How do you make a complicated business interesting?

The curse of knowing too much

Most complicated businesses are run by people who understand them deeply, which is exactly why they are so hard to talk about. When you know every nuance, every nuance feels essential. So the homepage becomes a table of contents and the brand film becomes a list.

My job, most days, is to be the least-informed smart person in the room for as long as possible. The questions I ask in the first week are the questions the audience will ask forever.

One idea, repeated

If the audience can repeat it to someone else, you have a message. If they can only nod, you have a presentation. Pick the one idea that survives a retelling and let the rest live one click deeper, for the people who want it.

For National Grid, that meant not talking about corporate responsibility in the abstract, but letting New Yorkers vote on which youth spaces got funded. See Project C.

Borrow a feeling

People don’t care about your product category. They care about their kids, their money, their weekend, their reputation at work. Find the link between your complicated thing and one of those, and you get interest for free.

Healthcare is the clearest example. Nobody wants to learn about benefits. Everyone wants to know what happens when their kid gets sick at midnight. Start there.

Then, and only then, make it beautiful

Craft matters enormously. But craft on top of confusion is just expensive confusion. Get the idea simple first. Then make it look and sound like it was made by people who care, because it was.

If you’d like help with this kind of problem, it’s what we do at Summer Friday.