Journal
Six people, six versions
A small exercise for a Monday morning. It takes ten minutes, and you’ll probably be thinking about the answers for weeks.
The exercise
Pick six people in your company and send them all the same short message. Spread them out if you can: someone in sales, someone who builds the product, someone who joined this year, someone senior, whoever answers the phone and the person who’s been there longest.
Ask them one thing. “If a friend asked what we do, what would you say? A sentence or two, no slides.”
Tell them not to check the website first. When the answers come back, put all six next to each other.
What you’ll probably see
In our experience it usually lands in one of three places.
They all say roughly the same thing. The words are different but the point is the same. Then you’ve got a story. Keep using it.
They’re all true and they don’t add up. Everyone describes their own part of the company well, and nobody describes the whole thing. This is really common in good companies that grew quickly.
They sound like six different companies. Some answers contradict each other, and some describe the company as it was years ago. At some point the story split and nobody noticed.
One request: don’t mark the answers. Everybody told you something true, and the gaps between them are the interesting part.
The chain
Why six versions on the inside turn into many more on the outside.
01Break point
Six versions inside
The story lives in lots of heads and each one has tweaked it a bit. This is where the exercise catches it.
02
Six versions out in the world
New hires, partners and customers all get to know the company through whoever they happen to talk to first.
03
Referrals get vague
Happy customers still recommend you, warmly and a bit hazily. “They’re great. They do sort of everything.”
04
First meetings start with a correction
Prospects turn up expecting something you stopped doing ages ago, and the first half hour goes on putting that right.
05
You hire for the old company
People apply to the company they heard about, which isn’t always the one that’s hiring.
06
You come across smaller than you are
From the outside the company looks narrower than it feels from the inside. It shows in what you can charge and in who gets in touch.
Fix it before it leaves the building
Luckily, the earliest point is also the easiest. It starts with a single sentence everyone can say in their own words and still mean the same thing.
That sentence is harder to write than it sounds. It’s also worth more than most campaigns, because your people take it into meetings, dinners and job interviews that no campaign will ever reach.
- The conscious read
- If your own people describe you a bit vaguely, everyone else will too.
- The romantic read
- Somewhere in those six answers is the one sentence that could hold all of them.
If this sounds familiar