The Power of Simplicity with Ben Guttmann

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide, and we're eager to do the same for you. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Ben, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, Kwame. It's great to be here.

Yes, it is my pleasure. Anybody who comes from Melina Palmer recommendation automatically gets spot man. So I'm excited to have you. So I'm going to get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I appreciate that. And I'll also use this as an opportunity to plug Molina's new book, which the week we're talking to each other just came out. It's the truth about pricing. It's awesome. My copy just came. I can't wait to read it. So thank you, Melina, for connecting us. So my background, I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I basically kind of right out of college and, you know, I set up shop in my old professor's basement. We slapped our logo on the wall and we worked with like the local ice cream shop and local camera shop. And then bit by bit, we started to, you know, get a little bit bigger and work with some bigger clients. And we eventually got an office and, you know, of our own and we hired some employees and. And 10 years later, we're working with the NFL and with Comcast and I love New York and all these really great brands. And then I sold the business. But, you know, two years ago we woke up and we said, well, do we want to do this kind of for the next 10 years? And. And decided, you know, let's find a home for this. And so we. We went out. We were lucky to find a couple partners for that. And since then, I've been teaching, I've been writing, I've been consulting. And what I' saying a little bit in that process is you can kind of like, take the boy out of the marketing agency, but you can't take the marketing out of the boy a little bit because the questions that, you know, you hire a marketing agency to solve, which, like, how do you get people to care about things or how do you get people to do things? Well, those are still kind of rattling around in my brain. And that's how we ended up where we're talking today, where my first book just came out called Simply Put, why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them.

I love this man. And congratulations. That's kind of like the American dream, you know, Start off in a basement, sell, you know, that's great. So kudos.

Thank you, listeners.

We were chatting before, we were just chatting about the art of simplicity and how that's kind of getting lost. And when we think about it in marketing, we understand it makes sense, but also we have to think about it in our everyday communication. How can we simplify our messages in order to be heard? And so Ben kind of set the stage for us when you're talking about the general premise of the book and what it means for us as everyday professionals.

So I'm glad you said that because one thing I argue in this book, this is a book that lives on the marketing shelf, right? That's where you're going to find it at Barnes and Noble. But the truth is, today, you know, in 2024 and for quite a while now, we're all marketers, right? We all have things that we want to share with the world. We all have causes that we care about or products that we're launching or businesses or organizations we want to build. And yes, this is a skill. Communicating, simply communicating in a way that moves people is a skill that a marketer is really going to take advantage of. But if you're an entrepreneur or a parent or advocate or, you know, a teacher, faith leader, those are all positions where you're trying to. Very much the same thing, right? And so what I found in all of those situations is the commonality between what works and what doesn't is quite literally that what works is simple and what doesn't is often complicated. And that sounds like, you know, kind of like, no, duh, a little bit. Right. But you know, as I wrote kind of on the first page of this book here where I said, well, it's a 208 page book about how to say things simply. Sure. Seems like I didn't take my own advice. Right. But when you get into the why of that and when you get into the how, it's surprisingly deep, it's surprisingly hard. And that's what we're trying to do with, with this framework.

Incredible. Incredible. Now let's go into what makes it so hard, right? Because again, I think there are a lot of smart people listening and they're like, okay, keep it simple, I'll move on to the next episode. No, but there's so much more here. So why is it so hard for us to simplify our messages?

So I'll break that down into like, what does it mean to communicate? Right. There's two sides of the communication equation there. And I say it doesn't matter again, who you are. If you're a marketer, educator, whatever, you're a sender. And then on the other side of the equation there are receivers. And that's the customer, the buyer, the voter, the donor. They're receivers. And we all wear both of these hats. We all go back and forth all the time. But the core problem in communication is that the way we are as receivers, how we're built to receive information how we prefer it is not the same as how we're built to communicate, how we're predisposed to communicate. So when we're in the receiving position, we like something that is fluent. And the word fluent is something that you know, right. We can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin. But if you look at the original kind of meaning of the word fluent, it means flowing, right? And if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, well, they're going to say this describes, you know, how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head and make sense of it. If it takes a lot of work, it's not fluent. If it's easy to get in there, it's easy to read, easy to understand, easy to kind of fit into that hole in your brain, then, well, we're more likely to buy it, more likely to like it, we're more likely to trust It. Things that are more fluent are associated with all those positive outcomes. Things that are less fluent, things that take a lot of sweat, they take a lot of work. We have to decipher them. It's hard for us to understand. Well, it's the opposite, right? We. We don't like them, we don't buy them, we don't trust them. All the things that we don't want. And when we are in a sender position, the problem is we can't quite get there. We have a really hard time getting to fluency. We have a hard time getting to things that are easy. Receivers want things that are fluent, that are easy. But senders, be it in our heads or outside of them, we are pulled in the other direction. A lot of times, you know, where we have an additive bias or more likely to add than we are to subtract, that's kind of one of the things going on inside and then outside. Well, all our structures are pointing in the opposite direction, too. You know, we want more lines on our resume, more stuff on our press release. People want to keep their jobs and get promotions, and so all of those things push us in the opposite direction. And that's the gulf. That's the problem that we have when we try to communicate.

Oh, man, this is good. And so listeners, if you're listening via audio, you don't see, like, the smile of embarrassed realization that Ben saw as he was explaining it. Because I was saying to myself, I know this. I had this same point in my last book, too, and I think about how in the business world, I can be really precise, very fluid, and communicate really well. Then at home, I get emotional. I get all my feelings and everything thing. And then I communicate like I've never communicated in my life, you know, and the additive bias is real. Just keep on going and going and going. And then when he's like, what are you trying to say? You're not making sense. I was like, but people think I'm smart. Why don't you think I'm smart? So, Ben, break this down. Because there I resonate with this. Like, it. It resonates with me, right? Because the additive bias, we just want to keep on adding things and we overcomplicate things. Even though we know simplicity is the key psychologically, why can't we do connect the dots in that way in the moment?

Oh, well, I. Again, there's. There's the forces inside and outside, right? So the inside piece, the additive bias, and Lydie Klotz, who wrote a book called Subtract did a lot of great research on this, which I recommend. And that actually stems from what's known as availability, right? We see things that are added. It's an available option to us. It's like when you open up the closet, what is like the sweater that you grab first, the one that's visible? Well, we. The. When you add things, when you add that page on your website or that slide in your deck, or that paragraph in your email, well, that's all visible, and we're more likely to go ahead and do it. But when we don't include that, there's not much evidence of the absence. And so that ends up being a problem in terms of, you know, what we think our toolbox is for stuff. And so there's a whole kind of boatload of research about that, which is interesting. And then the other thing that is going on is, well, we often kind of retreat into complexity or what I actually argue that complicated is artificially created complexity. Complexity exists, right? The computer chip is complex. The Big Bang theory is complex. But something like, you know, your instruction manual for your new fax machine, like, that's complicated, right? It could be easier. But you made it. But you made it complex. So beyond that aside, what I was saying is we retreat into complicated because it gives us places to hide, right? I'm sure you've been in a meeting at some point or a proposal or whatever, and I know I have. I know I've. I'm guilty of this too. I've at some point sat with a client, and we don't have the right answers, right? We don't know exactly what to say. And the easy option is to say, well, let me just filibuster you. Let me throw a bunch of words at you. Let me throw a wall of sound, and hopefully I'll be able to escape this unscathed. You know, I'll be able to find somewhere to hide in there. And so, because simplicity takes a lot of bravery, right? You have to be able to be confident and assured in what you're saying and what you're messaging, because there is really nowhere to hide.

This is great. This is really good. Let's. I don't want to gloss over this point that you just made, Ben, because this is really important. Bravery and confidence. I think those are two words that people might not have associated with the concept of simplicity in communication. Can you really paint this picture of why those two concepts are so important? And then let's say if we are struggling with that, how we can start to Overcome that?

Yeah, I mean, I actually argue, I think the, the chapter three, I call it the crime of complicated. Right. So complicated is really a problem for kind of three major reasons there. Number one is that, well, complicated is selfish. It's something that prioritizes our own needs over the receiver. We care about us being able to get out of that conversation. We care about us being able to get out of that pitch, to be able to get that customer service person to be done with us, whatever it is. We go into that selfish mode. Second reason that it's a problem is that it's cowardly. And so you mentioned that before, is that we complicate when we're afraid. If you look at the studies about this, and let's say you looked at how we use big language, what we find often that big language can be something that kind of gives away our status in a way which is opposite to what we intend. So my favorite little kind of microcosm of this was about airports. So in the US there's about 130 some odd international airports, and these range in size, all from JFK and Atlanta and Denver, these kind of big airports with thousands of flights all the way down to like Great Falls International Airport in Montana, where my grandmother used to live. And it's like, you know, one flight a week to Canada, whatever there's going to be. And so what these researchers at the University of Pennsylvania did was they looked at how do these airports talk about themselves? How do they. On their websites and other marketing materials, how do they refer to themselves? Now the word international has status associated, right? Like you think, oh, it's international, it's a big deal. I, you know, only there's only so many airports then international airports. And so their thesis was, their hypothesis was, and it proved to be true, was that small airports were more likely to use the word international when referring to themselves by calling themselves the Great Falls International Airport as opposed to the big airports. The big airports would just call themselves JFK or JFK Airport Internet. Small airports used it about 68% of the time, I believe. And don't quote me on these numbers, I don't have them in front of me. And. But the big airports used it about 30% of the time, so more than double the frequency of using the word international. And the same type of thing happened over, same type of result happened over and over again. With universities, you know, university, if you grant one doctoral degree, you're a university. Well, the smaller institutions are more likely to use the word university. And the bigger institutions are less likely to use the word university to describe themselves. So these type of things happen over and over, which is the complicated language actually kind of works against us in terms of projecting the thing that we want, which is maybe status or, or knowledge or prestige.

Hmm. So it's almost kind of like the person who feels the need to convince you that they are smart, they might be hiding something.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, this happens. You know. One more example of this too, which is, and this one's slightly a half step different, but if you look at the kind of papers published by researchers at different institutions, well, the lower that institution was on the US News and World Report kind of college rankings, the bigger language they used in their published articles as opposed to the ones that were higher up on the, on the rankings. There. There's a compensation effect that we, we use a lot when we're afraid that we might not be able to measure up or that we don't really know what we're talking about.

Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate. Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed. That's really interesting. And this might be outside of the studies that exist now, but just taking, creating a little hypothesis here, what is holding those bigger institutions back from using that big language? Would they be, would it almost be. I don't know, I'm just interested because, okay, they know the words, they could use that vocabulary. I'm wondering how much of it is intentional and how much of it is just purely subconscious where they feel comfortable enough in their position where they just say, I don't need to. So I'm just going to say what it is.

There's probably a little bit of both, right? And so I, I don't have that research in front of me necessarily, but I would guess that you're, you're probably right. Which is there's probably a little bit of a conscious component. There's definitely probably a large subconscious component which is saying, I don't have anything to prove you Know, care more about the results here than I do about, you know, projecting status or. Or somehow gaining recognition.

Yeah, it makes sense. Like, luxury brands are typically quiet. Like, you don't need to say, hey, I'm Mercedes, by me. You know, we have a discount. You know, we. We are who we are. And you accept that. This is great. This is really helpful. And I think listeners, as we're talking, yes, we. We're recognizing this is an ode to simplicity, of course. But then I think also on a deeper level, we can say, oh, hey, there are some tells that we might be giving when we are communicating and trying to use bigger language, more complex language. It's. It's more than just communicating simply in order to be understood. It's also, what are we telling other people by our attempts to overcomplicate things, too.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, there's the kind of. Behind all of this stuff is that the fact that simplicity is hard a lot of times. Right. And there's a famous quote which is often attributed to Mark Twain, but, I mean, everything's misattributed to Mark Twain and, you know, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. I just pull a name out of a hat to see who said this thing. But it is. I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one. Right. I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one. It took more work to do the short letter than it would to do the long one because our instinct is to pull in the opposite direction.

This. This is amusing for multiple reasons, because I was going to say, you know, there's a classic quote in the legal industry where. And that you just said it now it's fake. Mark Twain. No, but it's so true. It's so true. It takes a lot of time and effort to simplify a message. Absolutely. And let's go back to the concept of, like, fluency here, because there's some. There's a phenomenon where, okay, there's a difference between something being right and something feeling right. And so we want to get not just the facts correct, but we also want to get the feel correct. Can you help us to break that down, that discrepancy between what is actually true and what might just feel true?

Oh, I mean, that's a good point. I mean, one of the things that's absolutely true in marketing is that people don't buy the facts. Right. People buy what the feeling is. And you can look at this basically the lens of every popular consumer fad over the past, you know, how gazillion years basically, like right now we're talking in January and the biggest fad of the holiday season that just ended was what, the Stanley Cup. Right. Stanley cup is a $40 cup. It doesn't, factually, it doesn't perform any better necessarily than anything else if it's a yeti cup or if it's the generic one you go get at the grocery store. But it's, it's a status symbol. It makes you feel something. And so we're more likely to operate on feelings than we are to operate on, you know, is something actually, you know, the pros and cons and this many features and this and that. The thing about fluency is that fluency, it appears in a million different of different ways. It can appear in, you know, does something. It's something easy to see, literally. Like, can you. Can you read it in a clear font, in a clear typeface? Text that is written in a clear typeface. There's some studies about this is considered to be more trustworthy, more accurate than text that is harder to read. We can see this in terms of how is somebody's name pronounced. And even when they control for. For all the, you know, all the, the kind of other elements that go into naming with ethnicity and geography and language, well, they look and say, well, when names are easier to pronounce, those people tend to get kind of more professional opportunities than the ones that otherwise don't. And then company names also fall in that category. So there's a famous study which I talk about when they look at stock ticker symbols. Well, there should be no correlation between the ticker symbol and the performance of the stock. Right. There's. But it's supposed to be just a complete abstraction of it. But when it's easier to read, when it's more fluent, when it's pronounceable, something like Disney being dis is diz. That's pronounceable. But Verizon or Walmart, I think Walmart is wmt. Something like that is not pronounceable. What these researchers looked at was when companies went IPO and they were pronounceable. Well, if you invested $1,000 in that bucket of companies and then $1,000 in the bucket of companies that weren't pronounceable on their IPO days, by the end of the day, you'd be up $85 on the pronounceable ones versus the non pronounceable one. And the effect eventually kind of tapers out, but it still lingers a little bit in the data when they look years and years later, that the pronounceable ones tend to perform better than the ones that aren't. And so these are just a million of these little attributes here, which the feeling of a message can significantly impact how we ultimately judge it and how we react to it.

Oh, man, I love this. I love this because my portfolio is going to look amazing because of that last tip. But, man, I. I tell you, I think the beauty of this is that it is like we can see it in our own lives, but then the data shows the same thing. It's. The data show the same thing. I think that's really, really helpful. And now let's bring this to the actual conversation, because I'm asking as much for me as I am for other people. Whitney's going to be home in just an hour. Okay. So when we are in the moment, when we're actually in these conversations and we feel that drive to over complicate a message, what tips do you have for somebody to calm down and simplify when everything inside of us is telling us to do the opposite?

I'll give you kind of the five principles about how do we construct, how do we design a simple message? And these might be a little hard to go through, like maybe in the heat of the moment, but there's pieces of them which we can certainly internalize. Now, this isn't a checklist or like a rubric for something, but it's these principles. The better we can act upon them, the better we're going to be in terms of. In terms of hitting that mark. So the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? What's in it for them? You know, kind of this old sales piece, right? Features versus benefits. The second principle of a simple message is focus. Are you trying to say one thing, or are you trying to say multiple things at once? Is it one idea or is it kind of three ideas in a trench coat? The third one is. You're cracking up over there. That's a good.

That's a great visual.

Yeah. The third one is salient. Does your message stand out from the noise? Does it contrast? Does it rise to your attention? Is it something that is noticeable? The fourth one is empathetic. Are you speaking in the language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are both in terms of the literal language, but also their emotions, their motivations, all those things? And the last piece of this is Minimal, which is have you cut out everything that isn't important and kept only what is? And I lied a little bit about them not being in order. Minimal's there at the end on purpose. Which is to say. Well, it's hard to really know that unless you did a little bit of thinking about some of these other pieces there. Because going back to what we talked about a few minutes ago, we're not necessarily optimizing for the fewest number of words or sentences or pages in our message. We're optimizing for the least amount of friction. We want something to be as fluent and as easy as possible. And so that's what we're looking for when we talk about minimal.

This is good. This is good, dude. Ben, have you thought about writing a book? A book on this?

You know, I did, I did. And then it turns out I, you know, it worked out pretty okay. There you go. I'm holding. There we go.

Man, this is great. I really appreciate this because here's the thing, like the people who are listening, we deal with complex challenges and complexity comes in many different forms. So we have people who are at home, they have difficult conversations with their spouses. I'm one of them. Right. But we, then we go to work, we're leading companies, we're having multimillion dollar deals. Like, these are really high stakes conversations. And then something that you mentioned a number of times, I want to give you an opportunity to speak on this is status too, because it's not just about the communication and sending the message. The message is a little bit beyond the message. Because sometimes as we're communicating, the message is simply status. We're trying to demonstrate not only that, hey, we can be effective here, but also we are worthy of being in this environment. And so can you just speak briefly on how status weaves in to all of these conversations?

Oh, certainly. So I mentioned a few of those other bits before, right. Where sometimes our efforts to appear higher status by using larger language will backfire on us. And they're often seen as indicators of lower status. And so this happens with, this happens in the professional environment. There's studies that show smaller people at smaller law firms talking to larger law firms, undergraduates talking to MBA students. We talked about kind of the higher ranked and lower ranked schools in terms of research. Another example that, you know, again is kind of a half step away from that, and this is really important when we talk about minimal, which is about reducing friction, is this example of, and I'm going to forget the university that did the Work on this. I apologize. But what they did was they took graduate school essays, application essays, and they took the pile and they said, okay, we're going to have. This is the control group, and then we're going to take that pile of essays and we're going to run it through it, some software basically, that we're going to kind of crank up the complexity on it. We're going to replace words, we have longer words with more obscure words with kind of fancier language. And then they took those two piles and they had them judged by different admission counselors. Well, what happened was that the kind of across the board, the judges rated the complexified, the hyper theorized versions of it, they rated those worse and rated the authors as kind of less intelligent and rated their odds of being admitted as lower than the ones that were the standard essays. And so that had a material effect on. Well, what are the results there? They ran this through and they, they took it, you know, out of the university context. They looked at high school or the same thing. They took, you know, like philosophy, I think it was like Descartes. They took some, like some, you know, established, you know, academic literature, philosophical literature and did the same thing to it. And the same results came through, which is that the more we kind of cranked up that dial it actually in the eyes of our receivers, it kind of went the other direction.

It's incredible. So, Ben, essentially we know bias is real, just bias in the. Not like a, a creepy, nefarious type of way, but just speaking generally about psychology, subconscious preference towards something or a subconscious prejudice against something. So there could be institutional bias. We have like a public school versus an Ivy League school. We can understand how there will be different perceptions there. And so what I'm hearing. Tell me if I'm. I'm understanding this correctly. So we understand that there's going to be institutional bias in that regard. Just in general that's going to happen. But then it's almost like that bias is internalized by somebody who goes to, let's say, the state institution. Everybody listening who went to a state school, just know I went to Ohio State. Okay, so we're Cohen.

I'm a City University of New York graduate. I love it. It's great. Yeah, there we go.

We're still doing well. Right. But it's almost like that internalized bias then manifests itself in the conversation in a way where we signal inferiority by trying to sound too smart.

That is ultimately the result. It's not necessarily what our. It's obviously not what our intentions are. But the problem is when we make things complicated, we often do so in the effort of seeming more intelligent or thinking. That complicated is correlated with something being better and smarter and more effective when the results of testing it across the board kind of point to the opposite of that.

Incredible. Incredible. My friend. This has been exceptional. I really, really appreciate this. Listen before you go, let the listeners know about you, your book, and how they can connect.

Well, Kwame, this has been a ton of fun. I really enjoyed this. This is, you know, one of the best conversations I've had. So if you want to learn more, head on over to my website, bengutman.com it's not a good name for radio. It's two T's and two N's. If you lose one of them, you're not going to get there. But it's BenGutman.com you'll find a free chapter of the book and go download that. You can sign up for my email list. I send a Send out a newsletter or connect to me on LinkedIn. Reach out via email. Love to hear about how this work has affected you and anything I can.

Do to help, man. Thank you, Ben. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you and I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.