A little while ago I ran a survey with my mailing list to find out what people were struggling with most, and one comment stuck out in my mind:

Absolutely they’re connected. Writing and speaking are complementary - comedians create a feedback loop between ideas and performance by jumping between the two. So let’s take one skill that affects them all: summarising. Tom Kerwin (author of the Innovation Tactics card deck) told me about some feedback he once received:

There’s real magic in these ‘that’s it!’ moments. Organisations love people who can compress reality when they summarise - turn a complex thing into a small number of words. Summarise well, and all heads turn towards in your direction: you've reduced the effort they need to spend to understand something. They'll listen carefully to what you say next.

So how DO you do that Tom? (he’ll try to tell you it’s Multiverse Mapping - not wrong, but let’s start simpler!)

Summarise a movie in 7-10 words

Here’s a fun way to practise: summarise the movie you just watched. Imagine the events in the movie were real, and you’re the journalist writing up the (slightly trashy) newspaper headline:

It might seem like these are easy to write. But as with design, they’re not: you need to do the hard work to make it simple. If you practise this in writing, you’ll get better at doing it live in your head when needed.

Imagine you open your notes app as the credits roll on George Miller’s Furiosa (no spoilers!) and you…

1. Write the core plot

Focus on the main character and their driving motivations:

2. Write the actions

Let’s focus this time more on what she’s actually doing:

3. Bring them together

We can summarise the kidnapping, who she is, and why she fights for freedom by adding the word ‘slave’. Plus 'wasteland' is better than the generic ‘apocalypse’.

Nothing earth-shattering or engaging, but if you don’t know anything about the movie, this is a decent practise-run. If you’ve seen my talks recently, you’ll know that entire movie franchises can be described in totality by summarising just the opening scene of the first movie:

Fun aside: there’s a whole subreddit devoted to creating misleading summaries, like this one for Jurassic Park:

Once you’ve had some fun trying this with a movie or two this weekend, then you can start applying this at the end of meetings, projects, ideas, or anything that needs explaining. It’s a little harder in work, as the main features don’t stand out as neatly as movies do, but the practise with movies will help you bulk up those summarising muscles.

My friend Sophie Dennis once described summarising as ‘moving up the abstraction ladder’. We spend so much time at the bottom rung - practise summarising to take a few steps upwards. The horrible truth is that most people don't need all of details in your head rattling around inside theirs.