You Don’t Even Need To Be Good

You Just Need To Take A Crack At It

How many meetings have you been in that end with, “OK, great. So, who wants to take a first crack at that?’

After everyone looks around at each other awkwardly for a few seconds, the marketing or communications person inevitably agrees to do a first pass and circulate to the team.

Have you ever wondered why that is? And more so, have you ever considered why that’s so important?

As a communicator by trade, I innately approach situations with two things in mind: clear communication and understanding. The biggest frustrations (and F-Ups) that arise in organizations almost always comes back to lack of comprehension or misaligned understanding. These ‘misalignments’ often result in much larger problems and difficult situations that, quite frankly, could have been easily avoided.

Good communication needs to happen at all levels of a company and in every direction. This applies to management communicating with other members of management and to the broader company. It also applies to colleagues on the same team and interdepartmentally. And I don’t mean firing off an email or dropping a slack message to direct or reiterate what needs to happen. I mean understanding on a fundamental level. Communicating with one another to ensure you are envisioning the same thing and have the same understanding of what that thing actually is.

I think one of the major reasons that organizations (and individuals) struggle with this is because we’re all coming from a different, individual perspective. My idea of what a tree looks like could be a pine tree, but what my colleague’s idea of what a tree looks like could be a palm tree. Technically, both are trees, but the look, climate, and design of each are fundamentally different.

This is why it is SO important for more people to ‘take a first crack at it’. Make something tangible that explains their perspective of what the problem at hand is. Oral and written communication is great, but it’s not everyone’s strength and it also leaves a lot to the imagination. As with our favourite books, the experience of reading them is very different to each individual. We can read the same words in the same book, but envision completely different characters, settings, takeaways.

Taking a crack at it is often as simple as doing a terrible drawing on a white board or notepad. For the more spatially-minded, using props or inanimate objects is a great way to help describe what it is that they’re envisioning as the product, problem, situation.

I vividly remember the day I first fully understood what an API was. It was after having loads of hypothetical conversations and then very real discussions about clients and how they would ‘access’ the API. In my head I had lots of different notions or ideas of what this actually looked like in physical terms…all of which turned out to be mostly incorrect. But, at the time, I was the one responsible for explaining it to people; both internally and to external stakeholders.

In a meeting with engineering, the lead developer for the company took to the white board and drew what looked like a sun beam and a planet followed by lots of arrows (similar to the below version I kept in my notebook for years after), narrating how each of the components worked.  The pieces started to make more sense in that moment. We then related that Picasso to real world client scenarios and requests we were working through, which led to how we might evolve our capabilities to support clients and approach these conversations in the market differently - and better.

Purposeful not Picasso

Better for the Sales team because they would then be knowledgeable about what the hell an API actually is and what ours is able to do.

Better for the Engineering team because sales isn’t promising capabilities that we do not have or won’t be able to deliver on.

Better for Product team because our customer teams now know what language to use and what questions to ask to get highly useful market intelligence to improve offering.

Better for Marketing because it provides a differentiator, an additional item to market and something to be aware of for our competitive matrix.  

Better for our Support team because they understand how to properly configure or troubleshoot client issues related to the API to best support and advise clients.  

Better for management because we began thinking about how to monetize this capability and could articulate the value behind it to our stakeholders and justify our engineering resources.

All of this value and these benefits derived from simple, clear, communication. The illustration didn’t win any art awards…but it was never intended to. In fact, the positive outcomes and efficiencies that were possible because of this drawing and surrounding conversation are more of a success or accomplishment than any award would be.

Nobody needs to be good at this, they just need to try. 

So, next time, even if you’re terrible at it, do your marketing or communications person a favour and offer to take a crack at it…and maybe also buy them a beer.

Publish Date: November 4, 2022