Communication and how to use it to create opportunity in your career (Day 5) | Open to Work

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1:20That's O-L-L-Y dot com. Anish, we're on day five of our series of Open to Work. So I think I should recap what we've covered. So we've done day one, curiosity. Then we talked about courage. We've done creativity. We've done compassion. And our fifth and final skill that we're going to talk about today is communication. I wonder whether people who are listening or watching, they might think, oh, I know about communication. You know, I communicate every day. What do I need to do differently? Why is it more important now? Let's dive into this and give people meaningful, useful stuff that they can do.

1:58because this is all about the human skills that help us to stay relevant and succeed in the age of AI. So let's tackle communication. Why did it make the five? Why wasn't it just a foundation for everything? You know, this one is the most personal for me of the fives because my whole career at some level has been built around communication. And I have honestly struggled with that term. There were periods of my career I ran away from anything that had communications in it because I wanted to be more than and I didn't want to be limited by. In the job I'm in now, I remember my co-author, Ryan Early, at LinkedIn said, you're a great storyteller.

2:35And I reacted negatively to that because I felt storytelling was around a campfire or with children's books. It didn't feel real, mature, business relevant. And I have over the course of writing this book, but also just coming to terms with my strengths and really what makes me amazing, so embraced communication now as so core to who we are at our best as humans. And I think some of the idea of communication and why is it a 5C? It's already been out there. There's also this sense that AI can make communication possible for everyone. Why do I have to do anything if I can just ask it to write the thing I have to write or write the talking points I need to use?

3:14And so this is another one like creativity where AI will make the generic universally available. So that means all of us can be better communicators because communication and storytelling has often, again, been seen as a talent that some people have, some people don't. We all can now get better at it with this tool. But the moments of great communication, as we talk about in the book, Martin Luther King saying, I have a dream, and that mobilizing a movement. The Beatles saying, all we need is love, and that mobilizing a culture. I mean, the power of words spoken well in moments that are waiting for those words to be articulated is sort of indescribable in terms of its impact on individuals, on cultures.

3:54And so part of the story of self that I've been building around communication and storytelling made me a student of storytelling. And so I learned about Pixar. We talked about Pixar in the creativity episode. How did they bring a science to storytelling? But also just the importance of storytelling. So in Sapiens, which is another great book people should read, A Brief History of Humankind. It's not brief. It's not brief. I know, now having written a book, I'm like, oh my gosh, he really went at it. But it is not brief. But he talks about storytelling as equivalent to tool building, as what makes us the apex species.

4:29It's not that we go from fire to wheel to AI. It's that we tell stories that create inner subjectivity around this imagination and this made-up thing that becomes real, like the nation state, like the monetary order, without storytelling, like we don't get situated in the world. And then I think often about Joan Diddy and the great American writer, and she has this line, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And we just talked about it at the end of the compassion episode. But story of self is the most important story that any of us will ever tell. And most of us don't understand that that's a story.

5:03We think self is some locked identity based on the nature, nurture, intersection, often around 10 years old, that makes us us in an unchangeable way. We either are always restless or not, or we are creative or not, or we are someone that people get, or we are someone that people don't. All of that is a story. We're all those things. We're both of those things. We're neither of those things. And so the work of storytelling and communication, again, like the end of compassion really starts with self. And And that's why I'm excited about this as a C, because I think it will change lives if people can grab hold of this skill.

5:40I have thoughts. I have thoughts, Anish. One is that you've reminded me of when Sarah and I did our TED Talk, they said on the most successful TED Talks, the ones that are most popular, they've got, you've got to tell good stories. That's like, oh my gosh, the weight, the weight of having to tell a good story. Go be Shakespeare. Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh my gosh, what's a good story? And they're like, oh no, it can just be like something that happened this morning. Like it doesn't have to be this big thing. So I think sometimes like with stories, it's just a simple thing that's personal to you that you communicate to others.

6:11Like it doesn't have to be this. And by the way, everyone tells stories in their everyday life. Yeah. To your spouse, to your kids, to your family, to your friends. When you call up and say, did you know what just happened? Or did you hear what just happened? Or can you imagine this just happened? All of that is storytelling. Yeah, I feel like take the pressure off. It's just kind of something that's happened to you that you relate to someone else. And then the other thing I was thinking with communication is, so there's a lot of words in the world, right? Like wherever you're, you might be listening to them or reading them or, you know, there's a lot of words in the world.

6:40And I think you and I might have a shared skill, and it could have been a sixth C, I don't know, but I think it fits in here, with clarity. Because I think in the context of a lot of words in the world, communicating with clarity is a really valuable thing that people can do. And you don't even have to be the person that's telling the story or doing the thing, because if you can summarize and you can create clarity for other people, that's a really valuable skill that I think sometimes gets missed when we talk about communication. And I think, again, if AI makes expertise, generic expertise available to all, then in that world, everyone can communicate anything at whatever length about any subject.

7:22Great. So then that becomes baseline and a world where we're already realizing is filled with slop. So then what graduates the things that break through is communication that breaks through. And I do think a lot of it is going to rely on these other C's, the curiosity that leads you to clarity and to taking complex and making it simple, the compassion that tells a story that actually lands with the people that you're writing about or speaking to, the courage to like tell a story before it's been told before, to be the first. You know, a lot of it is the summary of the other C's too. And the book we talk about in communication, we use the book as an example of this as a skill.

8:02And we say how AI helped us, helped us research things that we've talked about. It helped us structure arguments and we could go back and forth with different versions of what we could do. But it was the human to human battling and debating that led to this. And the final words of the section on communication make this point, that to tell this story, which was take the complex, make it simple, and make it simple in a way that is empathetic with where people are at and can move them from anxiety to agency. That was the assignment that we signed up for. Well, to understand where people are at, to move individual readers from anxiety to agency, the final lines of communication say you need to know humans.

8:39You need to be human. And I think that's where communication is going to go. It's going to be communication in ways that are uniquely possible because we're human. Some of that is going to be the connection of dots and the complexity that's made simple. Some of that is going to be the way that we introduce these ideas so we can meet people where they're at, so we can, with empathy, understand who people are, what they're caring most about, how we move them in new ways. So the art of communication is about to get easier because now we can all do it, which is great for everyone who thought it was a talent that they could never get.

9:12and harder for everyone who's done it before because it's no longer possible to just do generic and feel okay about it. It's got to get more human. And so let's end with an action for everybody. I'm going to share maybe one of my own because I have had to learn this with communication. So my context is worked in lots of big companies, ended up talking corporate speak quite a lot, which is not always... A lot of what we said in the book is we need to speak human. Yeah, yeah. So I think my business partner, Sarah, is a very speak human kind of person. And she has taught me through lots of feedback that every time I talked about strategic development of an ambiguous opportunity, which is like, just say, Helen, like do a new thing or something like that.

9:54So I think like you're speak human, like use simple words don't mean you're a simplistic communicator. In fact, I think some of the best communicators and the cleverest communicators use simple words. So be human, speak simply. Well, what's interesting about that is that in certain environments, corporate speak is shorthand for things where you want to use it because it speeds through some of the stuff that you've got to do. If you're going beyond those environments, it becomes distancing, limiting, clunky. So a lot of it is like knowing your environment, I think. But I'm a big believer we all have to speak human like we got it because a lot of old work is based upon jargon that is going to be hard to translate into new work like old math won't work for a new equation.

10:35So the best thing we can all do right now is speak human, be human, be pro-human. I think for people that are communicating in any way, any day, which you do at work, you've got to do a presentation, a team meeting, your team leader, you just got to present your work. There are two things I think you could do to push yourself. One is the TED Talk exercise. Add a story. Literally, whatever you're presenting about, there's the possibility for you to add a story. Find a way where it connects to something in your everyday life or someone's everyday life and start with that. And then if you can't find a story, you could do the other thing, even though I think you can always find a story, make an analogy.

11:13So this is like X, Y, Z. And I think analogies are so powerful in helping humans process things. And you could do that through a story that's personal experience or through a, this is just like when it's like a lot of what we did with managing is it's like sports. And when you're on a team and you're like in a key game or in the playoffs, like Like, think of what that locker room's like, that environment's like. It's that Ubuntu, I am because we are, that great African phrase. You want feedback from others because you want to get better. And you want them to get better because the better they are, the better you are, the better we are, you know?

11:45And so that helps people really get it. And what does a sports coach do? They don't tell you how to dribble the ball. They like check your energy, ask you how you're doing, how you're feeling, how do they build camaraderie? So that's an analogy I've been using a lot as we've been telling this story. So I think pick one of those two things and hold yourself accountable to adding one of those two things to whatever is your next presentation. I think that's a very good action for people listening today to take away. And I just want to say thank you because this is the end of our five day series on Open to Work.

12:12And I, you know, I said it before, I think this book is a brilliant companion to what we talk about on Squiggly Careers, because I do think it, it really sets a scene for why people need to invest in those skills, because this is the world that we are now working in. So thank you for spending your time with us. Thank you for sharing all of your ideas and congratulations on the book. Well, I have to say thank you back. And I now you're making me remember that one One of the exercises I had for compassion, and I ended up going with sort of like be pro you, was express gratitude to others. Because it's one of the easiest ways that you can build compassion is to make sure you let known to other people how you value them and why you value them.

12:49And so for you specifically, I have to express extreme gratitude because in even contriving this book, but even as an individual who had a squiggly line career and has spent most to my career feeling really limited by that, really insecure about it. The term squiggly line career, when it introduced itself into the world in front of me, was this like organizing event in my brain. It was like, oh my gosh, this makes sense. This is me. There's this thing that I am. And there's this kind of cause for what I can be if I carry this forward. And so I just have to express extreme gratitude for what you've done for me.

13:23So many people out there who had these atypical careers but didn't know how to think about them and then for everyone who is about to have an atypical career which is literally every worker who now has the know-how they can build from. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

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