Episode 161 – Principles of Effective Communication – Tom Wheelwright & Todd Rogers

Speaker 1: 

This is the WealthAbility Show with Tom Wheelwright, way more money, way less taxes. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

We’ve moved from the age of information to the age of communication, whether it’s social media, email, text, whatever it is, it is all about communication. And one of the biggest things we learn as business owners and investors is that our communication is not always as effective as we would like it to be. And we know that because as my friend Robert Kiyosaki always says, “communication is the response you get. And if you’re not getting the response you want, perhaps it’s a function of your communication and not the person that you’re sending the communication to.” 

Today I’m very, very happy to have an expert in effective communication, Todd Rogers. And Todd has written a book, Writing for Busy Readers, which I love the idea because it is short and it is sweet. And we’re going to talk about short and sweet a lot today, I think having read some of Todd’s work. And Todd, welcome to our show. 

Todd: 

Thanks for having me, Tom. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

And if you would give us a little of your background and why this topic now? 

Todd: 

Sure. I am a professor at Harvard University, I’m a psychologist/behavioral economist, so the cross between these fields working on how do we communicate so busy people read and respond to what we write. And in various stages of the last 30 years, worked on how do we communicate to busy voters or how do we communicate to busy families on behalf of school districts? And then for much of the last five or six years working with electeds and state and local leaders, how do we communicate with busy constituents and stakeholders? And in the process learn that there’s a handful of principles for how do we write for busy readers. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

You do talk about the difference between effective writing and good writing, and that effective can be different than good writing. We don’t want to read a novel when we read a text or an email, we do want to just get to the heart of the communication. And then I’ve seen you talk a lot about brevity as being the heart of it, and being one of those people who doesn’t read past the first line of an email ever, you’ve got to really say, “look, read below for more information,” else I’m not going to read below for more information because I’m too busy to read all that. So just give us some of your thoughts on what makes for effective communication. 

Todd: 

Sure. I actually love when you opened up with Robert Kiyosaki’s that, what if it’s your fault that people aren’t getting back to you? And when I do these trainings, and I do lots of trainings with companies and governments and other organizations on how to write so busy people read and respond, I start with, have you ever had this experience where someone asked you, “didn’t you read the thing?” And everyone’s hand goes up. And then have you ever gone up to people and been like, “incredulous, didn’t you read the thing?” And the people hadn’t read the thing, we all have this experience. 

And the radical take, and this book is co-authored with Jessica Lasky-Fink, my colleague and co-author on lots of this research, the radical orientation is, what if it’s always your fault as the writer? What if we just take full responsibility? If we send someone something, whether it’s a report, a proposal, a sales pitch, a memo, an email, a text, a slack, and they didn’t read it, what if it’s our fault? Because what if we just accept that it’s always us? And then with that orientation, then we orient and we’re like, well, so here’s the reality, they are busy, they’re skimming, and so how do we write to accommodate the reality of how they’re reading? They’re not reading in the way that we were taught to write in English class in school, and that’s the orientation. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

It’s totally true. I think that we are too bombarded by too many communications, and if you’re going to deal with it, people that I deal with all the time say, “well, I can never read my emails.” I’m going, “well, I think you’re reading them wrong.” Firstly because I read all my emails, but I read them in like three seconds, that’s what I read, and that’s why I say I don’t get past that first line unless you tell me you need to read past this first line. I’m not going to read past this first line because to me, if you can’t say it in that one line, it must not be that important to you to put it into concise enough language that it’s valuable to me. 

Todd: 

I love it, Tom, that’s a pretty strong take, but I will write emails differently to you even though I’m pretty committed to it. Let’s get back to that because I actually think that there aren’t ironclad laws of how we should write, but there are general principles of how people read and we should accommodate that. But the real answer is, we need to talk to the people we’re communicating with and see how they want to be communicated with. But one of the principles which you’ve pointed to a couple of times is, less is more. 

And so Jessica and I have run lots of these randomized controlled experiments where, I’ll describe an example of a couple, where half the people get one message, the other half get a pretty radically shortened message. And so here’s one example is, during the pandemic, we scraped the web email address from the web, the email addresses of 7,000 elected school board members, and we wanted to ask them to fill out a survey. And in one condition, I wrote a nice message saying, you’re important, I appreciate you, other people should appreciate you, thank you for all you’re doing, you have a terrible hard job of being a school board leader, so thank you, will you please fill out my survey? In the other condition I just said, you do a hard job, I appreciate you, will you please fill out my survey? Cut it by two thirds. 

People read both, predictors read both and predicted the longer one would be much more effective, almost everybody predicted it. And then we ran an experiment and more than double response rates when we cut it in half or by two thirds. We’ve done this even with lots and lots of versions, people always think longer is better, they think more detail is better, and we’ve never found that to be the case, we always find that removing stuff makes it more likely people will read and respond. Can I just tell you one more example? One more funny experiment? 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Go for it. 

Todd: 

Working with a large federal political committee, so think one of the two major parties in the United States, they had 750,000 donors on their email list and they were writing a fundraising email and I proposed, “why don’t you arbitrarily delete every other paragraph?” So they deleted every other paragraph, so it didn’t even make sense anymore, you read it and it’s incoherent, but it’s half as long and it still raised 16% more money, we just never found that more is better. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Well, so here’s my take on that, I think when we send a communication, we are asking for something in return, and what we’re asking for is their time. And I think that time has become the most valuable commodity in the world right now, and so if we require more of their time, it’s actually like you just halved the price of reading that email, you cut the price in half from an economic standpoint because our time is money to us and our time is our most valuable commodity and we never get it back. 

And so to me, if you write along an email, it shows a lot of hubris that you think you are so important that you deserve that much of my time. And I’m going, “wait a minute, my time’s important, at least as important your time, so why don’t you take more time and cut it down?” 

Todd: 

It is interesting, one of the experiments I just described, the one about school board members, we had people read them and then in addition to predict which would be more effective, also say read them and estimate which one will the survey be longer? Will the survey take more time? And when the email was shorter, people thought the action we were requesting was going to be faster because we thought that we valued their time. Or in the other condition, the long one, it’s obvious we don’t care about your time, therefore the survey is probably going to be interminable. 

I like the real directness, all of your intuitions, I share, that it is kinder in addition to being more effective, it is just kinder and more respectful to the reader to write in a way that is easy for them to get through. And again, when we talk about it, we’ll say, if I send you a message that would take you four minutes to read, and let’s say you really are going to read it, although I know, Tom, you’re not, but if I send you a message, it’s going to take you four minutes to read it and I could have edited it so it could be one minute. I have just wasted three minutes of your time in addition to you being less likely to read it in the first place, even if you do read, it’s just an unkind text. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

No, I agree, I think you’re asking a lot. And the reality is, here’s what we all know, it’s harder to write the shorter piece than it is to write the longer piece. It’s like if you go to, so coding right now is a big deal, whether it’s AI or whatever you’re coding, because we have such huge memories on our computers, coding is sloppy, it didn’t used to be sloppy when we had 40 megabyte hard drives, coding was really tight. But it’s hard to do that, it’s hard to write a really concise text or email. 

But what’s interesting to me, so help me understand this, Todd, we’re in the world of tweets, texts, things that we only have a certain number of words and we know we have to do that in a certain number of words. Why is that when we get a form like an email or a letter or something where we can write longer, that we just automatically write longer instead of, why not tweeting it? 

Todd: 

It’s harder to write shorter messages, there’s this famous quote often attributed to Mark Twain, but attributed to every smart person, is that, “I’m sorry this is so long, I would’ve written you a shorter message if I’d had more time.” I love it because it acknowledges that, it’s unkind to you, it would’ve been better if it had been shorter, it also takes time to be shorter. Your question about why, let’s go back to, I’m going to write differently for you when I write to you next, and the challenge for a writer to a busy reader is what the norms are, and if you know who you are, you know the norms of the person you’re writing to and what’s expected, then it ends up being clear. 

I love the US Army has a regulation commonly called BLUF, bottom line upfront, I’m sure you have some veterans who are listeners. Bottom line upfront, a general writing to an enlisted person, first line of anything, bottom line. An enlisted person communicating to a general, first line is the bottom line. What’s amazing about that, it makes it completely clear to everybody, this is how we write, but under normal conditions, without that norm, without that regulation, a much lower status person communicating to a much higher status person, it might be seen as too aggressive or too direct to have the first line. 

Tom, let’s imagine we’ve never emailed and I send you a message and be like, I disagree with something I heard on the pod, I’d like to talk to you. You’re like, what? That’s my one line. Instead, it’s going to be, I’ve been following the pod for a while, I really like the work you do, I admire it, you don’t know anything about me, but I’m whatever, whatever, there’s something I was looking … and then all of a sudden you’ve deleted it because I now know your norms, but it’s really hard as a lower status person. 

When I train leaders of organizations, we talk about the principles of writing for busy people, but then we also talk about how do we get our organization to establish clear norms because then it makes it more effective for everybody, but especially for lower status people or people who don’t know the norms because they end up in addition to having more words and having to be more deferential, being less effective in the process of writing in this way. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Let me go to your example, I get 20 emails with those exact words, I’ve been watching you, I like what you do, all this kind of stuff and I’m just going blah, blah, blah, blah, toss. Because all you’re doing is, to me, that’s just a kiss up, I’m going- 

Todd: 

Some people like it though, some readers want some kind of deference. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

… Yeah, okay. I’ll tell you this, typically not, your financial professionals don’t want that, what they want is, I love it, it’s the bluff, bottom line upfront. Give me the bottom line because guess what, tell me the bottom line and then I’ll decide from what your conclusion of what the bottom line is, whether I want to read it. 

Let me give you an example that I just got in my inbox the other day, and this is actually from one of my staff, they’ll probably listen to this podcast, so if they’re offended, I’ll apologize upfront, but they know me enough to know I’m just pretty direct. So they send me this analysis and the analysis never really tells me the bottom line, it says, well, we think it might save 10% of some people’s time, but we don’t know which people’s time it saves 10% of, and in the end, it will probably save us $5,000 a year. 

And I’m just going, “so we’re going to go through this major upheaval in the company for $5,000 a year, are you kidding me?” I’m just going, “so not only did you not tell me the bottom line up front, you told me you don’t know the bottom line, which tells me you didn’t take the time to really do the analysis or you weren’t committing enough to your analysis to actually stick your neck out and say, here’s what it is and here’s what it means.” And so to me, effective communication has got to start with, and I realize I’m more direct than most people, but effective communication has to start with what matters to the person you’re writing to. 

Todd: 

One of the principles is, emphasize what the reader cares about. But there’s something interesting in this story, which is, it sounds like the writing that this person did was to clarify their own thinking. The writing was the analysis phase, which is an important role that writing has, is to clarify our own thinking. But that’s not what we share with people, what we share with people is the magic of writing, not to clarify our own thinking, but to get an idea from our heads. Really like we step back, it’s incredible, I think something, I type some stuff and then that idea ends up in your head without us ever interacting, it’s magic. 

And that’s a different goal and a different function for writing than the clarifying their own thinking. It sounds like they should have written that, and then they’re like, to tell Tom, “Tom, we save $5,000, there’s a lot of work.” I would’ve liked, and it sounds like you would’ve too, the analysis of a recommendation of whether this is worth doing. But they may not think that’s their job just to present it, but either way, the key info, five grand and a lot of upheaval, “what do you think we should do, Tom?” 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Yeah, and I’m just going, “what do you think we should do? Why would you even send that to me in the first place? Because you’ve just said it’s not worth it, that’s what you’ve said to me, you’ve said it’s not worth it.” So when you think about what’s important for the reader, because obviously it is different, we all have different natural instincts bottom line, mine is simplicity, that is my natural instinct. We all have different natural instincts, how do you get there? In other words, how do you decide, I’m going to do it differently than this person and this person, especially if you don’t know the person? 

Todd: 

That’s a challenge for everything, it’s perspective taking, we’re not awesome at it. But when I say that I get that you want the first line to be the bottom line, awesome, the risk if I don’t know you, is the uncertainty that you may think I’m being too direct. So what I do with every communication is, I try to include some human warmth to start, I am looking for something better than I hope you’re well, but it’s got to be concise, super-duper short. So it’s like, Tom, big fan of the podcast, period, then next, then, I want to know if we can, whatever, whatever, whatever. So that way, at least in case you want to know that I respect you and am human, I want to convey some warmth, but there is a trade-off of conciseness and warmth. 

Your question is about, how do we better take the perspective of the reader? This is one of the things that I think a lot about organizations like companies and military and governments, this is why I’m making it really clear, this is when new people get onboarded or as teams, how do we communicate so that it’s not a diverse set of different norms, it’s like a standardized set of norms. If I don’t know you, I got to do my best. And simple is the answer, the big takeaway, the TLDR version of the book Writing for Busy Readers that Jessica and I wrote, and for those of you who are not teenagers or millennials, TLDR is too long, didn’t read, the TLDR version of the book is, we should add a round of editing to everything we write asking ourselves, how do I make it easier for the reader? 

And there’s a bunch of other things that we could talk about about how to make it easier, but the easier we make it for the writer, the more effective we will be at achieving our goals and the kinder we are to our readers, it’s a win-win. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

No, I agree. So I actually believe every communication is a sales. You’re attempting to sell them on, first of all, reading your communication. And second of all, you’re trying to get them, presumably you’re either delivering information, which is the easy part or you want them to act on it, and acting is a sales process, and to me, simple is always a better sales process. 

We’ve all been into the department store or we’ve been into the jeweler and I remember a time years ago and I go into this jewelry store and I’m with my wife and I just want to buy something, I’m pretty specific as to what I want to buy and they go on and on and on and on and try to and just push and push and push and push and my wife just says, “let’s go,” because she knew that they had passed the point of no return. So actually had so much oversold it that they convinced me not to buy it. Tell me your thoughts on that because I’d like to hear your thoughts because I do think we can push so hard that somebody was already sold, let them buy, why are we continuing to push? 

Todd: 

Yeah, the principle that we talk about in the book on this is called make responding easy. But just in your example, I do want to diagnose it in one way, which is, it’s very similar to that initial message to elected school board members that we said where you said, “I want this,” and they went on about the origin of the diamond and the carrots and whatever else, and you’re like, “my God, the next steps are probably also not easy.” You made some inference that if it’s this hard for me to say I like it, it’s probably going to be 45 minutes before I can just leave here. And so you’re making these other inferences about how they must not value my time or think that this is part of the process, but make responding easy. 

I’m a behavioral scientist, so I do lots of randomized experiments on how do we change people’s behavior for the better, and some of the principles of how do we make it easy, we reduce friction. You might think Amazon’s one click, which when it was patented and they have a patent on it, apparently, that’s patentable, but the Amazon one click is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars, that making it that easy for people to reduce the number of steps to purchase something is incredibly valuable because it increases sales. So reducing friction, reducing the number of steps required, there’s lots of research that I and others have done on, when you reduce the number of steps to take an action, you make people more likely to do it. You put all the relevant info next to each other, so in addition to reducing friction, reducing the number of steps, and the final one is just reduce the cognitive effort. 

Here’s one that will be very familiar to you and to all the listeners. There are three of us on a chain, an email chain, I said, “let’s find a time that works, these are six times that works.” The next person replies, “I can do the second but not the fourth of them.” And then the third person joins on, and in order for them to reply, they have to then go back through the original chain of messages and figure out what was the second and what was the fourth. So if we make it easy for people, it makes it more likely they’re going to respond. So that principle is basically reducing friction, making it easier makes it more likely people will do stuff. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I think an easy way to think about this is, how would you communicate with your three-year-old? Because you would not give your 3-year-old six options, you would give your three-year-old two options, do you want this or that? Because if you give them six options, they’re like, “what?” And honestly, I’m like that myself, don’t give me six options, I don’t want six options, give me two, you want this or this? Otherwise, it’s like, you want me to decide, I’ll do that too, you want me to decide- 

Todd: 

It funny- 

Tom Wheelwright: 

… No problem, but why six options? 

Todd: 

… Every intuition you’re describing is spot on this, which is, we have all these experiments where when you add additional, and not just options, but requests, let’s say I’m requesting you to do A, B, and C, if I just asked you to do A, it would be more likely you to do A than if I say to please do A, B, and C. The more we add, the less likely people are to do any of it. And so just this is another version of simplification, just the easier we make it, the more likely they’re to respond. 

But on that one, I do want to just push, which is the burden again comes back to us, we have to prioritize. If A, B and C are not all equally valuable or important for us, then we need to purge the ones that are less important because the more you add, the less likely someone’s going to respond to any one of them. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I like it. Now I’m going to ask you the obvious question, which is, how do we use AI to facilitate this? Because to me, AI is such an amazing tool because there’s so much of communication that really is repetitive communication, and to me, the repetitive communication, AI can handle that. Whether it’s delivering facts, information, that’s repetitive stuff, AI can do that at least as well as I can do it and can save me a bunch of time where I can focus more on the relationship aspects of the communication, which doesn’t happen until you’ve got two or three communications down the road. You’re still dealing with facts until you can get to a relationship, so how do you see AI doing this? 

Todd: 

Sure. I want to jump to we on our website, we actually trained GPT-4 on the principles of how to write so busy people read and respond. And we have a little tool that get thousands of people use now every day for rewriting emails, it’s trained on emails, so we’ve- 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Give us the name of your tool, let’s- 

Todd: 

… Yeah, it’s awesome, it’s www.writingforbusyreaders.com/ai. And it’s a free tool, but it’s incredible as like a 24/7 coach on writing this way, and you don’t have to do it that many times to be like, I guess that could have been a list, or, you’re right, that is an essential detail. It’s not the final word, anyone who uses ChatGPT knows that it makes mistakes, but even I run my stuff through because I still learn from like, I didn’t have to say all that, or I could have said it in a more simple language. But that’s the applied tool, www.writingforbusyreaders.com/ai. 

But the higher level is, I think that in the end, if we want human readers to read it, which eventually we might have AI write to AI that we’ll then do whatever, but if we want human readers to read what we’re writing, then we’re still constrained by the limits of how people read and given those constraints, people skim, and there are some principles for how we can make it easier for skimmers. And so then, we need to write in a way that accommodates that, and at present, ChatGPT is trained on the way we have written on the web and in all our natural language writing, which isn’t written according to these principles, but it will be. 

And that’s what our trained tool is trained on, and I’m talking with the other, say, email and writing technology companies about incorporating this into their tools. But for now, to the extent that we want humans to read it, we need to write it so it’s easy for them, and that’s what these principles are for. But I think that your listeners would enjoy the tool, it’s incredibly fun as a coaching tool just to see how it would suggest rewriting things. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

… That sounds terrific. So let’s finish up with what are a couple of those principles that if you were to be very concise, let’s leave our listeners with something very concise as to a couple of things that they can do right off the bat to make their communication more effective for the reader. 

Todd: 

Less is more, that’s the first one. It has a couple of components, which is like fewer words, fewer ideas, and fewer requests, so less is more, just we need to insert a round of edit to make it easier for ourselves, so less is more. The second, make reading easy, we haven’t really talked about this, but smaller, shorter common words, shorter, easy to read sentences, and the idea is that the lower the mental effort required to read it, the less likely people are to quit on us. And really that’s what we’re fighting when we write to you, Tom, or any other busy person, is we’re trying to get through before you give up on us. So the second is make reading easy, that means write simply with what we write. And a third that I like that we haven’t talked- 

Tom Wheelwright: 

There is a third. 

Todd: 

… That we haven’t talked about is designed for navigation. That means think about your writing not just as a continuous flow of words, but as something that people are going to jump around. That means add headings, use structure, and make it easy to signposts so they can navigate it. This isn’t going to be true for text message, although I now write with bullets in text message, but make it easy for skimmers by designing it, not just writing it. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I will tell you, I love any message to me with bullets because it tells me that you’ve thought about how to put it into concise messages. If I’m going to read beyond one line, it’s because there’s bullets or- 

Todd: 

Can I- 

Tom Wheelwright: 

… One, two, and three? 

Todd: 

… Yes, totally, 1, 2, 3 is great because actually there’s a logic to it, which is that these are separate distinct ideas, maybe even sequential, but not necessarily. I professionally think a lot about how do we write more effectively, and so there’s no reason a normal person would’ve really thought hard about bullet points, but Jessica and I have. And one thing that’s interesting with bullet points is, it does not help a skimmer to read and understand what you wrote if all you did was put the sentences in bullets, because they still have to read the sentences to figure out what the bullet is about. 

And so one of the little sub-rules that we have that I think really I did not realize before until we thought about it, is if you’re going to have a long-ish, I say more than 10 word bullet, you should have a little summary, two or three words in the front of the bullet so a skimmer can know they can skip it if they don’t care about that topic. The bullet doesn’t help skimmers unless it helps them speed through what you wrote. And so adding these are little micro things, I know the high level, we talked about three things. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I think it’s funny you’re saying some people need to have a bullet for a bullet, that’s really what you’re saying, I was just going, are you kidding- 

Todd: 

Or a title? 

Tom Wheelwright: 

… Give me the bullet in the first place. 

Todd: 

Yes. But often, we organize it, it’s a bull … I don’t have to defend myself, you get what I’m saying? 

Tom Wheelwright: 

No, I totally love it. Einstein reportedly said, I don’t know if it’s true, but he reportedly said that any 6-year-old can explain something to a genius, but it takes a genius to explain something to a 6-year-old. And I love when you talk about using smaller words, simpler words, I saw one of your articles where you talked about Hemingway and you said, look, he wrote to a fourth grade level and he won a Pulitzer Prize for writing to a fourth grade level. And I think that’s a key, to me, it’s just self-aggrandizing if we’re using these big complicated words where we’re really not helping the reader. 

Todd: 

And I think often we include those, I wish I had a fast phrase for grandiose verbiage because we think people will think better of us. And I don’t think it’s universally true, but the only research that exists on this topic suggests that people think we are less intelligent if we use unnecessarily fancy language, which is great. It is so funny because it has exactly the ironic effect, like when we were in high school or college, we incorporated unnecessary technical terms, Tim, probably mistakenly, now that I’m a professor, thinking mistakenly that our professors would be impressed, but it turns out that people see through it. 

If I write you something in really complex language, it either implies that I didn’t understand the concepts clearly enough to make it easy for you to understand, or I’m a try hard trying to impress you. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I like, a try hard. All right, so the book is Writing for Busy Readers and the website is writingforbusyreaders.com, I love that, again, simple, I like it to the point. This has been with Todd Rogers in the WealthAbility Show, and Todd, anything else you’d like our listeners to know? Anything else you’d like to share with how to find out more about your work and what you’re doing? 

Todd: 

This has been fun, and I will end on the same thing we’ve been saying to make it really simple, we should add a round of editing to everything we write, where we ask ourselves, how do I make it easier for the reader? It’s more effective for us, it’s kinder for the reader, and it’s more accessible to more people. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I truly love it. I practice a lot actually on TikTok because, TikTok, whether you love it or hate it, you’ve got 30 seconds and you’ve got to be able to explain a concept in 30 seconds. And so to me, it makes my communication tighter to have to do that. And I think anything that we can do to force ourselves to be more concise, to the point, to make our point early and realize that every communication is cell-like, I think what will happen is, like we say at WealthAbility, it’ll always result in way more money and way less tax. Thanks everyone. 

Speaker 1: 

You’ve been listening to The WealthAbility Show with Tom Wheelwright, way more money, way less taxes. To learn more, go to wealthability.com.