My old buddy Paul Wiefels, the oracle of Chasm Group, well, maybe one of the oracles, just returned from a two-day gig in S.E. Asia. His assignment: bring a mega-software outfit's local folks up to "best practices" snuff. As it turned out, the first order business, even prior to his getting on the airplane, was to take a hard look at the existing curriculum and lesson plan and make necessary tweaks.
The tweaks turned into radical surgery. As he put it, over breakfast recently at the Four Seasons in S.F., he quickly informed his client that the material he was given to review was the equivalent of calculus being force-fed to middle-school math students. "Yeah," said Paul, "there may be one or two people who might get it. But for the rest of the class, it's a set-up for failure." Wiefels' lesson plan boiled down to three parts: "What", followed by "so-what" and concluding with "now-what". In the "what" section, a plain-spoken introduction and explanation of what was going to be examined. In the "so-what" portion, he would explain why this is important to understand and useful to implement. Finally, in "now what", the day is concluded with take-home tools the participants could start to use and apply right away. Brilliant. In the original lesson, the client was throwing jargon and concepts around under the assumption that everyone in marketing knows what we're talking about. Big mistake. Rarely will you find, in group of 25 marketing people, a consensus on any elementary marketing concept -- so disjointed and opaque and definition-free the function remains, particularly in technology industries.
Want to hold your staff's attention and make them feel useful? Tell them what needs to happen, in basic business-speak. Explain why. Then hand over the toolkit they'll need to make it happen.
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