DETAILS DETAILS

I want to talk about how to think of the details. You’re a professional and in your professional realm there are a certain number of big highlevel points and a whole lot of details. I want to talk about how to think about details in relation to making your point. We often talk about separating those two. I want to know when I’m making a point. I want to know when I’m elaborating the point. That is something that I completely believe doing them separately as opposed to mixing them all together that can build toward a much more concise and powerful message. A point that’s made and elaborated. The thing I want to add here is where the point goes can essentially be on either end of that process of the details. Now think about it this way. You can grow grass upward towards the sky. You can grow vines downward. You know, vines grow down as they go. Grass grows up. Think about that as a good metaphor for what I’m trying to get at. If you go from the ground up, you’re starting with the details and you’re talking through the details and you’re building up to this place where the audience has enough details that you can then make a point and they would understand it. The vines down way is we’re going to start with the point and we’re going to work our way down through the details that evidence out that point. And interestingly, either of these can be fine. Generally speaking, if an audience hears a bunch of details and you make a point with it, that’s going to make sense to them. Usually, if you give a point, they understand the big picture and now you detail it out. That’s the vines coming down. And either of those tends to work. What doesn’t work is the big scramble. The weed mess is my points and details are all mixed and then I’m playing a tetra sorting game as an audience trying to figure out. I don’t realize I’m doing I’m just grabbing the pieces that made sense and I’m building my own point. That’s what you don’t want. So a good way to think about when to do one or the other knowing that I just said both are okay. Think about whether they’re detail people or they’re concept people. So, classically, you’ve got a bunch of leaders, CEO types. They tend to be top down. They tend to be concept first. They’re the ones you grow down the vines for. You start with the point and you bring it down. You’ve got really inspirational visiony people. Those people are also top down. You want to get your head around an understanding of a vision and then you want to build the details downward from that. You’ve got people who are more processoriented though, the thinker types, sometimes the relator types, and they want to know how everything’s going to work. When we have straight thinker audiences, there’s no such thing. I get that. But say you had a group of engineers, they’re probably highle thinkers. They’re detail oriented. They’re process focused. You know what? good time to start at the ground and work your way up to the point. If you’ve got relator types, people people, these um more supportive, a little bit more appreciative, caring kinds of individuals. They are often details up, but you’re focused on people details, teams, politics, how how communication is wrangled. Those are details that work up to a point. So rule of thumb, if they’re detail- oriented, whether it’s process or people, you know, grow it up like grass. If they are CEO types, drivers or inspirers who are about results and visions, you want to think like vines and grow down. And knowing either’s okay, these ideas can help you position your information so that it has both the point and the proof. And either way, you’re taking the scramble away from your audience and you’re bringing them information that they can understand. [Music]