Be brief, be brilliant, be gone
My decade-long "aha" moment
I’ve been thinking a lot about a topic of Simplifiers and Complicators lately.
Championed by Paul Stansik, his distillation of this subject is something that I’ve been circling around for a handful of years now but could never properly describe.
Every handful of years, I come across an idea like this where I can feel little nudges hinting towards a larger insight, but can’t quite put a finger on what that thing is. Then someone comes along and encapsulates it so well that it feels like a combination of relief and validation.
The first time I experienced this in my career was when I was on the lead gen hamster wheel, wondering how marketing was doing “so well,” but our pipeline and revenue were anything but. Then I came across Chris Walker’s content on LinkedIn and, well, the rest was history from there.
This past month, I’ve been having this same experience with this topic of Simplifiers and Complicators. And here’s what my journey to this realization has looked like.
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“To be or to do”
I first read the biography of John Boyd about 10 years ago. To this day, it’s one of my top 3 favorite biographies of all time.
I came across this biography after spending a handful of years within a large, enterprise company. I was out of the “entry-level” phase of my career and was slowly starting to get involved in plans and decisions that impacted the larger company. Far from being the decision-maker, but I was in the room listening to the conversations and contributing with insights gleaned from the data I had access to and the work I was executing as a digital marketing manager.
And I’ll tell you what, being on the “leading edge” of leading digital marketing at a ~$1B and getting to spew data + sound intelligent to the people making the decisions for our company felt good.
So I leaned into that. I came prepared with data and graphs and reports galore to wow those individuals. After all, that’s what I was noticing most of our middle-managers were doing, so I thought “this must be how I get to where they are.”
How do I make the work I’m doing look incredibly important and valuable to the business?
What can I say to gain the “approval” of the higher-ups?
What do I need to do to climb the ladder here?
And I started to get more responsibility.
I started to get invited to more meetings.
I started feeling like I was “in the club”
…but it didn’t feel right.
It felt superficial. I was saying the “right” things, but I wasn’t proud of the work I was doing. I felt like there were better ways to accomplish the goals we were after, but those went against “the way things have always been done,” so I shut my mouth and assumed this was simply a part of what you do early in your career.
Then I came across this quote from John Boyd, and it was like a lightbulb went off in my head.
“And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something — something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram
I was on the track to “being somebody,” not “doing something.” My internal compass was telling me that I wanted to be doing work that made a difference - that being a member of the club wasn’t what I sought.
I had the initial thread that I would begin pulling for the next decade.
“Be brief. Be brilliant. Be gone.”
For years, I called it the “digital glaze.”
It was the look that took over the faces of those I spoke to internally about digital marketing about 3 minutes after a conversation began. I always thought it was due to the sophistication of the type of marketing it was and it being an unknown to the people on the other side of the conversation because it was different from the other types of marketing.
Ironically enough, a few years after moving into digital marketing, our entire marketing organization took the Insights Discovery psychometric assessment to better understand ourselves. In their own words, “Insights Discovery helps people understand themselves and their colleagues so that they can have more respectful, productive and positive working relationships, even across virtual boundaries.”
The output of this is a simplified, four color model that buckets what makes us unique, scoring how much of a “trait” we possess. From there, they give you 4 oversized lego blocks with each color + their description. They told us to put our highest scoring color at the top and lowest scoring color at the bottom so that team members could see these colors and know how to best engage with us.
Like any human, I was incredibly interested in my assessment, but what was even more interesting to me was a trend I quickly spotted with other members of the team. Notably, those who weren’t the middle-managers, but those who carried significant responsibility within our marketing department.
Of those leaders, > 75% of them had red as their top block. Of the remaining 25%, it was their second block.
So, what did red mean exactly?
Two big things stood out to me when connecting the dots between who these people were and their categorized traits:
Primary focus: Results
Likes YOU to be: Brief
Click. Another “aha” moment for me. Looking back on what I called the “digital glaze,” it had nothing to do with the “sophistication” of digital marketing and all of my incredible knowledge. It had everything to do with how I was being a complicator and was leading them straight into this “digital glazed” state.
These people wanted to know if what I was doing was driving results. Simple as that. Is what you’re doing working? Yes? No? Now get on with it.
Which couldn’t have been described any better by Paul himself when we sat down for a recent podcast episode to discuss the topic of hiring a simplifier…
“Give a straight answer with a period at the end of it.”
“I can usually tell who’s a simplifier vs. a complicator by how they answer [how the business is doing]. If I get a straight answer with a period at the end of it, there’s a pretty good chance that person’s a simplifier. And if I get an answer that is usually accompanied by hand-waving choreography that takes longer than 30 seconds and never really delivers on what I was really trying to get to? That’s maybe the mark of a complicator.”
As I shared at the beginning of this newsletter, big insights like these rarely come about. They hide in plain sight - the obviousness of the insight being the mask that keeps so many of us from uncovering it. But when we do, it’s like being able to see an entirely new color. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere.
This conversation was one of those moments for me. Really getting into what makes a simplifier vs. a complicator. What the behaviors of each look like. How to spot them. How to vet for them in hiring. How to detect them in ourselves. How others perceive them.
And now I’m obsessed. I’m shoring up areas where I’ve been a complicator. I’m observing where it’s showing up in those I work with. I’m applying it to the conversations where I know this is critical, such as leadership readouts and board decks.
Now I’m in the fun part of this journey. I’m looking at everything I’ve learned up to this point through a new lens. How to simplify lessons learned. Determining which frameworks can be made more concise.
And hopefully these will start to come through in future newsletters to come.
I’ve never shared in here a podcast I’ve been a part of and recommended that you go and listen to it. But this is one that I truly believe will benefit anyone who wants to level up in their career and with their communication, especially to leadership. Here are the links to the major listening/watching channels:
Book quote of the week
“The greatest mistake you can make in the initial months of your apprenticeship is to imagine that you have to get attention, impress people, and prove yourself…If you impress people in these first months, it should be because of the seriousness of your desire to learn, not because you are tring to rise to the top before you are ready.”
In case you missed these this week
See you next Saturday,
Sam