The story in the summary

These days you tell people something and they will urge you “Tell me fast!”
When you have an interesting idea you are urged to “turn this concept into an elevator speech!”
When you have a concept you are often asked “what is the key visual for this creative approach?
When you have a theme with multiple facets, people say “can you show this as a visual board?”
And one of my favourites, “Do not give me a research report – just give me a well edited video film that I can play for about 7-10 minutes..”

People try to get more out of their life and time in more ways than one “The album sucks – just get the 1st and 4th track”, “What is the one thing that this workshop told you?” “So what is this book really saying?”

And then of course everyone tries to convey their feelings with communication expressions like “LOL”, “Rgds”, “Tks” “tc” (in addition to, the now, more than 50 kinds of smiley)

Also, in the past almost 2-3 years, people have even started rationing spelling their names – I guess it started with the lack of time and soon turned into a statement of style through on brevity. So Saurabh Sharma is not needed at the need of every mail – ‘s’ is enough however if you really mean to sign off, it can be “S”.

The rise of visually rich adult comics, messages with symbols, PowerPoint presentations without words, word documents without many words, music without words, music videos with Karaoke are some examples of the new shorthand culture.

While on one side everything is getting “shorter, crisper, smoother, faster, focused, narrow, now and quick”, on the other side there is this constant appeal for the “Story”. “Can you say what you want to say in a way that I not just hear but I also ‘like to listen’, ‘remember’, ‘believe’ and ‘act upon’?”

I believe that the paucity of time is intensifying the tension between ‘relaxed story telling’ and ‘brevity geared for efficiency’. The long story needs to get short but the short point needs to tell a story!
Today, the classic - ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ also needs a story that can be engaging and yet at the same time ‘the stories that we tell need to be told in the elevator’.

Interpersonal communication, especially in work situations, is becoming increasingly demanding and most of us who do not recognize this end up at the wrong side of it. The key perhaps is to understand (in real time) when to switch to the story, when to say the summary and when to say the story in a summary.