Cognitive limitation: when the devil is in the lack of details

Everything was done according to the rules of the art. You arrived at your feedback point with an open mind, your manager was very professional. You leave with a smile, and you are ready to tackle your area of improvement: make your written communication more effective. Nothing complicated in this objective... and yet, when it comes to getting started, the task seems rather arduous. It's as if you arrived in Nepal to climb Everest, and someone just pointed the finger at you and said “It's the highest, you can't miss it.” You are fully motivated to go there, and indeed, the objective is visible. Rather, the problem is that you lack a lot of information and tools... Result: Everest will wait.

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What's going on in your head: cognitive impairment

Our brain is an amazing machine, but like any machine, its capabilities are limited : we are only able to process a certain amount of information at a time. Professor Miller, from Harvard, also estimates that this number is 7, plus or minus 2. Faced with too many possible choices, especially when these choices are complex and seem to require a lot of effort, our brain does not know what decision to make, and blocks our ability to take action. Facing Everest, what equipment to take, what food, when to leave, in what direction? Just looking at the mountain makes you already feel tired — and again, you're not even running out of oxygen. In short, you are quite incapable of creating a plan, much less putting it into action.

Faced with your feedback, the situation is exactly the same. It is not that the objective “to make my written communication more effective” is difficult in itself: it is that it is ambiguous and complex. Ambiguous, because you finally don't know if your manager was mainly talking about emails, presentations, files or reports. Complex, because as is often the case with Soft Skills, it is difficult to know when you will have reached a sufficient level: it is as if you were asked to climb Everest, except that in addition, you cannot see the summit, and you do not know its altitude. As a result, the effort required to implement this feedback is growing rapidly: the best way to avoid this effort is simply not to Do nothing.

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Les Nudges to the rescue: the method of Chunking

Fortunately, working on your written communication is an objective (at first glance) easier than climbing Everest: there is no need for an exceptional physical condition to overcome it! Just apply the right one Nudge, that is, the little push that will help you take action. Here it is the Chunking (of Chunk, “piece” in English).

The method of chunking, that Rory Gallagher and Owain Service (the authors of Think Small) tell us about, is simply breaking up an objective into sub-tasks, as small and numerous as needed, until each piece becomes accessible. If you ever want to climb Everest, you won't do it all at once: the ascent is divided into stages. And before you even set foot in the snow, you will have an extremely precise list of the type of equipment to buy and the workouts to perform.

In this way, you simultaneously reduce ambiguity and complexity: you now face specific and accessible actions.

Try to use this method: Break down your objective into sub-tasks

Why? Les Soft Skills are in fact a set of behaviors to be adopted and refined on an ongoing basis. Listing these behaviors, or actions, concretizes the stages of your progress. Not only do you know what to do, but you also prepare concrete examples to present to your manager as proof of your progress.

How? List your types of written communication: e-mail, presentation, file, report. Prioritize only one, for example emails: this will be your focus of the month. Finally, list weekly actions: this week, take care of the title of your emails; next week, use formatting to structure your emails...

Little by little, you will work concretely on pieces of your written communication. You will progress, at your own pace but continuously... in short, you will advance, slowly but surely, in the direction of your Everest!

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