I'm walking on stage at a customer's annual conference. A thousand people sit there waiting, and I'm terrified. It's not the size of the audience: I'm speaking after two people who might be considered national treasures of comedy, and I'm a complete unknown.
How did I end up there?
I'm on stage to introduce the new company website. Their main channel isn't digital, so there's been an open question for a long time:
What is the website actually for?
To answer that question, we'd spent weeks talking to customers and employees. We sifted through what we learned by putting hundreds of sticky notes on the wall, trying to make sense of it, aka 'affinity mapping'.
But as you can't move that wall to the hundreds of decision-makers involved, I had to condense our thinking into a coherent, short presentation, summarising thousands of noisy data points. After the first time I presented it, I knew we were on to something when the client said:
"when you got to the answer, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head."
And that is why she invited me to speak at their annual conference. We'd done the work that no-one else had done: making sense of the mess. Doing the work to find the gold gave us one solid story, one coherent answer, near-impossible to argue with.
Most of us don't have a huge wall of data points to sift through; it's a mess of neurons inside our skulls. Like the wall, it's not portable: we can't just hand it to others.
So when the first thing you reach for is your presentation tool, or you just start improvising in a meeting to answer a question, you've skipped the most critical step: building the argument from the mess in your head.
Over time, I realised that I was doing the same thing over and over again. The act of trying to tell the story forced me to get everything out of my head, find the few things that matter, and order them so each one earns its place next to the others.
And that's why I created Mess to Message: a fast, repeatable method for taking your data points and transforming them into a convincing argument.
Which leads me to today's tip. You need the thoughts out of your head to start making sense of them: here's the fastest way to do that.
- Transcribe yourself talking about the thing. Do it for longer than you think. Look at your work and notes while you're doing it. Ramble freely: prototype with your mouth. Don't sweat the order or quality. Throw in what you've already written or said in meetings.
- Ask an LLM to convert it into a spreadsheet. One point per cell, all in one column. Don't let it edit or interpret, just break it up.
- Paste the spreadsheet column into Miro / Figjam / etc. Miro has a 'paste as sticky notes' feature.
That's pretty fast to do. Now the real work begins - finding only the most important sticky notes in the mess, and start making a linear argument out of them. More on this in the coming weeks!
Now you might be thinking: why shouldn't I let the AI work out the argument for me?
Because like me, you'd never ask a stranger to take over the most important part of the work. How could I possibly end up on stage in front of a thousand people, if I hadn't internalised the argument I was making?
A good communicator isn't someone who is reading from a script like a robot, it's someone who knows their stuff deep in their bones.
And despite the odds against me, my talk was a hit.
