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http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/ideasatwork/adams.html#iv4i3-94-idea94
Hypnosis, Dilbert, and Animal Metaphors
Scott Adams on the Art of Communication
(Harvard Communications Update January 1999)
Scott Adams’s syndicated comic strip, Dilbert, runs
in more than 1,700 newspapers in more than 50
countries. He’s written several best sellers, including
The Dilbert Principle. Every “cube farm” in the
business world today has at least one Dilbert cartoon
on its walls. Adams’s deft depiction of workplace
absurdities has rung so true with business people that
his work has evolved into idiom: When supervisors
annoy or demean employees, they are now said to be
“Dilberting” them. Beneath the facade of a droll
workplace wit and an accidental artist, Adams is a
shrewd analyst of business communications. HCU
went to him for insights into how he does it. Can we all
learn to communicate with the punch of a Dilbert
cartoon?
HCU: In the Dilbert strip, you have to make points
vividly in limited space. How does this apply to other
forms of communication?
Adams: Oddly enough, the most useful thing that I did
for learning the craft of cartooning was to take a
business-writing course. And unlike any writing
courses you might take in college where they tell you
to throw in those adjectives and pile on the adverbs,
the goal in the course was to keep subtracting. You
just make sure that the one thing you want to say is all
that’s left. That actually was a turning point in my
cartoon career. So I think the one tip I would give is
never underestimate the inability of the human mind to
process communications. The brain only takes in one
thing out of ten, so you might as well throw away the
other nine.
HCU: Even when we’re reading?
Adams: Even when people are reading, the amount
they actually absorb is a very tiny percent. If you were
to say, for example, “Mark McGwire hit a crushing
home run into the right field fence. It was number 61.”
All anybody remembers is “McGwire home run.”
When I write cartoons, I just hit them with the facts,
without the adjectives, and it leaves the impression that
more information is being transferred, oddly enough,
because it doesn’t get filtered. The fewer words you
use, the better off you are.
HCU: Is business jargon now the greatest threat to the
English language?
Adams: People don’t bring that language home too
much. You know, you come home and you’re not
really facilitating the diapers. For some reason people
can turn it on and off...I think it’s a surrogate for
actually being confident. It probably took me 10 years
of working in the corporate world before I realized that
it wasn’t just because I was inexperienced that I was
confused, but it was because everybody’s full of [it].
Soon I realized that I was bluffing, too. Everybody’s
bluffing. If you can say, “Well, we are going to do a
paradigm here. We’re looking at different models.
We’ll run a few simulations and put this together to see
if we can get a consensus.” That sounds much better
than, “I don’t know.”
HCU: In The Dilbert Principle, you write that “the
purpose of a presentation is to transfer resources away
from accomplishing objectives and to concentrate
them on explaining how well you’re doing.” Should
companies have separate meetings for this kind of
breast-beating?
Adams: I’m actually working on a different method
now. I’m recommending that we solve meeting
problems by creating chairs that actually heat up about
10 degrees for every minute that you talk; they’re
voice-activated. So on a cool winter day, if you can
say your point in a minute or two, you’ll get a nice
warm chair. You’ll be happy about that. But if you
keep rambling on like many people do, you’ll actually
be incinerated.
The worst kinds of people are the ones who use
meetings as a surrogate for a social life. If you notice
anybody who’s really pushing to schedule a meeting
either after six o’clock at night or on a weekend, these
are people who are not dating or who hate their
families.
HCU: Your prescription for writing humor includes six
elements: cute, bizarre, mean, naughty, clever, and
recognizable, and you’ve said that the writer needs to
use at least two of the six to be funny. How did you
come up with this?
Adams: I was just thinking: How is it that some things
are funny and some aren’t? So I just started paying
attention and making a note of the elements that I saw
in humor, and when I got to six, I didn’t find any
more. I noticed that for something to be funny, you
need to have at least two of the six.
HCU: You often use animal metaphors and analogies:
faster than a cheetah leaving a salad bar, deader than a
fish stick at a cat festival. Do animal analogies help you
achieve two of the six elements of humor?
Adams: Yes: they’re automatic — part of the reason
for Gary Larson’s success, I think. He was really the
first one to figure out that as soon as you put an animal
into a situation and had it act in any human way, it was
automatically bizarre — and often cute, because
people like animals.
HCU: You write frequently of the various uses of
e-mail. What won’t you use e-mail for?
Adams: You’re asking the wrong guy. I heavily favor
e-mail over all other forms of communication.
HCU: In The Joy of Work, you discussed using a
white board, not paper, because it’s an evanescent
medium that precludes the possibility of error — or
accountability — after being erased. Has this idea
spurred white board sales?
Adams: It can’t hurt at all. But I believe it’s more
basic than that. I think it has to do with the fact that
after 10 billion years of evolution we’ve only had a few
hundred years of any serious technology, and really
we’re the same people who lived in caves and wrote
on the wall. So we feel comfortable doing that.
Here we are, stuck in these cubicles which essentially
recreate the caves that we loved so much, but we
don’t have any good way to write on the wall. Hence
the white board. I think soon you’ll also see portable
heaters for cubicles to replace the fire in front of the
cave. It’s a slightly improved version of the cave, but
only in the detail.
HCU: You’ve written that you hypnotize people at
meetings so they’ll agree with you. Is that an
exaggeration?
Adams: No, that’s actually something that I have done
and continue to do...If somebody at a meeting crosses
their arms in a certain way, they’ll influence other
people to do the same. If somebody yawns, other
people yawn. People follow each other’s leads. They
don’t think about it; they just feel comfortable doing it.
And this is a very small part of the overall benefit of
hypnosis.
The real benefit is that it helps us understand the
conscious mind.... For example, there are radio
commercials that simulate the sound of a dentist’s drill.
But it’s not about dentistry, it’s just that they’re trying
to be funny and they’re selling cars or whatever it is.
Now, the people who do not have hypnosis training
think this is great, it’s funny, and everybody can relate
to that dental feeling. They know it’s not really going
to hurt them because it’s not real; it’s just a
commercial. But after you’ve studied hypnosis you
know that if you put two images in somebody’s mind
at the same time, one is hideous pain, and two is —
Hey, how about buying this Buick? — you will sell a
whole lot fewer Buicks.
HCU: So if you’re trying to sell an idea, you’d best
conjure up positive, pleasurable images?
Adams: Right. People forget the words, but they’ll
remember the picture.... If you’re trying to get
someone to agree with your point of view, for
example, hypnosis teaches you that you want to give
them the ability to imagine the things they want to while
making sure they don’t have something to disagree
with. Trial lawyers use this well.
The hypnotic analogue is that if you’re hypnotizing
somebody and their eyes are closed and you say,
“Imagine yourself walking through the forest. A
beautiful forest, feeling really good,” you kind of bring
them into it.... But if you then say, “And you see a
tree, a walnut tree,” you’ve lost them. The reason is,
when you say, “And you see a tree,” everybody
imagines the kind of tree they like best. Maybe it’s a
spruce tree.
HCU: How does the Dilbert strip reflect this?
Adams: The comment I get most from readers is:
“Dilbert must work in my company.” And it’s not
because I said he did. It’s because I removed all the
clues that would have [indicated] he didn’t. By taking
away their ability to find an objection, I allow them to
find the thing that they like best. The key to
communication is to try to get as little of it as possible,
especially from your boss and coworkers....
I know someone who’s got a boss who doesn’t
answer voice mail and turns off his e-mail. And he
spends almost all of his time out of the office and has
no pager. So he can reach you, but only when he
wants something.
When I first heard this I thought: man, what a nut! It’s
obviously not going to last. But I found out that he
was very successful because this caused people to
solve their own problems. The few minutes that he
would show up, he would give directions and then he
would get completely out of the way. By eliminating all
communications in one direction, he was actually very
effective.
HCU: What was he doing with his time?
Adams: Nobody knows.
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