#SOTD 25: Organising, labelling and mnemonic devices

18 March 2022

What is common to the following:

• The 4Ps of Marketing
• The SWOT framework
• The CODE process by Tiago Forte
• The SUCCESs model in Made to Stick

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All of them are smart mnemonic devices that pack in a ton of insights in an easy to remember way.

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Oh, and they are also MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) and elegant.

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They are a great way to ensure your audience remembers what you have to say.

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Here's how you can use them in storytelling:

• Collect all the ideas that you want to share with your audience (it could be any topic - marketing, sports, facilitation, auditing techniques)
• Bucket the ideas under different heads: Bucketing can be tricky. The key is to ensure your framework is MECE and elegant
  • Try out different bucketing combinations till you achieve this goal
• Think of a smart set of labels for each bucket/group. If the labels can be arranged to form a mnemonic - great!
  • Mnemonics work either as a standalone word (e.g. CODE, SUCCESs) or as a collection of the same letters (e.g. 7S framework, 4Ps)

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Let's look at a recent example I came across on Twitter.

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​Gaurav Singh could have said that the key objectives of a CEO include the following:

• Craft vision and strategy
• Execute on the strategy
• Hire the right talent
• Raise funding for short term and long term needs
• Meet shareholder expectations on returns
• Be the face of the company and communicate the vision and performance to all stakeholders
• Motivate the team and help them grow
• and so on.

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Instead he bucketed these ideas under five heads (must not have been easy!) and then came up with a cool mnemonic to make it memorable:

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Now - you may disagree with some aspect of the classification or the labelling.

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But this framing allows you to 'get' the ideas faster and gives you an easy device to remember all the jobs in one go.

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Where can you use this technique

This technique is very useful in training. Especially, if you are trying to take an audience through a process, using the process steps as the buckets and creating a mnemonic (like the CODE process, or my own ABCD framework) is a useful way to share the same.

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Have you created or used a framework like this at your work? Do share and I'll post in the next email.

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Oh, and wishing you all a happy and safe Holi!

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#SOTD 25