“The simplest questions are the best”

How does movie producer Brian Grazer—he’s “in the feelings business,” remember—get to the heart of an idea?

In his book, A Curious Mind, he offers three questions. As you might have guessed from the title of this post, they’re simple questions. And I agree with Grazer: the simpler the question, the better.

“What kind of movie is Grinch?”

Obviously we’re adapting this question. Most companies are not in the business of making movies—especially not movies about the beloved children’s book How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But every time you stand in front of an audience to speak, every time you sit down at your keyboard to write, you’ve got to be clear about what kind of message you want to deliver. Is it celebratory? Somber? Informative? Inspirational? Your answer to the “what kind of” question will shape your theme.

“What story are we telling?”

Make no mistake about it: Everything is a story. Stories are the basic units of how we make sense of the world.

If you don’t present your thoughts as a story, your listeners will shape them into one. And their story may be very different than yours. I suspect that’s not what you want.

“What feeling are we trying to convey, especially when the audience is going to arrive with their own set of feelings about the story?”

I almost truncated that last question to “What feeling are we trying to convey?” After all, people aren’t going to enter your business meeting with an attachment to your story that stretches back to when they were a sleepy tot in footie PJs. (Probably.) But don’t assume they’re completely blank slates, either. No one is.

Say you’re rebranding and as part of that you’re going to change your logo. You’ll have people who hate the existing logo, so they’ll be happy. You have people who love the existing logo so much they’ve had it tattooed on their arms. Happy? Not so much. And people will have the same reactions to the new logo—some will love it, some will hate it, some may see it as eating up a good chunk of earnings that could have gone into their bonus check. Even people who just joined your organization that very day will walk in with their own feelings—maybe the old logo was what drew their attention to your company in the first place.

The point is, no one is a blank slate—about anything. But if you go in knowing that, your speech is not just going to be a celebratory “Ta-da! here’s our new logo!” Instead you’ll make it a persuasive “Who we are today is [insert adjectives of your choice]. This new logo is the visual representation of that.”

Three simple questions to help you shape a powerful message.