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Easy is the new hard. No, really.
So there you have it.
The all-singing, all-dancing, everything’s-connected National Health Service IT system is to be ‘dramatically scaled back’ (i.e. quietly scrapped).
Mind you, I could have told you that. For two reasons.
First, I got a bad feeling about three years ago, when I did some copywriting on the subject. The background reading (all 500 pages of PDFs) was grimly compelling.
A bit like watching a road accident that’s about to happen but not being able to do anything about it.
Front-line staff weren’t behind it. It was ambitious, fiendishly complicated and promised the earth.
Mind you, it also cost the earth. Back then, my bedtime reading suggested anything between £6bn (€6.6bn/$9.8bn) and £30bn (€33bn/$48.9bn).
To date, it’s come in at £12bn (€13.2bn/$19.6bn).
My second inkling came when my doctor tried to use the system. She didn’t want to do anything complicated – just to book an appointment.
But it was complicated, as I’ve written about previously (High tech or hype tech?). And in the end, I bypassed the system and used the telephone to make the hospital appointment myself.
Not good.
Easy peasy lemon ketchup
The trouble with big projects is that they’re big. No one person can get their head around all the individual pieces, so they project is compartmentalised. And that means it very quickly becomes fragmented, complicated and disconnected.
A couple of years ago, I boarded a train at London’s King’s Cross station in the rush hour. I took an outside seat in a group of four. In the two seats opposite were a hassled-looking middle manager and her shiny-suited sidekick.
As the train pulled out, she flipped open her folder and peered at a spreadsheet printout.
“You know that consultant, the one with the gold-rimmed glasses, in Peter’s section – you know, whatshisname?” she said hopefully.
“Oh Graham, you mean,” he said. “What about him?”
“Well,” she said, “he’s paid £900 a day and he’s been with us six months. Do we know exactly what he does?”
I did a quick mental calculation, and came up with a figure of close on £100,000 (€110,000/$163,000).
“Hmm, ” said the shiny suit. “Not really. I mean, not exactly. Erm, no.”
“We should find out,” she said, lazily snapping the folder shut, “one of these days.”
Or tomorrow, I thought. Or right now. Because that’s my tax money (yes, they were civil servants – couldn’t you tell?).
Easy does it
Difficult is easy: you do one thing, then another thing, and yet another. Each without reference to what came before. You add a bit here, and there. You spread responsibility among different groups, and patch holes as they appear.
Issues are dealt with as they come in, not according to how important they are. And before you know it, you don’t know where you are. And neither does anybody else. And the result is organised, project-managed chaos. At £900 a day.
So what’s the answer? If difficult is easy, what’s easy – difficult?
Actually no. It’s easy – when you know how.
Here are my top tips for keeping it simple, staying on top of things, and never losing sight of what’s important.
And for leaving the office early (that’s the clincher, isn’t it?):
- Keep a log of your day: and see how you really use your time. Important things should take priority, with urgent ones trumping them only if they’re also important.
- Review your tasks, and update and re-prioritise each one every day. Or better still, at the beginning and end of every day.
- Take stock: check where you are with a project regularly, and make course adjustments if you’re off-track.
- Be realistic & honest: if you know you can’t achieve it, don’t say you can. If it’s too big to tackle, break it down into smaller, manageable chunks.
- Peel off. Adding another layer to an already-complicated process just makes it more complicated. Instead, strip away the unnecessary layers and get back to basics.
- Communicate. Tell people what you’re doing. Ask them what they’re doing. And if you’re the only one doing anything (like me) sit down and have a serious talk with yourself now and then.
- De-junk. Recently, I threw out old clothes, LPs, clever-but-useless kitchen gizmos and anything I hadn’t used in a year. It felt so good (better than skinny, to paraphrase Kate Moss). Take the same ruthless approach to your work and you’ll feel supermodel-light in less than no time. Need it? No? Junk it. Move on.
Now wasn’t that easy?
We all do it – so why not use it to your advantage?
Did you blow out over Christmas? Wine, beer, sherry, turkey, mince pies, Christmas pudding, cakes, chocolates, and lots of yummy cheese?
If you did, perhaps you’ve blown up too. And you’ve seen the inevitable New Year, new you! headlines in the glossy weekend supplements. So maybe you’re thinking about turning over a new leaf.
And what better way to do it than a detox?
Well here’s a newsflash: detox doesn’t exist.
UK charitable trust Sense About Science recently investigated 15 detox products from bottled water to face scrub. And their conclusions? The detox claims, they said, are “meaningless”.
We’d be better off, according to them, eating healthily and getting a good night’s sleep.
Their claims caused a furious debate. I heard one myself, on BBC radio.
On one side, a spokeswoman for Sense About Science. On the other, a woman who’d been through a five-day detox, and said the results were amazing.
So who’s right?
They both are.
The scientists are right because the science is undeniable. But the detox fans are right because they believe they’re right. They’ve told themselves that detox exists – so it does.
It’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.
Tell (a story), don’t show
We all tell ourselves stories.
I do (I’ve even got some ‘detox tea’ in my cupboard to prove it). You do. Everybody does. It’s part of who we are and how we function.
It’s something Seth Godin explores in his addictive (in a good way) book All Marketers Are Liars. It’s packed full of examples of how we tell ourselves stories about everything. That’s our way of justifying purchases, cutting through the clutter of choice, and making ourselves feel good.
Often, we use stories to deceive ourselves. Here are just a few examples I picked up on recently:
- A woman at my gym who spends £30 an hour (her membership only costs £35 a month) once a week to chat to her personal trainer. She’s told herself she’s working harder, that it’s easier when you’ve got somebody motivating you, that it gives her structure and purpose. But it doesn’t. In six months, to my inexpert eye, she’s lost no weight. If anything, she’s gained weight.
- Two acquaintances of mine who proudly announced that they’re self-diagnosed dyslexics. Their spelling is pretty bad, but it’s easier to blame it on a medical condition than do something about it.
- An art gallery in Melbourne that gushed with enthusiasm over a new artist, until they discovered she was only two years old.
OK, these examples are frivolous, but they prove a serious point.
People aren’t looking for facts. They’re looking for a story. And it’s a hugely powerful marketing tactic you can use to your advantage.
The plot thickens
Let’s be clear here: we’re not talking about deceiving people. If you market something using deceptive practices, you’ll be found out – every time.
Instead, what you need to do is put yourself inside the mind of your potential customer. What stories do they tell themselves? What, in the words of the Wise One (Seth), is their worldview?
Find out that, and you know how to talk to them.
Why do people pay what they do for works of art? An art dealer friend put it very succinctly to me:
“Art isn’t ‘worth’ anything,” she said. “It’s simply an agreed point on a spectrum, usually midway between the buyer and seller.”
In other words, they tell themselves a story. If they didn’t, how would they justify paying (or charging) a fortune for pickled sharks and unmade beds?
Baby on board stickers work because it bypasses the need for speed and appeals to people’s parental instincts. The same goes for safety cameras (the new name for – you guessed it – speed cameras in the UK).
Once you know what’s important to people, you can look at your product or service from their point of view – using their vocabulary and terms of reference.
Or put another way, tell them a story.
So what’s your story?
Find out more:
Help your audience dodge those bullets
We’ve all experienced the famous ‘death by PowerPoint’.
It’s a painful process: slide after endless slide, oceans of text (usually in a tiny point size), and enough bullets to wipe out an entire regiment.
It’s stressful enough standing in front of people without having a presentation that works against you. So here are some tips to cut it down and liven it up:
- Don’t use PowerPoint as a script: If all you do is read word-for-word off the screen, you might as well sit down and let the presentation run by itself.
- Limit the number of bullets: keep it to six maximum, or fewer if you have lots of sub-points. Go to the back of the room when you’re rehearsing and see if you can read everything.
- Hold something back: don’t give everything away on your slides. Consider animating your points so they follow your presentation, but don’t go wild or it will affect readability. Try using consistent animation on all slides.
- ‘Chunk’ information: break it down into manageable bits, which are arranged logically. Remember, your audience is reading your slide and listening to you, so make sure it flows smoothly.
- Split it up: sometimes, there’s just too much information for one slide, even after you’ve edited, chunked and deleted. Consider splitting one slide into two. The information will be much easier to digest.
- Preview, review: it’s always a good idea at the beginning of a presentation to set the agenda. And at the end, it’s useful to wrap up with a summary of what you’ve covered. That way, the audience is in no doubt about your message.
OK, example time. Here’s a slide that breaks all these guidelines:
And here’s the same information spread over two slides, but radically cut down. I’ve also changed the template to make the copy more readable:
See the difference?
The first slide holds nothing back: it’s a stream of consciousness. The second two are short and concise, and don’t give everything away. Which means the audience is left wanting more detail.
And they’ll get it – from you.
Writing for the web, questioning what you know, and the irresistible appeal of a slinky little number
OK, slinky little number first.
This week, Steve Jobs came back from the dead and announced the new range of iPods.
It’s not the first time (for the iPods, not the resurrection). This time last year, he did the same thing, launching a new range in time to make them the must-have Christmas present.
I have a Nano. It’s not the square-ish one. It’s the original – the one with the screen that scratched easily.
“There was an issue with some Nanos,” said the salesman at London’s Apple store when I bought mine, “but it was very limited.” (A week later, I realised I had one of the limited-edition Nanos.)
And so, to the new new Nano. Or Nanos, because there are eight funky colours to choose from. And it’s curvy.
So far so superficial. So what are the real changes?
Well it’s now either 8GB or 16GB (I already have enough space with 4GB). It lets you cycle through album covers in 3D (not interested). It picks similar tracks and creates compilations for you (not interested). It helps you organise your music better (I listen mainly to spoken-word podcasts). And lastly, you can ‘shake to shuffle’ to let it randomly jump to another track (not interested).
So why am I still interested?
Hats off to Apple. I have no logical reason to upgrade my Nano. But they’ve appealed to my emotion, knowing that that’s the reason behind most sales.
Clever move.
iPod. Do uPod too?
You’re tempted, aren’t you? If you do end up getting a sexy new Nano, you’ll need something to fill up all those gigabytes. So here are two suggestions to get you started:
First up is Jonathan Drori, an ex-BBC man whose presentation at TED questions how (and what) we learn. Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do is funny, informative and thought-provoking.
Second is the Internet Marketing Podcast from AI Digital. It’s a monthly podcast, with insider tips and advice for online marketing. The current episode is #39: Writing for the web revisited. It’s packed full of practical advice on web copy. Even if you think you know all there is to know (and remember what Jonathan said) it’s still worth a listen. To visit the subscription page, click here.
Enjoy.
…is the technology. Sometimes, it’s simply not enough.
When was the last time you saved a Word document as HTML?
Never, right? Same here. And yet it’s more than 11 years since Microsoft announced that the document format of the future was HTML.
I should know. I announced it.
I can see myself now: standing in front of an audience of 1,500, leading them into a brave new world, where people didn’t save on their hard disk. Or on the network – or, at least, not directly. Using Microsoft Office 97, they saved on the intranet. Using HTML of course.
I peered out into the semi-darkness. 3,000 sceptical eyes peered back at me.
And here’s the thing: they were right, I was wrong.
Way cool
The trouble with most technology is the technology.
It’s cool, it’s different and it makes for great demos. People gasp in amazement at product launches. They feel a frisson of excitement and anticipation.
Then they go home or back to their office, and try it out themselves. And the result? Usually, it’s disappointment.
Remember WAP? And the hoop-la over 3G?
This week, it’s the Sony Reader, an electronic book that’s hit the UK market. With a 200MB capacity, it can store over 160 books. It has a (faux) leather cover, and uses display technology called e-ink. It uses power only when the reader turns the (virtual) page. So in theory, the battery should last 1,680 pages between charges.
There’s just one little problem.
Ne’er the twain
You’re either a reader or an gizmo junkie. Just step onto a commuter train – if you can – in the morning, and you’ll see that people fall into one of the two categories.
Reading isn’t just following the words with your eyes. It’s much more than that. It’s the opening of the book, the turning of the pages, the turning back. It’s the smell of the book, the size and shape, the satisfying heft and bulk.
It’s a physical sensation that nothing can replace.
Technology fails when it forgets how end-users really live, work and relax. And if you’re writing about, marketing or selling technology, you should always remember the real people out there.
The ones who still don’t save in HTML.
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