Tamsen Webster explains the Red Thread, a five-part template people use to make sense of events: goal, problem, diagnosis, change, and actions. Understanding someone's unique Red Thread helps you explain ideas in ways that actually persuade them.
What is the Red Thread? Think about it like Mad Libs, but for how we make meaning. All right, I'll take— explain the Mad Libs piece in just a minute, but let me talk about the meaning part first. Why is that important? Well, the meaning part's important because whether we're trying to create change or simply to feel in control of all the change that's happening around us, there is one step that always has to happen first. And that first step is that we must make meaning of what we see. We must make it make sense. And this, this need to make meaning happens before conscious thought. We don't— in other words, we don't think about how we make meaning, we just make it. And that's important because how we make meaning, the meaning we create, dictates the thoughts that we think, which dictates how we see the world, and importantly, it dictates the role that we see ourselves playing in it. What's interesting about all of this is that how we make meaning, we do that in predictable ways. They're called schema. A fancy word for a pattern or a template for how we think. What's even more interesting is that there's recent research that suggests that this template for meaning-making in particular is shared, that it's the same from person to person. Now, this is where the Mad Libs piece comes in, because if you remember Mad Libs, it's a, it's a pad of paper filled with pre-written stories, but the stories have holes in them. You have to come up with words, nouns, verbs, adjectives that fill in the blanks. But you have to do that without knowing what the story is ahead of time. But when it comes to the shared template of meaning-making, we do know the story. And that story of how we make meaning is the Red Thread. And I've named the 5 specific blanks that we have to fill in order for that information in order for that story to make sense. The first is the goal. What is it that someone's trying to get? What's the drive that determines everything else? The second piece of the Red Thread is the problem. A problem we're going to discover is the real reason why that goal isn't being achieved, why we're not getting it, or why it's not happening already. The third piece of the Red Thread is the diagnosis of the problem. We're gonna call it the idea. The idea that explains both why the problem is such a problem and why the change that we're asking people to make is the only one that makes sense. And that change is the fourth piece of the Red Thread, a high-level shift in direction that is what we must do, given what the problem is and the diagnosis of that problem, in order to achieve our goal by solving our problem. The final piece of the Red Thread is the actions, the details of the change, the specific set of things that we need to do in order to make that change happen that we've talked about. Now, while the template is shared, each of us fills in those blanks in a different way, which means each of us, every person, every organization, every idea, Everything has its own unique Red Thread. And when you know these, both of these things, your Red Thread and the general template for the Red Thread, you've got a lot of power in your hands. First, you understand what's the filter through which you see the world. How is it that you uniquely make meaning of it, and particularly your role in what's happening around you. But because again, this template is shared, by understanding the Red Thread, what you get is, a way to make anything make sense to somebody else because they have the red thread too. So that's what the red thread is. What's yours?
