Tamsen Webster breaks down five mistakes when building a persuasive Red Thread: making the goal about you instead of the audience, stating the problem as just the opposite of your solution, using the change itself as your insight instead of a discovery, being vague about what needs to shift, and listing too many scattered actions instead of three to five chunked steps.
Have you started working on finding your own red thread? Whether that's for a message or a talk or maybe even yourself? Then there are some pitfalls that I want to help you avoid. I'm Tamsen Webster of TamsenWebster.com and this is Find the Red Thread. Here are 5 things to watch out for as you work on your own Red Thread. Number 1, with the goal statement, make sure it's their goal, not yours. And the easiest way to test for that is to think to yourself, if I were to say that goal to the person that I most want to hear this message, would they readily say yes to it before hearing anything else I have to say? If so, then you've got it. If not, keep working. Number 2, with the problem statement. The biggest challenge I see here is people want the problem just to be the reverse of the change. I want people to do X, so the problem is that they're not doing X. That can't be the way it works. It will never work with an audience, not really. They'll be skeptical and you won't get the change that you're looking for. So the best problem statements are those that describe the world in a new or slightly different way, that cast the problem in a new light. So, look as much as you can for ways to create that tension between the world as they think it is and the world as you see it. Tension is where a problem really lies. Number 3, with the idea statement. The challenge I see most often here is when people start to introduce the change as the idea. But the idea, just like the problem statement, is also descriptive. It's an opportunity for you to introduce an additional piece of information, a discovery, a realization, a value, a core belief, something that gets people to understand why the problem is such a problem, but also that creates the understanding and agreement that's necessary for them to say yes to the change. The most common challenge I see with the change statement, this is the fourth one, is that it is not specific enough, that people wanna say, well, it's these three things. And that's normal because those 3 things, whatever they might be, might be your action. But they should all roll up into a big shift. And that shift should be the product of your problem plus the idea. So, you've got a descriptive problem statement, a descriptive idea statement. Your change statement should be a prescriptive change and approach that builds on the problem and the idea. Finally, with the actions, the thing I see most commonly here is that people just have too many of them. Now, it can be that in a book or in a much longer paper or something where people are going to spend time that you could have 12 or 15 steps, but when someone needs to understand something quickly, they really can't hold more than 3 to 5 pieces of information at a time. So the— to the extent that you can chunk that information in your action steps, chunk it based on a process. We need to do step A, step B, step C. You can chunk it based on criteria. In order to have this change happen, we need to make sure that these 3 things are in place. Or you can chunk it based on categories. We need to make this change in these 3 areas: locally, globally, personally. Hopefully that will help as you are working on your own Red Thread. If you have any questions, please reach out to me through my website, Tamsen Webster.com.
