Friday 2nd September 2022
By Jon Durrant & Mohamed Abdel-Gadir
How many recommendations, roadmaps, strategies and other IT architectural products end up sitting on the shelf after getting no traction with the sponsor or stakeholders?
We have all seen brilliant architectural products lost or forgotten because they were too detailed for the stakeholders to understand or maintain interest in. This is why using communication to your advantage can level-up any architect. Architecture principles guide an architect’s work. They are not mandatory but act as guidelines and checklists. They help us consider a set of often interacting criteria that should be considered in the analysis, designs and recommendations.
This blog looks at 8 essential principles for the following task of communicating architecture products.
Start with results to grab your audience’s attention.
The opening of a presentation is the most crucial part. This is when your audience will form a first impression of you and what’s to come, and let’s face it, first impressions count. Stakeholders are not interested in your analysis until you have them interested in what you have to say. An effective way to do this is to begin with the results. Start with the biggest insight, an impactful statistic, or a thought-provoking question and work backwards. Once you have their attention your job isn’t finished yet. When you have them where you want, it’s down to you to keep them engaged with meaningful content.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that with the constant distraction of the modern office place, anyone presenting has only around three minutes to get the attention of their audience. Once you have lost your executive, it is near impossible to regain their attention. I am sure you can cast your mind back to a time when you lost your audience in the first few minutes and try as you might, you never were able to get them back. The frustration you felt when everyone was looking at their phones or answering emails. That is a situation you want to avoid.
Communication must drive action through recommendations or plans.
Architecture products that inform but don’t provide a way forward are often not considered valuable by stakeholders. The stakeholder can’t agree or disagree with it, and therefore there is no way for them to easily move it to the done pile. Instead, it gets stuck. Effective architecture products provide recommendations that are ready to allow the organisation to take the next step. This means that recommendation has to have enough detail to be considered an informed decision by including estimated cost, time and resources.
IT Strategies have to be high level to cover the IT functions vision and alignment to the business strategy. In the best examples of IT Strategy, there is a clear plan of action to realise the vision backed up by justification from the business strategy. Our architecture principles cover this alignment to strategy, so why doesn’t our communication? It would allow the sponsor could understand the vision, justification and approve the beginning of the action plan. Some of the actions may be to do a detailed analysis to produce a business case for work but the recommendation to undertake the business case must clearly articulate the cost and value of the work.
Content must resonate with the audience’s perception.
The audience and sponsor for the work must be able to empathize with the context described and the action recommended. This is not saying that the architect must just reflect the sponsor and audience’s view. They must build from their view rather than oppose the audience’s perception.
An architect working on a financial reporting solution could see more gaps in the solution than the sponsor perceived. Manual workarounds and spreadsheet fixes fitted into every step of the existing process. The sponsor’s focus was on the submission of data into the system from the divisions’ sales and product management systems. By dividing the bigger problem into different phases the architect was able to focus on the first phase which matched the sponsor’s perception of the problem. The sponsor strongly resonated with the recommendations and was even prepared to look at the following phases’ benefits over the coming months.
As humans, we engage and remember stories.
It’s not often obvious how we can incorporate storytelling into our presentations, especially when dealing with what can seem quite dull data or insights. By picking out the right information to build a narrative, you can create insightful stories which can paint a vivid picture to your audience. This will leave them in no doubt what the outcome will be if action isn’t taken. The three key elements of any story are the setup (the beginning), the conflict (the middle), and the resolution (the end).
A Stanford Business School Professor performed a test on their students. One by one, the class presented a pitch. One in ten of them used a story within their pitch, while all the others stuck to pure facts and figures. Afterwards, when asked to write down what they remembered, only 5% of students recalled any of the statistics they’d heard. A huge 63% could recite one or more of the stories, well over ten times the students could remember a story over any single fact. So as you can see, if you want to make a lasting impact with stakeholders, storytelling is an extremely powerful method.
Use visuals to support and enhance messages not detract from them.
Presenting something visually impressive can create a critical emotive response needed to initiate an action. If it’s a visual story you want to tell, you can start by working with a central visual as the foundation and build the story around it. After all, the human brain can process an image 60,000 times more quickly than text. Strong visuals create a shared meaning which is vital when dealing with broader ranges of stakeholders. The conversations they open will be more focused allowing for greater buy-in and clearer feedback.
Software company TechSmith conducted research that demonstrated outdated non-visual communication methods can actually lead to a decrease in morale and motivation for employees, up to 47%. So clearly there are a multitude of benefits beyond simply looking good.
Sponsor and audience can quote the tagline to create “brand” awareness.
Treat the architecture communication as a product to sell into the market. Make it memorable with a tagline and identity that can be talked about by the audience. If the stakeholder and audience can easily share the product then that makes the challenge of wider socialisation much easier. It’s an architecture principle we follow to build consensus and create awareness. We should apply it to our products too.
In an entertainment company, the architecture team presented the IT Roadmap as a set of seven themed journeys, each broken down into a few separate projects. The themes each had a short title and tagline invoking the future. They became a shared language, describing the future ambition of the client departments and the IT services they required.
Respect the audience’s time.
Stakeholders and especially senior stakeholders are often pressed for time. They are commonly in back-to-back meetings and their prior one may have overrun. Plan to be able to deliver your message well within the agenda time slot. Keep it short by allowing them to delve into detail through questions and reading your appendix. Always try to give them 5 minutes back by ending early. They and their PA will respect you for that, and make it easier to get more time in their dairy in future.
A CFO squeezed 30 minutes in their diary for the head of architecture to discuss an issue on a project they were sponsoring. The CFO arrived ten minutes late, having been overrunning all afternoon. The head of architecture explained the “bottom line up front”, the recommendation and justification, and allowed time for the CFO to ask questions. Though they did not get approval at that meeting, by giving five minutes back they put the CFO in a positive mood towards the proposal and approve it later that week.
Collaborate with designers and creative thinkers to improve the product. Take feedback and act on it.
No one person can do everything, well at least not to the same level. You wouldn’t ask a mechanic to perform open heart surgery, and you wouldn’t ask a doctor to change a gearbox. Different people have different skills, different experiences and different ways of thinking. Diverse ways of thinking does not just mean having a variety of different ideas and picking the best, it’s about seeking an even better third alternative. Designers and communications specialists are great at teasing out the right answers to questions that can help you focus your messages more succinctly. This will ensure informed discussions take place with stakeholders, instead of them being hung up on things they don’t understand.
It is not only the designers that you need to collaborate with, your stakeholders have an important part to play. Bain Institute state that Architects often run into difficulty as they “assume that the value of architecture is obvious”. It is the old adage of taking the customer along for the journey. If you are able to achieve that, then it will break down many barriers to entry.
Most architects along with most IT leaders are not natural marketers and tend to underestimate the size of the communication tasks. Yes structuring the communication and delivering it are tasks themselves. Tasks which can only begin once the analysis and recommendation have been produced. Often at this point, the author is so close to the content that it is difficult to see it from the audience’s viewpoint. Allowing time for this task and using the principles we have set out here can help overcome this. We apply architecture principles in our designs, and now we can also apply them in our communication.
About the authors
Jon Durrant has led IT architecture practices in global entertainment, financial services and retail sectors. He now provides freelance consulting, mentoring and training to support architects stepping up and helping executives understand the value architecture provides. He has published successful courses on IT Strategy and Data Strategy on Udemy, as well as a regular set of insightful blogs.
Mohamed Abdel-Gadir is Head of Visual Communications at Konvergent. Drawing influences and fusing aspects from multiple design and digital media disciplines, he is pushing the boundaries of design, visual storytelling and communication in the architecture and business design space. He has worked with global brands to help them transform their stakeholder communications into powerful visual stories.
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