Michael Caine the famous actor talks about an early career tip he received, which I love.

‘Use the difficulty’ is an odd one to love, but I do.

I’ll share more about specifically how you can use the difficulty to your benefit when preparing your communication in a tick. 

How to ‘use the difficulty’ to nudge your thinking into shape

Michael Caine talks about being a young actor rehearsing a scene when a chair got stuck in a door and blocked his path.

He told the other actor the chair was stopping him play his part.

The actor’s response was:
‘Use the difficulty.
If it’s a comedy, fall over it.
If it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it.’
(You can watch the 1 minute clip here)

Taken this way, difficulties are opportunities in disguise.

How is that relevant to communication?

Every time we try to distill our messaging, we come across difficulties.

• The so what is buried or doesn’t ‘feel right’
• There is too much data, not enough insight
• The draft is 9 pages long, and the new CEO insists on a max of 3

These are all difficulties to use or problems to solve that can help us distill higher quality insights.

Here is an example and what we did to solve it.

Today when working with some retail leaders on a board presentation outlining how they would revamp their inventory processes, we ran into a problem.

There were many ways we could organise the story. Which one would give the right emphasis?

Do we lay out the solutions by business unit, by type of remediation, by time, or by a mix of these?

How do we decide?

We leaned on the constraints inherent in the principles of structuring a message, combined with the commercial constraints to find a fit.

In other words, we used the difficulty (the constraints of the situation) to nudge us to think harder.

Here’s how it went.

Organising the story by business unit was wrong because part of the inventory problem is caused by working in silos.

Cutting it by business units would have left the impression that the silos were to continue, even though the CEO had asked for individual papers from each division head.

Ordering by solution type was clean because it enabled us to separate out process changes as well as softer issues such as culture change. But it didn’t create the much-needed sense of urgency.

Mixing these would break some fundamental principles about how to construct a story, so we nixed that early.

Ordering the ideas by time made perfect sense. Starting with the immediate tasks conveyed urgency. It set them up to explain the medium- and longer-term actions from a whole-of-business perspective. It also enabled them to discuss the initiatives by type and by business unit within each type.

So, I encourage you to use the difficulty to stimulate new and better ideas that will in turn lift the quality of your messaging.

I hope that helps. More soon.

Dav

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