The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 281 - 1 to 10

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jennifer.

Jen: I am running a workshop next week for a bunch of actors. It is called Why You Need To Do A Marketing Audit and How To Do It.

Pete: Oh, nice. It's super prescriptive, I like it. It feels provocative.

Jen: Right? But the thing I actually wanted to run by you is this, I guess, process I've kind of come up with/stolen. And I'm wondering if you can help me zhush it.

Pete: Oh, yes. I love the word "zhush". I have my zhush pen ready to go. I don't know if a zhush pen is a thing, but let's zhush. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: How many times can I say the word "zhush" in this podcast episode?

Jen: Okay, how do you spell "zhush", Pete?

Pete: Oh my god, how do you spell "zhush"? I feel like it starts with a Z...Z-H-U-S-H. Zhush? Does that sound right? How would you spell it?

Jen: Sure, I'll take that spelling. Alright, so the workshop is about marketing.

Pete: Mmm-hmm.

Jen: But I realize that this small part of the process I'm going to ask them to go through might be helpful like any time you're having to sort of assess something you feel very emotionally attached to or have some sort of like perfectionist tendencies around.

Pete: Mmm. Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm, I'm curious. Yes, I know what you mean.

Jen: And I haven't even like figured it out completely, so this is very much a crunchy noodle.

Pete: Oh, great. Let's see if we can turn the crunchy noodle into a lovely, perfectly cooked bowl of ramen.

Jen: Okay, so I'm going to share with you where these ideas come from and then how I'm going to combine them, and then you will help me with the zhushing.

Pete: Great. Great, great, great.

Jen: Okay. I recently read Adam Grant's latest book, Hidden Potential.

Pete: Right.

Jen: Highly recommend.

Pete: Likewise, likewise.

Jen: And in it, he talks about his perfectionist tendency that really reared its ugly head when he was training as a diver. And for those of you out there who didn't know, Adam Grant is like an amazing diver. Who knew?

Pete: I know, who knew? Who knew?

Jen: So cool. So because he was such a perfectionist, he was really stopping himself at every turn. And then his coach implemented this practice where based on the difficulty of the dive or the newness to Adam's repertoire, instead of trying to aim for a perfect score, they would name which score they would actually try for. Now, I don't understand diving scoring, so we're just going to say on a scale of 1 to 10, which is not how they score dives but like, instead of trying to aim for a 10, his coach would say, "Well, this is new in your repertoire. Let's aim for a 6."

Pete: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it.

Jen: Okay, so that's one piece. And then the other piece is, last year, I read this wonderful book called Influence Is Your Superpower by Zoe Chance. I highly, highly, highly recommend it.

Pete: Okay, Zoe Chance.

Jen: I feel like I took notes on every single page, I just loved it so much.

Pete: It's one of those books, yeah.

Jen: Yeah. One of the things that really stuck with me in that book is this thing she calls "the magic question", which I may have mentioned on an episode before. And the magic question is, "What would it take for fill-in-the-blank?"

Pete: Yes. Okay.

Jen: So this is, you know, something she tells you to use when you're, for example, asking your superior, "What would it take for me to get a promotion?" And then they sort of lay out the steps, and then you can go through the steps. So, it's a magic question because the other person actually solves your problem for you.

Pete: Yeah, gives you the path for getting the goal or the thing that you want, hopefully.

Jen: Exactly. So I was like, "Oh, when I take these actors through the marketing audit, I want us to identify for each of these marketing materials, what is the actual score we are aiming for? Then, get some people who actually have experience and knowledge to give you a score."

Pete: Nice, the judges sitting behind a table beside the pool.

Jen: Right. And then ask them, "What would it take for this to become fill-in-the-blank with the score you were aiming for?"

Pete: Oh, interesting. So say you were aiming for an 8 and they gave you a 6, you say, "What would it take for me to make this an 8?"

Jen: Exactly.

Pete: Nice, nice, nice. I think I follow.

Jen: Okay, so I guess my question is, do you like it? Should I use it?

Pete: I mean, yes. I have some follow up questions. So yeah, I love the idea of having a measurable target that is realistic but not perfect, that's like a stretch but not an unattainable one, i.e. an 8 as opposed to a 10 in this example. And I guess my first question is, how do you score...maybe in the same way that we don't understand how you score diving, how do you score marketing?

Jen: Well, okay, so I'll give you a little more context, then.

Pete: Okay, please. Maybe that's what I'm missing.

Jen: So at the beginning of the workshop, we actually get clear on, "What is the story you want to be telling about yourself, who you are, what you do, who you want to do the things you do with?"

Pete: Okay.

Jen: So, "As an artist, like what is your aesthetic? What is your preference? What kind of work do you do? What kind of work do you want to do?" We want to make sure that all of the marketing materials point to that, so we have this sort of target of, "This is the story I want people to receive about me and the work I do. Are my materials actually telling that story?"

Pete: Nice. Love it. Okay, great. So it's a process of identifying where I want to go and then getting feedback from a really specific group of people to help you fill-in-the-blank.

Jen: Yes. And as we're saying this, light bulbs are going off in my brain where I'm like, "Ah, I could be using this with my actors in another way too." You know, I look at their audition tapes all the time and I'm giving so much feedback, and they do tend to have perfectionist desires when it comes to these tapes. And there's no way to make an audition tape a 10. It just is like not possible. Like, you can get it to like a 9.99999, but I'd be aiming for like an 8.5. I think that's good enough to send it off to casting.

Pete: Totally. I agree. Yeah, because I feel like the energy required to take something from an 8.5 to a 9.99 is disproportionate compared to the benefit that you get from it. Like, it's so much time.

Jen: Exactly. It's making me realize, it can make the feedback process so much simpler. Because if someone were to send me a tape, and they say, "On a scale of 1 to 10, what do you think this is?" And I say, "This is probably an 8." Instead of giving them every possible note under the sun that I have, they could say, "What would it take to make this an 8.5?"

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And then, it might just be one simple tweak.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: One simple zhush, as it were.

Pete: One simple zhush. (The zhush is back.) Okay, okay, okay, okay. I catch what you're throwing. I'm thinking about a live example I have about this myself, maybe we can use me as a guinea pig. So I've been developing these pre-recorded online courses, essentially, for leaders to take who aren't perhaps the most senior leaders in the business where often the business will invest a bunch of money for them to do an off-site or a full-day leadership development program. These programs exist all around the world, and are very much where I spend a lot of my time, where you take twenty leaders at a time or a leadership team and spend a bunch of time deep-diving with them. What also exists is the desire for many organizations where those senior leaders say, "I want also to include my team, or my team's team, or my team's team's team in this learning, but we don't necessarily have the capability nor the scale to take potentially thousands of leaders or middle managers to an off-site or to a leadership development workshop." So what does it look like to pre-record some of these learnings and package it up into a course that I can pass on to the leaders, that they can then take? Okay, so that's the context. So, I'm like doing this at the moment. And I guess I'm realizing in this moment, I did a version of this...I didn't use a number scale, but I did send this course to five people in my Square Squad. And for those wondering what a Square Squad is, this is something we borrowed from Brené Brown (I'm going to put a link to it in the Box O' Goodies) where essentially, you have like a square sticky note and the people whose feedback you most respect and want to listen to, you should be able to fit them on a sticky note. So, there shouldn't be that many people. Anyway, I sent this first draft to five people. My prompt wasn't, "What would you give this out of 10?" But my prompt was something along the lines of, "If you were a leader in an organization, would you get value out of this course? Like, what value would you attain out of this course," or something like that. And I sent it to a bunch of friends, some of whom are video producers so they could have given me a bunch of notes on the video production. But they didn't, because that's not what I asked about. They gave me notes on, "If I was a leader in a company, this is what I would take away from that." And I then looked at all of that and went, "You know what, I can make some tweaks here. I can make some tweaks there. Yeah, like there's some editing I could do on the video quality and maybe the sound could be better if I was closer to the mic." But the crux of the feedback is, "This would add value to me as a leader." So I got pretty much the score I was hoping to get, to enable me to ship it with a few tweaks. Is that a kind of a live example of what we're talking about?

Jen: Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. Which I guess, Pete, means that, once again, we go back to the two most important questions you could ask about anything you're putting out into the world. "Who's it for?" "What's it for?"

Pete: Hmm, right.

Jen: And when you're clear on that, you can actually determine how effective or ineffective your work is.

Pete: Yes. Because the context I give to the people that I'm seeking feedback from is basically, "This is who it's for. And this is what it's for," which enables them to put themselves in that position of, "So yeah, maybe I run a video production, but this is not for people who run a video production company."

Jen: Right.

Pete: "This is for busy managers in an organization. So me, being the feedback giver," my friend who runs a video production company, is like, "I'm putting myself in this situation. This is what I would get value out of." And then he's also willing to say (and he has), "Look, if I have my video production hat on, you should do this, this, and this," which is also useful feedback. But that wasn't necessarily what I was seeking initially. So, yes. I mean, ironically, the, "Who's it for and what's it for," is a section of this course. So, I'm glad that I managed to live up to the principles of the course I'm actually sharing with other people.

Jen: Okay. I want to address the reason I wanted to include this sort of, "Give it a score," idea, is because it feels less emotional to me. And I don't know if you agree with that, but...

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: I'm thinking about clients sending me an audition tape, for example. It is very emotionally challenging, first of all, for me to say (even though I think I have to be honest), and for them to hear, "Yeah, that's actually not good enough."

Pete: Yeah. "You can do better," or, "That's not good enough." Yeah, yeah.

Jen: But it might be easier to say, "I think you need to be aiming for an 8.5, and right now, this is a 7."

Pete: Yep.

Jen: So like, it feels like a way to give feedback that doesn't have so much of a sting...

Pete: Agreed.

Jen: ...when it's something the person cares about.

Pete: Yeah, I love this. Because I think so much of what makes receiving feedback difficult is that the feedback receiver can take it as a personal affront on them.

Jen: Uh-huh.

Pete: And it's so often not what the feedback giver is trying to do. The feedback giver is trying to give feedback on a project or on a thing that is independent of the individual. But it's really hard, especially I'm sure in your world where the art is part of what the person is expressing. So it's like, but it feels like part of them, and so it can be really difficult to separate those two. So I agree with you that numbers, for some reason, quantifying numbers feels less emotional. And here's a nudge I would throw out there for anyone wanting to try this, is, "You rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, but you're not allowed to use a 7." Because 7 is such a crutch. It's the one that we...I do this all the time.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: I always go to a 7. Because it's not quite a 6, a 6 feels really harsh. And it's not quite an 8, which actually feels like it's really good and you'd actually really nailed this. Whereas a 7 is like, "Oh, it's okay. It's somewhere in the middle." So, "If you're not allowed to use a 7, what would you write this out of 10?"

Jen: Ooh, that's good. That's good, put a little constraint on it.

Pete: Yeah. So someone's like, "6.999."

Jen: You know, I'm thinking about a situation I recently had in a class where someone was performing a song for me. They were very, very, very good. And I was saying to them, "You are someone with the skill set that is ready to be working at a Broadway level, and that particular pass was not Broadway level."

Pete: Mmm.

Jen: And I could sort of see them be like, "Oh, no." And I was like, "You know what would make it Broadway level?" They were like, "What?" I said, "If you just let the vibrato start spinning on the three. Like, you're just waiting a little too long. Drop your vibrato in on the three." And they were like, "That's literally all it takes?" I said, "Yeah, that's Broadway, baby. You've got to time that vibrato." But it's making me think like, I could have said, you know, "If Broadway is an 8.5, this is like an 8.4."

Pete: Mmm, yeah.

Jen: Like, "This is how close you are to hitting the goal."

Pete: Yeah. I find that happens to me often or even clients often, which is the worry when someone is receiving feedback is, "Oh, I'm like, I'm going to get this document back and the whole thing is going to be red penned because it was so bad." But I feel like, especially in the...maybe it's because the clients you're working with and the clients I'm working with, we're very lucky that they're very high-performing in what they do. It's so often just like a little tweak here or a little tweak there makes such a big difference.

Jen: It's true.

Pete: Like for me, the one I think about a lot with leaders is, you know, a senior leader trying to work out, "How do I empower my team? And they always come to me with a question that they want me to solve, and I don't know what to do about that." And it's like, the tweak, for me, is so often the script...which I'm sure I've shared on this podcast before, but I feel like it's the most useful script I've come up with...which is, you say to the person, "Look, I'm happy to share my ideas. But first, I'm really curious what you think." And just that change gives that person who came to you permission to first try and solve the problem, and that makes them feel seen and heard and like they have a voice. Maybe they would come up with a new idea that you wouldn't have thought of. Or maybe they go, "Look, I really don't know. I'm really spiraling. Can you just give me some direction?" In which case, you got more clarity. So like, that simple shift is my equivalent of...what did you say, the vibrato on the third? I have no idea what I'm talking about. Eject.

Jen: Oh, gosh. Okay, I think I am going to move forward with this next week.

Pete: Did we zhush? Do you feel zhushed?

Jen: I feel a real sense of clarity. And I actually feel like the big zhush for me is talking this idea through in the context of marketing, but then encouraging them to look at other ways to apply this. When they're feeling overly emotional about getting feedback, maybe offering a scale of 1 to 10 could be helpful. And then absolutely invoking the magic question, "What would it take for fill-in-the-blank?"

Pete: I love it. And I think whether it's a scale of 1 to 10 or whether it's just providing more clarity, for me, the takeaway is like giving clarity to the person I'm asking feedback from on what I'm actually seeking.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Am I seeking to get this to an 8? Am I seeking to be able to ship this to a bunch of leaders? Am I seeking to be able to make this a publicly releasable podcast? Like, what is it that you're actually seeking, so that the person giving feedback can then give you feedback on that specific thing. That feels like the takeaway for me...specificity.

Jen: Well, Pete, even though we aren't striving for perfection, I feel like this was a perfect 10.

Pete: Ah, until this moment, it might have been. Until this moment.

Jen: Right. Right, right, right. Okay, so this was a perfect 9.9.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. Plus our little zhush bit. Actually, no, I think that might have been a good part of the podcast. Ah, well, I'm excited. The intersection of Adam Grant and Zoe Chance, if that is a Venn diagram, in the middle of it is Jen Waldman and her workshop and her exercises. What could possibly go wrong? And that is The Long and The Short Of It.