hard skills (e.g., using a spreadsheet program or CRM system).
One of the unintended consequences of these systems is that performance skills are now treated like a discrete item (think call times, packages delivered, or number of employees that have completed diversity training). That is, LMS systems only work well when they are acting like databases. (“We know Bill took this course and when, and we even know how he did on the final quiz.”)
FIGURE 1.4 Application of Stories
WHY ARE WE GOING SOFT?
In the consulting and learning businesses, we are our own worst enemy. In an attempt to appear more credible, we create language that makes no sense to business leaders. We refer to skills as competencies and we build elaborate learning management systems that are just expensive repositories that further undermine our credibility. But the worst offense of all is when we refer to any skill that is not technology-driven—a “hard” skill such as learning to use Microsoft Excel—as a “soft” skill. It’s no wonder businesspeople don’t take their own learning professionals seriously. The terms we use make it sound like we are building fat instead of muscle! These soft skills aren’t soft at all; they are the “performance” skills and muscle that enable organizations to grow and succeed.
But what if the performance skills that are most critical to our success and our organizations don’t lend themselves to being easily tracked and measured? Then we have to find a way to build these types of skills and make our technology work for us.
“So far, for 50 years, the information revolution has centered on data—their collection, storage, transmission, analysis, and presentation. It has centered on the ‘T’ in IT. The information revolution asks, What is the MEANING of information, and what is the PURPOSE?”
– PETER DRUCKER25
This is one of the keys to being a leader (and high performer) in our time: We are moving so fast and juggling so much that we must make time to distinguish between information that can be trusted to bits and bullets and information that demands a story. You read that right: we must make time. But before you throw this book into the cardboard box marked “Sell on eBay,” read on. This book’s purpose is to convince you that there are powerful tools at your disposal—indeed, some you may already use—that will save you time and make you perform better, in business and in life. A tall order? Certainly. And the journey begins with making the critical distinction between bits and bullets and stories.
CHAPTER 1:
SUMMARY