JT20 | Wen Szu Lin On Thinking And Communicating Clearly

Amit: In today’s world, it’s no longer good enough just to do the work and wait for it to be recognized. We’re always told that we need to communicate well and ensure that we project our work in a manner that others can understand and appreciate. But how exactly does one do that? Is it just about being fluent in the language or writing like a best-selling author? Or must you join something like Toastmasters?

Or take dramatic lessons to get better at speaking? or can anyone become a better communicator? Well, today we are privileged to have with us Ben Zhu Lin, Senior Director of Community Operations at Uber, and author of Deliver, which is a book that has a lot of growth hacks on how to accelerate your career, he’s always been a strong proponent of good communication, and clarity in communication. And we’ll be sharing with us today his key pointers on how to immediately become a strong and effective communicator, regardless of your fluency in writing or speaking.

So when so with that said, thank you so much for taking the time to join us here today. Maybe before we get going, would you like to introduce yourself? Maybe a little bit about your journey so far? And also tell us about your book and the inspiration for your book. And also, where can people get ahold of it? Thank you.

Discussion Topics: Wen Szu Lin On Thinking And Communicating Clearly

• How to become a better communicator
• Juan’s background
• Organize your thoughts and thoughts
• Understanding the concept of mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive
• Translating PSP into practice
• Finding a way to paraphrase your speech
• How to become a better communicator

Transcript: Wen Szu Lin On Thinking And Communicating Clearly

Hi there and welcome to JobTok, the show where we give you practical and honest insights to help you accelerate your career opportunities, improve your job prospects, and become a more valuable professional.

Ben Zhu Lin: Thank you for having me on the podcast. A quick introduction for myself. My name is Juan su Wen Sula, I’m based in the Philippines, and I actually grew up. I was born in Taiwan, raised there a bit, but spent most of my time in the US in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

Not sure if my accent comes out that way. And then my background was in electrical engineering for undergrad and graduate, I spent some time in consulting, then went on to get my MBA, and then did more consulting, I had a crazy idea about selling pretzels and China moved to China and Beijing or a pretzel brand brought her over from the US. I spent some time there but did not do very well on that one and ended up moving to the Philippines, where I’m based today.

I joined Uber about eight years ago, and to start this community operations, which is basically the back office support and operations for Uber in Asia. And then yeah, so that’s been a quick summary of my journey so far in my career. And then this book called Deliver is basically the old untaught lessons that if I could go back in time and give myself tips, my early self after graduation, about all the different things that I needed to learn the things that we’re not taught in school.

This is a summary of all of that. The book is called Deliver the Untaught Lessons to Growth, Hack Your Career. The reason for writing is something that I’ve been taking notes on these lessons throughout my career and have been using them to teach my team. But then the COVID locked down. And I specifically remember April 1, 2020, being a pivotal date, when everything when the sky was clear, and no planes in the air.

Everything was it was yeah, completely locked down, as you recall during that time. And it’s the first time in a while ash had time to sit down and structure, the thinking put everything down, and it was able to write everything. So I spent 2020 and 2021 Writing and editing the book. Very happy that’s out now. So yeah, deliver.

Amit: Yeah, it sounds like a really good book. And I mean, there’s a ton of material in there that I’m sure will benefit our listeners. And our show is entirely about accelerating one’s career. So it’s great to have a book like this with real lessons, stuff that you can actually apply to your own career. So everyone, please go and check out delivery. It’s very available when it’s available in the Philippines.

Ben Zhu Lin: It’s available in the national bookstores, and also online. But it’s available in most online stores, Amazon, the Kindle, also print edition in most of the major markets, but also any electronic reader that you have from Google to Apple. It’s available online there, right?

Amit: Okay, so pretty easy to get a hold of it. So everyone head on over to wherever you buy books, and and check it out. So when so we going to talk about communication today? And I did touch upon the fact that everybody talks about you need to be a good communicator. But why really, why not just be a communicator? I mean, I understand that part. You should talk about your work. But why does one have to be good? Why is the bar high at all? Why not just dump whatever you have to say, and be done with it? Yeah, great question.

Ben Zhu Lin: But one thing is, I guess being an engineer, one thing that we value quite a lot is just someone who’s really smart, who can actually work through technical problems and things like that. As I started to grow in my career, what I realized that separated leaders from the people who were actually doing all the work is that the leaders, not only know the details and the functional expertise, but they can also communicate it in a very clear and concise way.

To the point where I asked my current boss, I think he has seen them work with many Fortune 500 CEOs, I asked them, What was the difference that separated a typical CEO from a great CEO? And he basically said, hey, it’s actually the way that they communicate the way they can articulate the same message, but most likely, in more concise words, and one that can actually bring out the message a lot, in a much more clear way.

So I realized that communication matters quite a lot, especially for engineers who are not focused on that. Second thing, as a manager, now I have a fairly large team, I realized that there are a lot of invisible costs to bad communication. As an example, if someone sends an email or a message that is very hard to comprehend, I think we’ve all seen that before. A very, very long message that takes you 10, 20, 30 minutes to skim over and read, and then you’re like, what does that mean?

Organize your thoughts and thoughts

Amit: I have no idea what the person is saying, well, love colors and bold it stuff, and underlining and all of that.

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, that’s a whole different thing as the messaging and the formatting and things mattered quite a lot, and how the communication works. But then there’s a lot of cost to it. Because if you end up sending that email to 20 people, and they spend 10 minutes and do not understand it, all of a sudden, collectively, you actually have wasted a lot of time and HUD overall team. But if someone thinks about it, they actually come up with a very thoughtful message that can be consumed in one minute, all of a sudden, you can see that 90% of the time spent on that one message is better used across the whole team.

Amit: Right. Actually, this is a fantastic insight Wenzhou because when people think about communication, they’re looking at how to make it efficient for themselves. But you’re essentially saying that you need to take the time and not focus on how much time you can save on yourself. Because chances are, you’re wasting a ton of overall organizational time when sending a badly crafted message.

So this is really good. I’ve never heard anybody else explain it this way. And it is pretty obvious if you think about it in that manner. So thanks for sharing that. Okay, so this makes sense. Now, it also maybe puts the whole context of this conversation a little bit better, because you’re talking about communicating for others, not just making things easier for yourself. And I’m sure a lot of people when they think about communicating whatever their work is, and so on, just start communicating.

So you just start writing your email, or you just start drafting your presentation, or you just start speaking when you’re supposed to speak. But I think what you’re trying to say is that that’s not actually the starting point of good communication. So what is that starting point? Is it not just to start speaking, or writing?

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, great question. And I am very guilty of this to this day when someone asks me a question, a basic thing like, Hey, how’s your day, it’s easy to start to ramble. And just kind of have a top of mind thoughts, literal stream of consciousness just comes right out, I realized that in a work setting more so though, it needs to be a bit more structured.

And the example that I use from the book, the way I was thinking about it is, if you think about a very cluttered house, and I think that’s representative of a lot of our thoughts and thinking, right, if someone asks you a question, you’re thinking all different things, your whole mind is very cluttered in the way the thoughts are coming from where it’s going. But we take a page from Connery, the KonMari, method of decluttering, and organizing.

So imagine organizing your mind and thoughts together. That’s the way I approach communication. And when I think about a problem, when someone asks me a question, I will have to stop. That’s the first thing. Think about it, organize my thoughts on what I want to say, and how should I say it, and then go from there. But what’s always stopping, reflecting, and thinking through before talking?

Amit: Right? Okay. And when you’re doing this reflection and organizing, like KonMari has a method like you organize whatever T-shirts in this way, and you remove things that don’t bring you joy, etc. So is there a similar method or some way of thinking that helps you kind of organize your thoughts?

Understanding the concept of mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, there are many methods out there for organizing thoughts. The most powerful one that I’ve seen so far. This is one that I didn’t invent but I saw it, as one company sees, or misses as a founder, means mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. It was started by a lady named Barbara mento. I know when she was working at McKinsey, and it’s a very, very powerful concept. Very difficult.

It sounds easy, very difficult actually to understand and master, but let me explain what it is. So when you say mutually exclusive, you’re thinking about every single point that you have is very unique. It’s different from each other. They’re right, it’s hard to say something like, Hey, I want colored shirts. And as one point next point, you say I want purple shirts. And I also want four shirts. And if you start to think about it you listed in the same category, the colored shirts and purple shirts, they overlap with each other.

So you want to say something, you should say I want a purple shirt, blue shirts, and other shirts. So it’s cover covers, every single one is actually mutually exclusive. So it’s very distinct. And second thing is collectively exhaustive means that you cover 100% of everything.

So this means that you’re talking about pizza pie, everything, you’re cutting spices, it should be clean slices, you can’t like invisibly on a top draw, square slices, and then in other types of slices, and then have overlaps either you have to cover the whole pizza as well as be collectively exhausted. So that cost is straightforward to understand. But I read about this right after college. But what I’ve learned is that it’s incredibly, incredibly hard to implement in master on this, right?

Amit: And I like the pizza example because you’re saying the slices are mutually exclusive because the slices are independent. And collectively, they are exhaustive, because they cover the whole pizza. Another example would be a jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces are mutually exclusive. But together, they describe the whole picture.

So that’s right, I think that’s a very powerful concept. And what you’re saying is, just by applying this concept, you already clear up your thoughts because you’ve covered the entire subject you want to cover because it’s collectively exhaustive. And your individual points don’t end up going in circles and stepping on each other’s toes because they are mutually exclusive.

Okay, so that’s actually a really good framework and way of thinking, and maybe after this episode on the website, I’ll try and link some material to this, so people can look it up. What else? So now that you’ve organized your thoughts into this MECE framework, I suppose you’ve jotted them down somewhere? How do you then put it together into a form that you can then start using?

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, good question there. I think from the using the Macy framework actually getting to meet the framework is very tough. It’s a principle that is more of a principle. It’s not a guide on how to get there to say to someone, they come up to you and say, Hey, these are the reasons why you should fund my project. And it’s hard to teach and train someone to just be me right off the bat. So I have actually developed a couple of techniques over the years that help a person get them missing.

And two techniques. One I called DSP, which my team members if you’re listening to this call, is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s called boated summary phrases. So what we do there is for every bullet point, a B list points sub-bullet point, and things like that, I asked people to put together a BSP aboard the border stub. Rephrase. So basically, it’s a concise summary of what the bullet point is about. And then what we asked people to do is make it lighter within three to five words. So it is truly a summary.

The reason why that’s useful is imagine you buy a ballpoint of a whole paragraph and you have two or three points in there. When you try to write a DSP summary of that, you’ll realize, oh, wait, I actually can’t capture interviews about words, because that’s two different points. And that forces you to break it apart into two different bullet points, the more you practice that, the more you can start to break apart the mutually exclusive points because you can’t summarize it otherwise.

So it’s a really good practice on that. And I’ve been asking our teams to do this, in every document, every email, everything they write, what’s useful about it is imagine the corporate environment, you’d write 10 emails a day, you use a bullet point construct, you would actually have bullet points in there. So say you write three bullet points 20 noses a day to practice at least three times a day. So over one year, you’re actually going through practicing the me part of me and see quite a lot. So that’s the BSD construct.

And then the second thing that kind of brings it home and completes a circle is just a common rule that a lot of people have used. It’s called Rule three, I tried to make people bucket everything and categorize it up into buckets of three. So if you’re talking about something, someone gives me 50 points, 50 bullet points, even if they’re just thinking very narrowly focused, I ask them to bucket it up, right? So how do you put it in bigger categories, bigger categories, until you only have three categories?

And then, so if you use a combination of the VSP and row three, you can actually get the MECE quite quickly, but it’d be SP and row three, It’s very easy to see, they’re easy to implement, and very easy to monitor, right? Because you can look at someone’s bullet points, how many bullet points do you have more than three? Okay, can you try to group into just to be only you can keep doing that recursively until you get down to DC aspects, right?

Translating PSP into practice

Amit: And what I like about this, whatever you just said is that PSP essentially is giving us a way to translate Mi c into practice, rather than leaving it as some theoretical construct. So that’s great. I mean, it’s something that people can immediately apply. And that in combination with the rule of three makes the entire message much easier to skim or digest quickly, especially for I think leadership.

So in your case, you have a large To him, if somebody two or three levels down from you wants to send you something, and they send you 50 bullet points, like you said, it puts too much of a mental load. And it’s probably too much detail for you to know anyway. And so therefore, this practice of trying to group things into threes means that they have to focus on what is most important for somebody three, or four levels above them to know.

And that makes life just a lot easier for that person. And for the writer as well, because they’re getting the important message across, and therefore more likely to get whatever it is that they want, versus losing the person and author detail.

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, correct. So this is really just, it’s a method to method communication, especially for writing that we use. And the more times you practice, the more times you realize that two things happen. One, is your mind become more structured, because now you’re thinking in terms of how do I summarize this? How do I make sure every point is distinct? And then the second thing, the rule of three makes you gives you the ability to make it more concise in the buckets at the rate, which is always easier than, 13 different event points.

Amit: Right? Yeah, so thanks a lot, man. So that is really good information, and really good tactics overall, for people to practice. So now, I assume all of this is still around the actual preparatory work, right? So you’ve decluttered things, you put them into a structure, and you’ve probably written out these bullet points in the BSP format. So now how does one actually craft the message or deliver that message?

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, this is one that took a while for me to think to figure it out. I think it’s actually pretty basic Vyas you want to have a really clear, clean message, you have to invest time into it. Yeah, to actually sit down and write down the messages I have seen people going into discussions for me in the past, that would just go in blindly. Hey, I know many things I can buy from the door on the fly and make up my key messages.

But what I’ve seen to be a lot more powerful is people who actually think through how the conversation flow could be they actually map it on paper. So for example, pay someone in a meeting, they ask me question A or D, how would I answer it, and they actually write it down. I’ve seen people actually write down to put into like duties and things.

So they had to key messages on if someone asked him about specific topics, that’s probably just that early preparation, by far the most important thing. And then later on, just in terms of how you approach communication, for writing, and also for verbal communication, just a concept called weak language.

Now I’ve heard about in communication classes, this is more corporate training things. This week, language, oftentimes is just related to bombs as those other filler words, but that’s actually not it. What I realized is, that if I go back and think about a conversation that I had with someone that, I wrote to someone, if I use 100 words, and I constantly try to think about, can I ask you to repeat that same message, but in a lot more concise? Way?

Can I have said that exact same, that’s just 50 words. And then if you’re able to do something like that, what you would realize is that the other 50 words you use are actually considerably language, because not really that helpful because you could have done it more concisely. So I think it’s more of a reflection, iterative process for someone to go through. Always take a look at the message and see what words there were not useful to the overall message. And then how do you eliminate it from your communication style verbally and in writing in the future?

Finding a way to paraphrase your speech

Amit: Right. So essentially, you’re saying that we need to find a way to paraphrase. So even if you’ve done all of this prep work, and what you want to say, and you’ve brought it down into its key points and the essentials, when you’re seeing it, you still need to say it in a, get basically get to the point and don’t kind of waste a lot of time on extraneous words, because that makes it sound like you’re waffling. Versus if you just say the few things that need to be said, you come across maybe as a little bit more of a leader or an authority, because you’re seeing what the core thing is, and then stopping.

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, correct on the written communication, or you can actually analyze what you wrote, you can actually learn from it. Yeah, that’s a pretty easy one to reflect on. And see verbal communication, it’s a whole different thing because then it becomes a lot more about style use of silence. And a lot of times you can actually use body language to communicate certain content and tone that you cannot do written-wise, that’s more of a whole different segment of practice. But it’s very important, and we’re in a Zoom environment is important as well. It’s also very important if you have live meetings, especially for leaders trying to communicate a message and get around people behind this vision board.

Amit: Okay, so we’ve talked about how one ideally should communicate and given us actually quite a few good tactical points and tips for how to get me to see Dan, how to structure things, and the fact that you should be structuring things before you start communicating. So this is all good. But I’m sure listeners of our show have deliverables that are probably due yesterday, presentations, that they’re making documents that they’re planning to share emails that they’re writing. So are there any frameworks or maybe formulas that you’d recommend so that they can get started? immediately, versus trying to figure things out from first principles using what we just discussed?

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple of frameworks we can use that help people communicate. But I think more so on problem solving, and how to frame a storyline. So let’s say we have an example of a problem that you want to present to your managers.

And let’s say it’s a recommendation to go out a new office, it’s easy to start, I think a lot of people will go out there and they have the data first, hey, let me tell you how many people we have today, how many do we have tomorrow. And then you do that case, up until the very end the recommendation on the last slide or last page to say, hey, we recommend that we go to a new office, the first tip that I have is something that a lot of different consulting firms use a lot of people use, basically just get to the point and get to this.

So that’s very quick, so imagine if the first thing I said to you, as a manager to come in was, hey, Ahmed, we recommend that we build out a brand new office, we literally just lay right out, the so what’s the key point, right on the first page on the first line, the first thing you would ask is a new person would ask this and say to ourselves, okay, why should we go the office? And then it actually makes the conversation a lot easier, because then you’ve already stated your main point, and then you can go backward in laying out.

Okay, here are the three reasons using the rule of three, why we should go to the office. Let’s go, there’s number one. And it’s probably a bunch of sub-reasons underneath. So you’re always starting with a so what’s getting to that point very quickly, rather than trying to do so from the order nitty gritty details in order to build up that point?

Amit: Yeah, actually, this is really good, because I’m thinking back to so many meetings and stuff that I’ve had where the person starts with some long story, and then it goes on and on. And after about five or seven or 10 minutes, you’re like looking at your watch and starting to do other things. Because you don’t know where all of this is heading.

Versus what you’re saying just say what you want, and then get into why you want it that way. And that focuses attention a lot more. It also means that in situations where you’re speaking with either leadership or people with limited time, or often what happens is you run out of time, at least you’ve got your main point across versus losing it by burying a child with a pat on the back.

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, I’ve seen that happen anytime. So 30-minute meeting, they set up for 25 minutes, and you spend five minutes literally discussing what you need to discuss in the yard that you completed on time, you don’t get to the main discussion, immediately, quick enough, right?

Amit: Any other frameworks that you recommend?

Ben Zhu Lin: Yeah, there are two other frameworks that we use, I have been teaching the teams. One is called PCR to do four letter acronyms. One is called PCR. I learned this from one of my managers before, I don’t recall from where, but it basically stands for problem, context, consideration, and then the resolution. And then it basically is a framework that we can use to build out the storyline.

So for going back to the same office example, if you have to stay out of the problem, when you start the discussion or the slides, anything you need to do you lay out the problem. First, the problem we have today is that we are running out of space for our employees. And then let me give you the context. Okay, we have four offices, this many employees, we have this many new employees that are coming up. And that’s the context behind the problem.

But what are the considerations as we’re thinking about the problem considerations well, we may or may not need all the office space, because we’re going to a hybrid model in the future with more resumes and things, we can look at all the different considerations, that’s not part of basic background, contextual information, and also the different insights that you would in order to analyze if you need to go to a new office, and the very end the resolution, if you just start with these three, these four blocks right here, it works very well, because every single thing that you do at work is always about talking about the problem first. So you start with a problem, context, consideration, and resolution you can cover it’s a very easy way of telling the story.

How to become a better communicator

Amit: So that’s the first of all, okay, and what’s the other framework? You mentioned? A couple. Yeah,

Ben Zhu Lin: The other one is also called S CQA. So this is the one also from our memento, the person who coined the term VC. So as for me, Stan’s situation is complicated. And now what’s the question? What’s the answer? So the situation in our environment here is the fact that we are going to run out of space in an office, the situation is about that we have a lot of employees coming in, we have very limited office space. And what’s the complication?

The complication is the fact that we’re going to run out of space. Right. So I think that’s the kind of problem or the PCR, and then you can take a look at the question. The question that we had to ask ourselves today is, should we build out a new office for us? And the answer is based on all the different analyses you have in your final recommendation, the answer is yes, we should, or No, we should not. So it’s a CQA situation, complication, question and answer.

Amit: But these are very helpful frameworks, Wenzhou and I’ll link all of these later on the website. But essentially, these give people tried and tested ways of getting their point across and they don’t have to sit around inventing In the movie, how to communicate,

Ben Zhu Lin: To write Yeah, we actually had templates on the team that had to have those two laid out. So basically, the template has PCR energy just doing what the problem is, what’s the context, and what’s at the end of consideration also for NCQA, and those very well used within our teams.

Amit: Yeah, that makes perfect sense, also saves people a lot of time trying to figure out how to structure their presentations. And because these are things that consultants use, man, I know, consultants are extremely good at putting together material that grabs attention, it’s a shortcut way for getting your point across as well. So before we close, when do you have any other suggestions or thoughts on how an individual could become a better communicator?

Ben Zhu Lin: I think, it’s basically these two. So I think the way I phrased it in my mind is one is called structured thinking and the second, is clear communication. So the structure of thinking is the MECE, the BSP the Rule three, that’s the core foundation of the thinking and organization, that thoughts in your mind. And then the clue communication is actually just how you articulate that out to the world either in a written format or in a verbal format, but the two together, I think porn is what we talk about as being a better communicator.

Amit: Right. And I think you’ve laid it out very well, in today’s discussion, both the planning and structure side and the actual communicating and framework side. So maybe, let me just summarize a little bit for our, listeners, there are four main points that I think you made. One is, when you’re talking about communicating, you have to remember that you’re communicating not just for yourself, making yourself look good, and making it efficient to do that, but you’re also communicating for others.

So you have to see how that message lands, how easy is it for other people to absorb your message, and thereby eliminate that invisible cost you were talking about. The second point is about structuring your thoughts using the MECE framework. And then using bolded summary phrases, and rule of three to actually bring the MECE framework into practice. And you did mention that it’s a concept that people can understand.

But it takes time to master. So the more often you do it, the better it is. And a simple tactic you suggested was just to do it on emails because you write dozens of emails every day. So why not use that as your practice pad? The third point was around key messages and removing B content. C, is there a way for you to bring down things into just enough words to get the point across, and then, not waste too much time on filler material and be content.

The last one was around, tried and tested frameworks you shared, actually, quite a few, three of them, and essentially focused on getting to the point and getting attention quickly so that you don’t lose people in all the details before you’ve got your actual message across. So these are great venzo. It’s good learning for everybody on this call. It’s good learning for me as well. There are a lot of good reminders here for all of us who are trying to accelerate our careers through better communication. Yeah, so when so thank you so much. Really appreciate having you here with us on job talk.

Ben Zhu Lin: Thank you so much. That was very structured, and very well communicated as well. Yeah, you’re doing very well on that one. Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed the time.

Amit: Yeah, same here and for everyone listening. Thank you so much for tuning in. In case you’d like to get all his career growth hacks. He goes well beyond communication into a lot of different ways in which you can actually jumpstart your career and do remember to follow or subscribe to the show. See you next time.