You can overprepare to overdeliver
Learn from the King
👋 Hey, it’s Andrés. Welcome to Astrolab’s weekly newsletter on how to become a better communicator at work. We write for knowledge workers and business owners.
Today: Why and how to overprepare
Read time: 5 7 10 minutes
Here are my five ideas for today:
Communication is something amazing
The five differences between being prepared and improvising
Overpreparing is the way
WYSIATI sucks
The 50/25/25 rule
If this is your first INFLUX 🪐, you’ll notice that this is a newsletter on how to become better winning others, mainly by improving the way you communicate with others.
Why my focus obsession on communication?
Because even though transactional communication is easy, communication in the typical fast-paced work environment usually goes beyond transactional communication, and into relationship-based persuasion.
You need to break through the noise, traduce complex ideas into something your audience can understand, and connect in a way only humans can.
Also, because we’re spending A LOT OF TIME doing this.
Here’s Slack’s cofounder Stewart Butterfield on this:
50%-60% of the average employee's time is spent on communication of one sort or another.
Dan Pink wrote something similar in To Sell is Human after doing some research:
We had a mean of 40%. But at some level, it masks what else was going on, because we had a lot of people up on the upper register — 70% to 80%.
So, we’re spending anything between 40% to 80% trying to move others. That is a lot.
And when is done correctly, cool things happen.
Communication is something amazing
Think about it:
You are minding your damn business
Then, you notice something that breaks the pattern, or something that you think is worth sharing
So now you try to codify that into your brain: What happened? Why? Is that relevant for me? What about my tribe?
Then, you could either think about the specific structure of ideas you’ll use to share it, or you could decide to just wing it
Eventually, you meet with others, either face-to-face, or digitally, and say your thing. You can always leverage your face, your voice, your slides, a thing you hold in your hands
Finally, if others pay attention to what you say, understand it, even remember it, you could say that your communication is successful
How awesome is this journey from one’s observation to a group’s shared experience?
In the rest of this post, I’ll share some ideas on how to get better at this process of turning stuff that you see, think or feel, into something that others see, think or feel.
The five things to consider while preparing
So how do we get better?
First, by understanding that you can always prepare. Let’s start from this sentence I wrote above:
You could either think about the specific structure of ideas that you’ll use to share it, or you could decide to just wing it.
How does each of these –thinking and structuring your ideas, versus winging it– look in action?
When someone prepares for a specific interaction, they’re actually spending time thinking on one or more of these things:
(strategy) Do I understand the strategy of the company / business unit / team, and how my role is aligned to that?
(objective) What’s my objective with this interaction?
(ideas) Which ideas should I use to achieve my objective?
(plan) What plan will I follow to communicate those ideas?
(words) Which words will I use for each idea?
In the following weeks, I’ll explore each of these five variables, or whatever they are.
Someone that does not prepare for specific interaction, will improvise, and will try to hit as many of these as they can.
If you’re an expert on the topic, a charmer, and a structured communicator, you’ll have a bigger rate of success
If you’re missing one of those three, your success rate will exponentially go down
After working for more than a decade with managers and individual contributors in Fortune 500 companies, I can say that, in general, people are really busy, and they tend to improvise a lot.
Because of this, they could:
have the strategy somewhat clear, the objective less clear, flaky ideas, not necessarily a plan
have the strategy super clear, the objective very clear, the ideas super clear, but no plan nor specific words
don’t have the strategy clear, and are really confused about this interaction’s objective
In the other hand, I can assure you that successful people overprepare, not just for their important interactions, but in general. They’re trying to acquire an overprepare mindset:
They’re usually curious about human behavior and about influence,
they’ll spend more time—at nights, on weekends, on early mornings— preparing, and
they’ll spend that time better.
In my next idea, why to overprepare.
Overprepare to overdeliver
A couple of weeks ago, Netflix debuted Starting 5, a docu-series following five NBA players for the 2023-2024 season.
One of those is LeBron James —aka King James—, that two days ago started his twenty-second season in the NBA, and is fresh back from winning a gold medal with the US Men’s Olympic Basketball team.
In the first episode of the series, we get to see a bit of how LeBron overprepares.
He warms up for a game, including the special routine he does with his personal trainer.
Apart from spending a crazy amount of money in his body, LeBron is a hard worker. He is known to watch countless hours of game footage, not only of his opponents but also of himself. (If you have ten or twenty minutes, just prompt ChatGPT with “Tell me more about LeBron James history of training, studying and preparation. Give me real examples”. You’ll have a lot of fun.)
Why does King James do all of this? Because he wants to understand how others move, run, and shoot. He is always trying to anticipate what his and the other team members will do, and there’s a lot of evidence on how he memorizes plays every game.
F*** WYSIATI
Now, if you’re not familiar with all of this work, you could watch LeBron play, and think:
Oh well, he’s a gifted player. Good for him.
But that would be a mistake.
When we watch people at their peak, there’s the risk of thinking that they’re like that because they were born that way, but that would be falling prey to the worst named bias ever: WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is).
Daniel Kahneman introduced this shitty-named bias, and described it as our tendency to make decisions and judgments based on the information that is readily available, without considering the gaps in that information.
WYSIATI makes sense (its intuitive, automatic and effortless), but it will usually lead you astray. Don’t let yourself fall prey to this.
Instead, do this. The next time you come across someone with an amazing skill, stop and try to imagine: What did she/he had to do to develop those abilities?
If you think hard enough, you’ll eventually come to this conclusion: they’ve probable put thousands of hours to get to that level.
In conclusion, if you want to overdeliver, you need to overprepare.
I suggest you follow the 50/25/25 rule.
The 50/25/25 rule
Are you spending enough time preparing for important conversations, or are you winging them, excusing yourself because there’s just not enough time?
We’re all adults, and the main person responsible for your growth and your development is yourself, so, make a choice.
Now, there’s always the risk overthinking instead of overpreparing. Overthinking means spending a lot of time spinning your mental wheels without actually solving things in your head.
I’ve been there: focusing for an hour in one slide that isn’t even that important, or just looking at your slides without actually thinking about the five variables (strategy, objective, ideas, plan, words).
I found this graph that explains where you should be in relationship to overpreparing.
So what should you do to be in the correct quadrant? Think about how are you going to spend your time preparing.
A suggestion, courtesy of Terry Szuplat, a former speechwriting for Barack Obama while he was President, and the author of Say it Well: follow the 50/25/25 rule.
Szuplat here:
For any speech our presentation, I spend roughly…
50% of my time thinking, researching, organizing, and outlining
25% of my time writing, and
25% of my time editing and practicing.
The cool thing about this, writes Szuplat, is that it is flexible:
Have to give a presentation in a month? Spend two weeks thinking/researching/outlining, one week writing, and one week editing/practicing.
Have to give a speech in a week? Spend about three days thinking/researching/outlining, two days writing, and two days editing/practicing.
Just found out you have to give remarks tonight—in two hours? Spend one hour thinking/researching/outlining, 30 minutes writing, and 30 minutes editing/practicing.
That’s a really practical way to use your time.
Thanks for being here! I’ll see you next Thursday.
Andrés
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***THERE’S NO EXTRA STUFF TODAY, HAVE A DRINK AND TALK TO SOMEONE YOU LOVE***