The Art of Stakeholder Whispering 📱

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[music] Heat. Heat. N. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the digital leader show where we talk key issues and news [music] at the intersection of business and technology in hopes of making you a better digital leader.

Hosted by Dan Goodstein [music] and Herpa AI, a professional association, media, and peer research network providing education, [music] networking, and advice to over 130,000 global members on automation, enterprise AI, [music] and digital transformation. We're live Wednesdays at noon Eastern, 9:00 a.m. Pacific on LinkedIn and YouTube, and the audio recording [music] is available wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, here's your host, Dan [music] Goodstein. Hello everyone and welcome to the Digital Leader Show. Today we're discussing the art of stakeholder whispering, plus headlines for digital leaders from the world of enterprise technology. My co-host today is Chris Serdak, award-winning author, former White House Chief Transformation Office Adviser, partner for digital transformation at Gartner, and AI practice lead at EY.

He's authored three books including The Care and Feeding of Bots, Data Crush and Jerk, The 12 Steps to Rule the World. Chris, how's it going, buddy? Happy post Thanksgiving. >> Yeah.

Welcome to December. Year's almost over. >> Crazy. Crazy.

Although, there's this great thing. If you haven't seen it, uh I think it's the Jimmy Kimmel show where he does these uh these clips from all the newscasters across the country saying how surprised they are that it's December and uh you know that keeps always sneaks up on them every year like it doesn't come up same day every year. But yeah, it just feels like uh you know, we were just talking end of summer and here we are talking uh 2026. >> Yeah.

Well, where I am in Southern California, we get about a 60°ree temperature shift in in six weeks. So, it's a little it's pretty radical. [laughter] >> Oh, wow. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we uh we have that that here in New York, although we've gone from like cold in the daytime and I mean cold at night and warm in the day to just cold. So, uh feels like holidays, feels like uh New York winter, and uh so we're getting getting down to the uh the final stretch here.

I know we're going to talk a little bit about what's what's happening for for next year, but uh let's jump into headlines. I mean, the one that kind of uh got my attention this morning, Chris, and and this has been in the news a lot, obviously, but um you know, the jobs front, uh you know, according to ADP, um basically uh shocked everybody. The US labor market took a uh unexpected hit caused by private companies cutting 32,000 jobs. Um this uh in contrast to some economists predicting a a gain of 40,000 jobs.

So, uh big big uh adjustment to uh expectations. >> Well, and that's in particular coming into the holiday season where you always get the seasonality um labor demand bump. Um so, yeah, it's definitely worrying and I think there's some of the latent effects of both trade issues, tariffs, I was in Mexico recently and the whole discussion on there was around tariffs. Um and then just the economy weakening in general.

Um, I I I I don't I doubt that this is like the end of it and it's it's particularly hard coming into the holiday season because people are counting on those paychecks coming in. So, with luck, we'll have we'll have a bit of a bounce come the new year. We'll see. >> There's an interesting um an interesting element of it like like a lot of like a lot of stories if you uh get beyond the the headline.

U the steepest decline came from businesses with 50 or fewer employees. Um and actually uh larger businesses uh actually had a net gain of of 90,000 workers. So um interesting. Seems like you know more of a hit on uh the SMB space.

I wonder if you have any thoughts as to why that may be. >> Um well that that kind of leads into the where do you um who who can survive sort of an economic slowdown. the bigger companies simply by size and mass can potentially survive it better whereas smaller companies you know are run running more razor thin margin sort of thing and that's where um they can they can kind of they're forced to make the change but then every person you cut loose from a smaller firm is a bigger proportion of your total labor capacity.

So it's really a mixed blessing. um they can adjust their cost basis pretty quickly by cutting one or two people but that also has a more significant impact on their their capacity to operate. So um if we look at smaller businesses as being the real engine of of economic growth and activity in our country that that's more worrying than having up you know twothirds as many people doing Zoom calls every day at a Fortune 200. >> Yeah.

Yeah, the other thing that kind of entered my mind. I had a conversation with a friend who's a uh an HR executive uh for a bunch of big companies and and you know she said something she works with a lot of pees and VC firms and stuff and she said to me something interesting which is that you know some of these companies and I imagine this affects the SMB space more than the large enterprise but they're they're just becoming overleveraged you know they just keep taking on you know you know investment dollars and loans and um you know at some point that get that starts getting pulled, people get nervous and uh they're just they're just overleveraged.

So, I wonder if that's that's part of the culprit uh there. You know, we've talked about the kind of AI boom and uh just uh you know, where we are with this stuff. I I wonder if there's uh something to you know, some some of the financial you always say kind of the what's the term you use the the financial gymnastics uh that the companies play. Well, I I is it's I I forget the exact number, but something like 40% of the Fortune 500 or so-called zombie companies where their debt load um their cash flow doesn't match their debt load.

And so, so as you say, they're financing their mere existence. And as as um uh the money supply sort of gets crunched a little bit, um then that all of a sudden you're you're negative to the point where you can't recover from it. Also big companies have more access to credit and and liquidity than small companies do. So whereas as you know I don't know a city bank can go out and come up with another billion here a billion there to keep their operations going u you know dicks towing down the road can't do that.

So they got to let someone go. >> Um the other issue I think in smaller companies in smaller areas there's more of a cascading effect. if if that guy running the tow truck for Dick's Towing all of a sudden doesn't have a job, then the the local grocery store loses some of their revenue and stuff. So, there's more more of a cascading effect, I think, with these smaller businesses, which is potentially more worrying.

I don't know. >> Interesting. McKenzie's uh shaking up the business model, the consulting business model, which we've uh been scratching our heads at for for a bit, Chris. uh they're they're adopting to a performance-based pricing model uh with fees that are contingent on on outcomes.

It's uh it's finally happening. >> Yeah. So, in my 30 plus years of being in that in and around that business, um we always talked about it. Um but I mean the entire machine is oriented towards the billable hour and so forth.

So, a how do you get the entire machine to operate differently? Uh, it's it's sort of like trying to get a an oil an oil tank or boat to start flying, you know, it's not built for purpose. But then the second question is and and having done these analytics for again a third of a century, who are you going to trust when it comes down to the performance metrics, right? So, if I'm going to pay you per for performance, who's measuring the performance and hence getting paid?

So there's a really really perverse uh incentive there for for you know you're going to go to McKenzie to say how well did we do and they're likely to say you did fantastic. So I um a I I think it's a the right move to a certain extent but how you implement it with a a business whose entire model for almost a century has been you know billable hours and so forth is it's going to be it's going to be a neat trick for them to pull out. But I think I think it's somewhat inevitable and that's going to it's going to be more so the case across a lot of professional services.

>> Yeah. You know, I've I've always been kind of, you know, interested in that model. You know, you know, why why you hire somebody by the hour to fix a problem without they have an incentive to not fix, right? But so maybe so maybe now they have an incentive to to fix.

But you bring up a good point, which is, you know, you know, who who decides on the on on the measurements. you're you're you're reminding me of a of a round table we had years and years ago in the outsourcing days where you know a vendor uh that shall not be named and uh an executive at McDonald's was at one of our events arguing about you know who should pay for innovation and and how you should measure innovation and um whose innovation it is and uh yeah it's it's it's not quite so black and white right >> well it's it's sort of a strange parallel but I think of like was it Joseph Stalin that said, "Show show me the person and I'll show you the crime so I can I can throw you out in a goolag on whether you're not you're guilty."

It's sort of like, you know, show show me the uh the payoff and I'll I'll build the Excel model to make it make it so. Yeah. Meanwhile, the uh the AI race heats up. Uh, Open AI seems uh, according to some some reports to be uh, concerned that they're falling behind with some of the new releases from Google Gemini and uh, uh, others.

So, uh, apparently Sam Alman sent out a internal memo basically saying all hands on deck, no time off, and stop doing whatever else you're doing because we got to make chat GBT faster, more reliable, more personalized. um etc etc and uh this is as I think they have it I think Google's now uh embedded Gemini into Chrome um and uh Anthropic is making moves towards uh uh an IPO uh apparently >> well it said code red all hands on deck it sounds like he had chat GBT write it for him which he probably did um yeah it just rand random uh sayings that it picked up from its training.

Um can't the the people that analyze this, it's actually quite interesting where OpenAI you'd think there'd be a tighter correlation and and integration with Microsoft their parent because Microsoft is everywhere and you're never going to dismbed Microsoft. But that's sort of the advantage that Google has is that when they when they deploy their stuff, if they plug it into the back end of of Google, everybody is still googling stuff. I've seen some people make the commentary, well, you know, OpenAI now has, what is it, 400 million users or something like that.

Well, yeah, because it's not only free, it's 95% subsidized. The minute you start actually charging people what what it's potentially worth, nobody's going to use it. And then there was also the recent release where they they're showing that they're going to start posting ads in uh in their posts and you can be sure that those are going to be incredibly invasive ads based upon the dynamic conversation you think you're having with chat GBT at the time. So again, we're used to having sort of the first three Google results be some bought and paid for in advertising.

Um that'll be a new idiom for people with OpenAI to get used to with OpenAI. So, I the the cause of the panic is is less important than the fact that there is panic. Um, and it'll be interesting to see, you know, what subsequent funding rounds are going to look like when he inevitably goes out to try to get more funding. >> Yeah, it's interesting, right, because this is kind of this race to be the app, the the place where you search, if we can even use that term now.

Um, you know, I had downloaded a couple months back, uh, you know, the the Comet browser from Perplexity. Um, and that was interesting because it was the first time I really changed my default app to browse the internet and ask questions and search and uh, and things like that. And um, it's the first time I think I've been off Chrome in I can't think about how long since I've been a Chrome user. Um and you have more and more of these these these kind of things uh coming up and and fighting for um you know positioning uh on on your phone or wherever your the killer app is that you initiate the your research or your searches or or what have you.

This anthropic IPO uh they're saying could be one of the biggest ever. Uh they're talking about valuations of like 300 billion. Um and uh interestingly beating O open AI to the punch. Um, I'm g I'm gonna reinforce how just how old I really am.

I remember was it was it Time Warner that bought AOL and 2000 and it was the biggest acquisition ever. >> Whole I mean I'm I'm having massive Groundhog's Day deja vu all over again. >> Could it happen? And would it be the largest IPO ever?

Probably. Is there a good chance that it'll crash just like AOL did shortly after it was bought in 2000? Yeah, better than 50/50, I think. We'll see.

>> Yeah, AOL uh I think we had on the show a few weeks ago, they just finally uh got rid of the rest of their >> Yeah, right. So, took 25 years to finally kill it off, but it certainly wasn't a good purchase mere months after they did it back then. So, >> um yeah, it' be and and who has the liquidity right now to to pay that much? It'll be interesting to see.

So, I want to get to our guest for today. It's kind of the human side of things for a change. We spend so much time talking about AI, but uh excited to have our guest Bill Shanders with us today. He's the author of stakeholder whispering.

He's got 30 years of experience in information design, data storytelling, and visualization. He's the founder of Beehive, Beehive Media, has worked with a variety of organizations, Fortune 500, and government alike. Bill, welcome to the show. >> Thank you very much.

I'm excited to be here. So, I have to ask you how you got into uh this space. It's uh really interesting as we talked about before, a couple different >> [snorts] >> uh angles I want to ask you about, but uh how did you find yourself uh how did you become the the stakeholder whisperer? [laughter] >> Well, it's funny you were talking about Mackenzie before.

One of my very first clients was actually Mckenzie uh a very very long time ago. I had a lot of consulting firms as clients and I was doing web design and development in the early years and kind of like the AI crazy hype cycle right now at the time everybody would just show up say we need a website just make a website and just throw a website together but they didn't weren't really thinking about like why and how and who's going to look at this thing what do you want them to do when they get there etc and so you know I was doing this kind of work for people who were usually thoughtful and strategic about how they worked uh and suddenly they weren't And so, long story short, I've been doing stakeholder whispering my entire career.

And I think it's what's actually that made the difference for me in my career. Like the the idea that clients hire me to do X, but X, the technical skills, what I really do for a living, you know, sort of on paper isn't as important as that therapy session, that conversation with them where I help them figure out what they really need before I actually do it. So that's you know how I got here is probably largely because working in consulting firms I got up close and personal with these kinds of people but I've been doing for a very very long time and like I said it's more important than the technical stuff that I actually do.

>> So you know you said something interesting to me before we went on live. um you know I was thinking of this from this from the standpoint of you know how to communicate with uh with with stakeholders and um influence within the organization and I want to talk about that but you you said something kind of interesting which is you know part of the time stakeholders don't even know what they're asking for and what they need so so what does that what does that uh entail >> yeah I mean the basic idea so you know I know you talk about digital transformation right so think about how many digital transformation projects are just a disaster.

Or you were just talking about the, you know, the Time Warner AOL purchase, right? We we do things, it's part of like an automated response. We're driven by our subconscious at all times. This is proven by decades of psychological research.

And so in the work world, the example is, okay, hey, you know, there's these new things out called CRM or ERPs or LMS's or whatever it is. Let's let's do it. Let's we got we need one of those because I heard our comp competitors have one of those. And so everyone marches ahead and they spend millions of dollars and they they pay the consultants a gazillion dollars and they spend a year or three years launching some giant system and it's an utter failure 90% of the time and it's because no one said, "Well, gee, why are we doing this?"

You know, what is the point? I instead of being driven by that automated response, let's think it through and think about what we're actually trying to solve for and then focus on that. So, you know, it's just a a fact of life that humans are driven by their subconscious at all times or we're driven by, you know, competitive instinct or whatever other reasons. And our job is to slow it down and just be a little bit more strategic, a little bit more thoughtful about what we're doing and why we're doing it before we start doing it.

>> Imagine that, right? Yeah. I I think I think we live in this uh this world where I I read this book a few months back about deep work, this term deep work and and how basically nobody does it anymore because we're just in this reactive environment all the time of, you know, answering emails and putting out fires and uh and things. How do you how do you create a culture around that or or or or if you're an employee, how do you kind of see if that culture is going to exist or do you just have to deal with these difficult stakeholders and the way they're doing things?

>> Yeah. I mean, so first of all, it is definitely true that some companies have a culture where this is accepted, embraced even, and they they really thrive on, hey, let's let's be thoughtful and really make sure we're doing the right thing. Other cultures are definitely top down, just do what I say and don't, you know, shut up about it already. Um, so, you know, what I say is that, you know, test for it, right?

So the next time your boss or your client asks you to do something, ask one question, right? The one question is, you know, tell me more. You could it could be as simple as that. Tell me more about this request you're asking of me.

And maybe they expand a little bit on it and from there you have a little bit more information. Or another question that's a good one is how are we going to measure success? Now this is interesting because you were just talking about that with McKenzie. you know, suddenly they're this paper by for per performance.

And not only to your point, depends on who's measuring, right? And if they're reporting on their measurements, that's a problem. On top of that, you know, there's a very famous quote, you know, you can't manage what you don't measure. And that actually is not what was actually said.

The actual quote, and I'm going to get it wrong also, but directionally accurate. The quote actually is more, you know, we'll manage to whatever we measure. And the point that he was making when he said that is that whatever you decide to measure, that's where you're going to optimize for. So McKenzie, whatever they decide to measure, even if the company's going to do the measuring themselves, they're going to optimize for solving that and and boosting those numbers.

And so you know, when you're in the business world and your your boss says do X and you say, well, how are we going to measure success? Well, then now suddenly you're going to be oriented towards optimizing for that. But even that question should have a follow-up like, okay, well, why are we measuring for that? So, you know, you got to test the waters.

Um, and you'll discover whether your boss is whisperable, as I call it. Um, and honestly, like the short answer is is if your boss isn't whisperable, then you probably should find a new boss because it's going to be a happier, healthier, and more productive work environment when you work somewhere where that is the culture of the organization. >> Chris, you you you spend a lot of time in this these types of environments. Uh, are you able to tell right away when you speak to a stakeholder?

What you are they is is it that black and white or what was your experience? >> Um, well, I Bill's spot on on a bunch of stuff here. The thing that immediately came to mind is um I ride motorcycles and the first thing they teach you is if if there's like a tree around the corner or there's a rock in the road, don't look at it because if you stare at it, you're going to hit it. And to your point, like if if I set up a metric, I'm going to hit that metric even if it's not good for me.

And I and I've often said transformation is in the metrics you're not you're not making right now, not in the ones that you are. Right. So, um, and I I get the sense, Bill, that that's And then the other thing is, as you were talking that comes to mind is back in the 90s, we would talk about the five W's. Can you answer why you're doing what you're doing at least five times?

And nobody most people can't get past two or three. And that's very telling as to who is a stakeholder and are they to your point are they whisperable? >> Yeah. Yeah.

The five W's are great. I talk about that in the book and the basic idea for those of you who aren't familiar with it. Yeah. You're asking why and the first answer is a surface level answer.

The next why and the next why eventually you get to the real root cause of the issue. But, you know, Chris, to your point, I I was looking you up on LinkedIn and I noticed you actually in your banner on LinkedIn, you have one of the greatest data visualizations of all time, >> which is the survivor bias visual. And for those of you who don't know the story, it's a picture of an airplane and has a bunch of dots which represent where this plane World War II, this is a true story from World War II, where the plane got shot.

And so the basic idea is these planes would come back. The mechanics would notice all the holes and then they would try to figure out what to do about that. And the answer was, oh well, look at all the holes in the tips of the wings or on like the tail. We should put armor there because we're obviously getting shot a lot there.

But that's the exact opposite logic because those are the planes that made it back. In other words, the plane can fly just fine. It has a bunch of holes in the tips of the wings and in the tail where you don't see any holes. Those are the planes that probably didn't make it back.

So to Chris's point, like you know, it's the data you're not thinking about. It's where it's where you're not looking that you have to be really thoughtful about. And that's our job as stakeholder whisperers is to say, "Okay, I heard you ask for X. I know that everybody's doing X."

You know, that the normal thing is to do X. I wonder if there's something other than X that we should be thinking about. >> Not exact. Well, and for me, that came from my time building spacecraft where it's, you know, half half of getting half of mission success is not failing.

And we spend so much time, you know, we had a bunch of engineers that were were trying to get to Mars. And I was the guy that said, "Okay, don't blow up along the way." >> And so, generally speaking, if you're failing at the stuff that you're concentrating on, then you're just incompetent. If you're failing at the stuff that you didn't concentrate on, that's your opportunity, >> right?

Yeah, that's a great example. >> So, Bill, how how do we do this in practice, though? So I mean we we we just we live in a in a corporate world where everything is KPIs and dashboards and um you know reports um and you know our audience is you know largely technical people largely data people. So you know it's like it's it's data analysis paralysis sometimes.

um do we do we just have to split the difference or is that does that not work at all? How do you kind of figure out the right the mixture of you know reading between the lines and and and data that's really not data but it's more information to your point. >> Yeah. I think the first thing is that you know data people of all people should realize that data is inherently flawed right there is no such thing as perfect data.

And so, you know, we know the numbers we're getting from here, here, and here are missing stuff or we, you know, we've analyzed it from a certain perspective, etc. There's all kinds of biases at play, conscious and subconscious. And so, our data is imperfect. That doesn't mean we don't use it.

Of course, we got to use it, but it means, you know, allow ourselves to recognize that everything has gray area and to essentially question everything. I call it, you know, engage your useful paranoia. Be a little bit paranoid. What's wrong with this data?

what's wrong with these decisions I'm making? What's wrong with this plan? And probe it just investigate it. Ask a few questions.

And that includes even when you have, okay, we have these KPIs and we have these KPIs for a reason. Like, you know, we have quarterly results and you know, the market is watching blah blah blah. All right. But you know what, next quarter maybe the KPIs need to shift.

And the best example I can give is remember COVID, you know, in COVID all of a sudden every dashboard in the entire corporate world was useless when COVID hit because instead of well, you know, as if we're below 3% growth or you know, below 2% growth, it's a disaster. Well, then it was if you were above negative 10% growth, you were like heroes, right? So, you got to change your thresholds. You always got to be dynamic and be able and willing to adjust your perspective and what you're shooting for and how you're shooting for it.

So, you know, again, data people should be more aware of this than anybody. We sometimes get hyperfocused on the numbers, but remember that all data is flawed. It's all gray area. So, take a step back and just question everything a little bit.

>> I Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I could I mean I I Bill, you're spot on with COVID because at the time I was dealing with a bunch of companies trying to do logistics modeling and and they they said, "Well, how do we do how do we do any modeling in the middle of the pandemic and everything's all topsyturvy." I said, "Go to your noisiest data. Go to your most abnormal data because you're in an abnormal situation.

The more you use the normal stuff that drove your business for the last decade, the farther off you're going to be." >> Yeah. And so one of the challenges with like data cleansing, when I'm cleansing the so-called bad data, I'm eliminating the ability to answer a different question. >> Yeah, it's a great point.

Yeah. And like you know, in the normal world, this is the threshold. Well, it be between here and here. And the noisy days, it makes it look like that.

Well, guess what? That is reality at that moment. So that's that's the gray area. Live in it.

It's going to be painful, but you you got to acknowledge the reality for sure. And how do you how do you how do you kind of take that that data um figure out what is, you know, the actionable part or the relevant part and and and kind of do that storytelling, Bill, because I think that's such a great uh trait that you that you talk about, right? It's one thing to get all these I mean, I I I get all these automated reports in my inbox that I just delete because I don't I don't know what they are or what they're actually telling me, right?

or or what what I'm supposed what what I'm supposed to take away from them. So, you know, how do you how do you figure out what to take away from them and then maybe more importantly, you know, craft that sto do that storytelling around it? >> I mean, this gets back to how you introduced this, right? The basic idea is we're now back in the human element of things and whether it's an automated report that you know some software system or some thresholds were check box were checked and thresholds were set and every Monday goes out or it's an AI generated report.

You know AI andor automation doesn't know what you actually need and it also doesn't know the context of the data. This week our biggest issue in our company is retention. We had you know 47 people quit last week in one department. Oh my god, what the hell's going on over there?

Next week the issue will be like some logistical challenge and the week after that it'll be about etc. So, you know, context is what it's all about. And so, you know, even though AI or automated systems can understand concept and spit out that here's the most urgent thing this week based on the numbers, it doesn't know what you Dan or Chris needs from that because or it could, but we don't set up our systems smart smartly enough to do it that way. Long story short, big picture is it always circles back to stakeholder whispering because I, you know, I as a human can be empathetic with you, Dan, and understand what you in your role and what I know is going on in the rest of your business, what you need from me today.

And so I can tell you the story oriented towards what you need. You know, because storytelling, it's not just putting a narrative together so the information flows, although that's a really key part of storytelling, but it's about knowing which story you need to hear. And it's not the story I want to tell. I'm not manipulating the numbers for my own benefit.

But it's what do you need from me today? And what you need is going to be based on me having these stakeholder whispering conversations with you so I understand what's driving you. What what are your concerns? What's your context in addition to the context of the data itself?

You know, we live uh we live in this era now where uh a good chunk of the workforce has never been in a traditional work environment. At least the way the three of us I think would would define it pre2020, right? I mean there's a entire part of the workforce that has has almost entirely worked remote or or hybrid. um what what's your advice for them uh just just to influence stakeholders to get facetime with stakeholders to advance within the or you know because it used to be you walk down the hallway you bumped into your boss you had an opportunity to you're in the elevator right you had your your opportunity still you all these Steve Jobs stories of him catching people in the elevator uh and him making promotions or or firing people based on what they told him uh in an elevator right you don't have that the way you you used to right so how do you do that in this virtual virtual world.

>> Yeah, man. It's so hard. It, you know, Zoom came along, you know, COVID hit, Zoom was there and it worked incredibly well. It was, it surprised most of us how easily we could shift to a remote world.

And, you know, I teach workshops. Clients hire me to teach them data storytelling and visualization. And literally on Sunday afternoon, my client Starbucks said, "Don't come tomorrow for the workshop tomorrow." I was supposed to fly in that night.

And so they said, "But we're going to put you on Zoom." So literally with less than 24 hours notice, I had to do the full workshop virtually. And it worked okay. It really was not horrible.

But here's the key issue is that, you know, body language obviously goes away. And even eye contact goes away, right? I'm looking at the camera so that it you feel like I'm looking at you, but guess what? I can't look at you if I'm looking at the camera.

So it's certainly not two-way eye contact, although it can sort of feel that way. And without eye contact, you're not reading what's really going on. You're not seeing facial expressions. You're not getting those all those little cues that help us really understand things.

Add on top of that, yeah, those there's, you know, serendipitous crossings in, you know, the cafeteria or the elevator. It just doesn't happen. So the short answer is a you know what go to the office sometimes or if you're a leader you know organize quarterly or semi-yearly events where people can actually get together face to face. Um if it's an all remote company then you just do the best you can and you try to have you know really you know human conversations rather than just a quick stand up you know update update update update which is you know doesn't work even in person I I would argue you know try to have real conversations um and again when you're the person being assigned a task you know do your best to really engage and don't just take what somebody says as with, you know, with with, you know, as like um you know, essentially like, you know, the the the edict from up top and run with it.

Always question everything. And again, depending on the patience and how whisperable your boss is, you know, you're going have to sort of find that, you know, that fine line between annoying your stakeholder uh and getting the information that you need. But start off slow. Take small bites of the apple.

Um, but you know, if you're if you're reared in an all remote environment, it's going to be hard. It's not as easy as in person. You just got to do the best you can. And that's that's lame advice, but it's unfortunately all I can give you.

>> Yeah. But so you know I'm curious you you're running these workshops uh that you in these courses um is there are there any particular kind of points where you see kind of the the aha moment uh especially for people that are not normally uh visual learners, visual thinkers? Anything pop out in particular? >> Yeah, I mean there's a few things that I teach that are always aha moments.

When it comes to the visual component of things, um, my favorite thing to teach is something called pre-attentive processing. We know from psychology, from from, you know, research on human visual perception that you'll react to a visual in an instant. It's literally subconscious. It's so fast.

Once you understand that, then that makes the case for making visuals very, very, very simple. Minimal design. And you you are you have complex data. You're making a really complex chart.

There's this a big story to tell. It cannot be the simplest chart in the world. Okay, fine. But I'm going to design it as simply as possible.

I'm going to take all the color out. I'm going to take as much distracting information off of it. And the one thing that I need you to see, and by the way, this gets back to the storytelling. What do you need, Dan, right now about this data?

Because I' because I've whispered you. I know what you need. That's the only part that's going to be in color, bold, and with a giant arrow pointing at it. So visual perception being in incredibly fast pre-attentive allows me to design in a very simple way.

It requires that I design that way. So that's one thing that I teach that is usually and especially the way I demonstrate it really you know um lifealtering for people when they're doing data visualization because I'll walk through like a a chart where I took the original chart which is a complete hot mess and then the final version of it which actually tells the story of that data effectively and I do it step by step by step by simply removing stuff for the most part and by the end it's like oh yeah that's why a good chart usually looks like that and not like that disaster that we started with.

What what I what I love about that is I you know I'm a marketing go to market guy by trade originally, right? So um you know a lot of the the work I do formally and informally is is helping tech companies that you know have long lists of uh of of features and stuff and try to get it down to a simple pitch, right? And um and it's exactly what you're talking about, right? It's take whether it's an image or slides or a bunch of text on a website.

It's it's it's getting it from the 40page version to the what's the one thing you do really really well? Uh the proverbial elevator pitch I guess or or what what a third grader would understand. Um but what what's great about that is in that process you learn a lot and and they learn a lot about what their value proposition actually is. the the exercise of creating the image is almost to me as valuable or more valuable than the image itself because it forces you to kind of work through it um at a level of detail that most most companies that I've worked with haven't done.

>> Yeah. I mean, and by the way, that's simultaneously sort of like the five W's. Um it's also, you know, it's it's thinker whispering. What it's all about is it's like therapy.

So like, you know, let's take that example. you you have a deck and it's trying to convince, you know, some giant corporation to buy your SAS product, whatever it is. All right. Well, why why is it 60 pages, you know, what what is if you if I only gave you one thing to say, what would you say?

Then they say like one sentence, the elevator pitch. Could this deck be literally that one sentence on a slide? Well, no, because we need to say these other four things for regulatory purposes and blah blah blah. Okay.

Well, you know what? Could we say three of those four things? you know, like so you the way I always phrase it is what if you defaulted to no? What if instead of putting all 60 pages out there and just selectively trimming it back, what if we started out with the most minimal thing we could possibly think of, that one sentence, and only add in what must be added in?

And if we take that approach, you're going to be a much more effective communicator. But to your point, the process of thinking it through will clarify your own thinking on what you do, how you do it, etc. It's literally like therapy. And that's what stakeholder whispering is always about.

It's it's this therapeutic process to help your stakeholders figure out what do they need? What do they really need to do here? And then everything else is just garbage noise. And so ignore it.

>> Yeah, it's it's interesting. I I spent uh the early part of my career in the newspaper business. I think this always came natural to me. It was kind of the same thing like you when you when you wrote something, you had to back you had to frontload it, right?

You had to you had to put the really important information in the front. You could always go deeper. You could always go longer. You could always explain further.

You could always more into data, whatever have you. But uh but you had to be prepared for the fact that if the editor cut it to three paragraphs that the important stuff made the cut, right? And it's it's kind of like that with with marketing maybe with storytelling. Uh as well, you know, people can always ask questions.

You can go to the deeper, you know, number four, number five, number six, number 37. Um but what's that one, you know, one thing or the or the first three paragraphs that are going to get somebody's uh attention, right? Yeah, trained as a journalist also. So, 100% with you on that.

And on top of the editor might cut it, the reader isn't going to read more than the first three paragraphs anyways. You got to always assume that. So, for both reasons, yeah, 100%. >> I mean, I don't know.

I don't know what Deborah they if they track stats back then, but I wonder what the percentage of people uh was that would actually go to the you know, it said uh story continues on page 47. Did people actually flip through the paper and go to page 47? Because I never did. I didn't have the attention span for it.

Yeah, that's right. If only we had click-through metrics back then on those. [laughter] >> I I think a lot of people are blown away by the concept that there was this before times when humanity didn't have PowerPoint and we still manage to communicate effectively. In fact, arguably more effectively and I always go back to um as what makes us I think unique as a species is tools, but we're not the only one that uses tools, but also storytelling.

So for tens of thousands of years, the way that we communicated anything with each other was through stories. That that was the collective memory of our species. And I think if you can plug in effective storytelling, which I think is what you're talking about with stakeholder narrative, um that that sits with us at a very deep primal level, and I think that's how you get people to be more into whatever it is you're talking about. >> Yeah.

I mean, there's lots and lots of research that shows that story is what we remember. Mhm. >> You know, there was one study done a few years ago where they were essentially doing a fundraiser and they sent people different brochures. Some people got a brochure that was all stats and other people got a brochure that had stories and the story brochure raised more money and it was the part that people remembered and those two things are probably correlated.

>> Um, on top of that, there's actually some people who have made a pretty compelling case to say that storytelling is actually more important than opposable thumbs as an evolutionary imperative. that literally the survival of the human species relies more on storytelling than it does in some of the other things we would think of because how did we learn how to hunt buffalo? Well, people would go and hunt buffalo and they would come back to the village and they would explain and it was data by the way.

It was a data information how many arrows they carried, how many arrows they ran, mileage, how many buffalo there were etc. But that data was trans, you know, was communicated in the form of a story. So we remember the story which means we learn how to do things like hunt buffalo. Really important.

>> It's all people people to your point people remember uh uh stories. They don't they they can't tell you uh you know the these stats which you would think would be really import I I always go through this myself like you know I'll hear stats. I'll be reading something or listening to audible or whatever and I'll hear this stat. I'm like wow that's a great stat.

That's an amazing stat. And I like even give myself the like I want to remember this stat. Maybe it's just me dyslexic or what. And then the next day I'm like, oh, I had that stat.

I can't reme I can't remember it because there's no story attached to it, right? But when you hear a story, I can tell you where I was on my walk when I heard that story. Um, and I flashed back to that moment and I remember all this stuff I was thinking at that time. Um, it's it's an amazing thing.

And we see it in marketing, too. I I um you know we're at the point where we almost exclusively force our our members to when they publish content to publish case studies not just thought leadership not just you know miscellaneous content case studies because it's it's essentially storytelling right it's talking about how a customer had a problem how you solved that problem um and it's a it's a story >> yeah and the thing is stories trigger an emotional response and when you literally feel That's memorable.

You know, a number 42. Okay. Well, you know, whatever. 42, you know, but what does 42 mean?

What was the impact of 42? That's much more impactful. >> Chris, you've uh you've written a couple books, too. I mean, uh you've seen this play out.

Yeah, >> I it's I I fold it into everything I do with my own with my own company and my team. I say theme, team, and tech in that order. That's what you have to prioritize. whether you're talking to employees, investors, customers, um it's that theme, the storytelling part of it that's going to make the connection with any of them.

And then Bill, I love you mentioned it before, context is everything. The same story isn't going to have the same effect on each person. So, you need to tailor the messaging to the individual to get them individually engaged to have them have that emotional response as you mentioned a moment ago, Bill. >> Yeah.

And it's interesting, you know, that's sort of like the promise of AI, right? Like AI can know what Chris needs today, what Dan needs today, what Bill needs, and it could theoretically send us each an individual message based on the same data, based on the same whatever, but it's not really doing that. But if and when it does, you know, that's going to be pretty powerful automation, you know, maybe some of the stuff I mentioned earlier almost goes away. I don't I don't think so still because you know I think that context is only can only go so far without that human understanding of well what does that mean for that human on the other side I think there's always going to be a psychological component to it but that ultra personal personalization is one of those promises that maybe can start to deliver on some of the promise that that tech has has been you know shouting about for the last couple few years.

Well, and Dan, you know, this is a favorite of mine. I've been arguing all along that transformers inherently strip context out of language. So, it so I I actually shudder to think, Bill, that we actually figure out the technology to do that because when we can take an AI and have it be contextsensitive like you just described, then we're probably in real trouble. We're already plugged into the matrix and and we won't know it.

>> Yeah, definitely true. So, Bill, one one final uh one if you could maybe uh leave our uh our listeners, our viewers with uh some fi final advice for anybody that's watching that's kind of stuck in a a messy stakeholder dynamic, uh competing priorities, last minute changes other than quit their jobs. What What are a few simple behaviors they can try this week to be more of a a shareholder whisperer? I think it really mostly comes down to, you know, first of all, recognizing that these people exist, you know, sort of, and I do talk about that in the book.

I have a chapter about the trouble you run into. And I I sort of name a few of the characters, you know, like the passive aggressive leader or whoever, the kinds of people who might be un unwisperable or less whisperable, recognize it. Um, and yes, if you can move on, please do. But if you can't, then you know, take small bites of the apple.

The fact is even even your most difficult stakeholders would prefer that you do a good job than that you execute on some stupid task that ends up wasting a ton of money and a ton of time and and gets them in trouble with their stakeholders because don't forget your stakeholder has stakeholders, right? Um so take small bites of the apple. You know, can you get an hourlong meeting every time your your boss asks you to do something? Probably not.

And will be a productive meeting? Maybe not. But can you get five minutes? Can you get that one question of of additional clarity addressed?

And then if by the way when you do that the whole thing is about building trust. Once you've done that and you've delivered a better experience because of that, then the next time you might get two or three questions in and before you know it, you have hourlong meetings every time because your stakeholder begins to recognize how good you are at this and how much of a difference that it makes. So, you know, recognize it and take small bites of the apple is probably the best short advice I can give.

>> Great advice, Bill. Thank you so much. Where can people find you? Where can they buy the book?

>> I'm uh always available on my website, billshander.com. There's a link to the book there, and of course, it's on Amazon and everywhere else you can find books these days. >> Sounds good, Bill.

Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much. It was fun. >> Thank you, >> Chris.

Good conversation. Um, I promise I'm not trying to find people that agree with you. In fact, I'm I'm trying the opposite. I'm trying to find people that don't agree with you, but uh the I'm starting to learn that uh you were right about a lot of things.

>> Uh it's selection bias, you know, maybe that that airplane thing that we were discussing where I I just have more holes than most people. Um but he's he's spot on. The more we're counting on automation and the technology and so forth, the more the human aspects are going to be the determinant of who succeeds and not. I I think back to, you know, ERP, everybody needed ERP because it gave you worldclass processes.

But if your processes are like everyone else's, then there's nothing to differentiate you. >> So, I think we're we're heading down that sort of path even faster now. And and whatever that last percentage of your organization that can touch on people's human human aspects, that's what's going to differentiate you. >> Yeah, makes sense.

Well, thanks for joining us everybody. Uh we'll be back Wednesday at noon Eastern, 9 Pacific. In the meantime, if there's anything that you're working on, you need some help, some advice, uh please go to herpaai.org.

You can reach out to us there. Uh in the meantime, have a great week. Thanks, Chris. >> Yeah, take care, Dan.