The Art of Processing Complex Information
Years ago, during my stint with Amazon, I flew with my MBA intern to the Seattle Headquarters to present his summer internship project to the Senior leadership team. I had worked with him over the past 3 months, and we were both extremely proud of his efforts. While he waited patiently outside, I entered the conference room to sit with a team of executive leaders who were reviewing the infamous Amazon One Pager I had helped my intern construct. Once I took my seat, I glanced around the room and just took in the moment, watching the team read and reread the document in the silence of the space. The only sound present was an infrequent pen scribble connecting with paper.
Amazon uses a One Pager instead of PowerPoint presentations. What makes the One Pager so special is its ability to “distill complex ideas into a clear and compelling narrative… [It] prioritizes brevity and clarity.”[1] Its tight format and deliberate approach encourage critical thinking and precision in language. The beauty of the One-Pager is that it consists of only a single page of text, delivering a powerful message. It is a strategic document that effectively communicates a product, service, or general proposal.
My intern’s One Pager was an extremely time-efficient way to share organized information in a concise format. Looking back, I intended to land a full-time position for my intern. But it wasn’t about key metrics or solutions that sat in front of that executive team on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. Instead, the journey and the art of the process enabled him to arrive at the result. Pulling together the data, synthesizing the critical components, and communicating key learnings. The author leads with a succinct executive summary and a robust conclusion, fleshed out in the middle with a thorough implementation plan that ascertains and mitigates risk. For this requirement, the art of slow is fast, and less is more is paramount.
I have discovered that reading can also be artistic. In How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren, readers must ask questions as part of the active reading process. “The art of reading on any level above the elementary consists in the habit of asking the right questions in the right order.”[2] Readers must address a book based on specific needs, goals, or objectives.
Personally, I have straddled the line between reading for enjoyment and analytical reading for business needs. I have often used inspectional reading to determine if a book piques my interest, but I have not delved into syntopical or comparative reading. The closest I have come to comparing is synthesizing ideas, facts, and projects using the One Pager format.
Live by the Machine, Die by the Machine
Since leaving Amazon, I have frequently accessed my toolkit for the One Pager tool. It has proven invaluable. The tool is data-driven and leverages key metrics and performance indicators, making it a foundational element for outlining and evaluating various projects. However, there are instances when stakeholders and leaders may disagree with your assessment of your art and provide a heavy critique.
I walked into the firing line of a monumental critique during a software implementation when I worked at Organically Grown Company. As an Operations project leader, I invested hundreds of hours in preparation for the rollout, which included monitoring and communicating our overall success on order fulfillment and associated metrics. I provided daily updates to the broader leadership team. However, this is where my total reliance upon the tool and the associated art failed me. Despite the superior results and daily victories, the road became rockier in consecutive meetings. On paper, we were winning, with incremental improvement in each day. Our external customer feedback was extremely positive, but the messaging did nothing to influence certain internal customers, key stakeholders, or executive team members. Following an early post-go-live meeting, one of the company leaders approached me outside of the conference room and without explanation said, “Live by the machine – die by the machine,” and walked away. His statement spoke volumes, and I was unprepared for that type of response. After working consecutive 18-20 hour shifts for more than a week I was exhausted. In this instant, I knew the art of my critical thinking had failed me.
In The Miniature Guide To Critical Thinking, Richard Paul and Linda Elder outline the essential intellectual virtues of the fairminded critical thinker. The fairminded thinker has a balance between pursuing their own needs and the needs of others. “Fairmindedness is having a consciousness of the need to treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interests…”[3] The bias and confidence I had toward this tool and my overall experience had clouded my overall judgment. I had left part of the team behind.
In hindsight, I ultimately chose the right tool and format to deliver empirical results, but it needed additional art to be successful. I had completely underestimated and misread their fear of what they didn’t understand and their past experiences with technology that held them hostage for roughly ten years. These specific senior leadership team members still bore the scars of an overpromised and underdelivered technology solution that helped aid and manage their daily business execution. While critical thinking is important, having an emotional pulse on the entire team is also essential. Since that moment, I have taken this lesson to heart while leading other significant change projects.
I look forward to shifting and growing my mindset as we explore actively researching, writing, and adding additional precision tools to the toolkit.
[1] Reicher, Hermina. 2023. “Amazon’s tools: One Pager, Six Pager, and Backwards Press Release.” June 8, 2023. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazons-tools-one-pager-six-backwards-press-release-hermina-reicher/
[2] Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972, 46.
[3] Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools, 8th edition, Thinker’s Guide Library, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 23-26.
About the Author
Michael Hansen
8 responses to “The Art of Processing Complex Information”
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Mike,
I appreciate your phrasing of reading as “art.” It has got me thinking… how so? What does it mean to “create” or be an “artist”? How does that relate to reading?
On reflection, I think that my (unintentional) approach to reading has been something along the lines of treating it like I am the canvas and the book is to paint on me. Instead, your phrasing has caused me reconsider: perhaps my own thinking and creative activity is the art, and I am collaborating with the author as I read their book?
Thanks for writing.
Joff,
I live with a family of artists: two very gifted children in the traditional arts (art and music) and a wife who considers herself a repressed artist. My background, experiences, and specific use of frameworks would give me direct answers that are timely, efficient, and cost-effective. And I agree with your statement -Adler is leaning into being more efficient with the reading process – and yes, you are ultimately the creator here. There is much less rigidity in ways to interpret and get answers through reading than you, or I might have chosen to acknowledge or act upon prior.
Mike-
Your description of the one-pager is a helpful expansion of Adler’s directive to “state what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity.” He gave the what; you provide the why. I have lived through many, many PowerPoint meetings that lack the power of a point.
Paul and Elder describe the balance of fairmindedness. At first blush, your “live by the machine” colleague doesn’t sound very fair-minded. By speaking up, he also gave you the opportunity to learn and improve. Cold silence might have been a crueler response. Once the sting of his gruff criticism subsided, I’m curious how you later viewed his ‘help’. The statement was effective, even if it fell short of Paul and Elder’s intellectual standards (clarity, accuracy, precision, etc.).
Rich,
The one-pager was an enormous leap for me to enter that environment. At Amazon, when I first heard “no PowerPoint,” I wasn’t really skeptical because, as you shared, there sometimes isn’t much to (Power)Point to, and you’re left wondering what I did for the last hour. But it left me questioning what was going to fill that void.
The one-pager was an abrupt and decisive shift. No fundamental bullet points or images, and a few small tables to represent necessary data. Then there was the combined experience of creating the one-pager and the almost eery interaction with the senior team while they were chewing on and digesting the document. I had not experienced this, and it was much more efficient once you got through it together.
Your observation about my interaction with the senior team member was correct. His comments stung for a while, but I sought him out later and had a chance to share my overall perception of the moment with him. This was my first leadership role post-Amazon, and the culture of this company was almost the complete opposite. I learned various lessons from this interaction, which made me a much-improved leader. It was one of the catalysts that ushered me toward interacting with a coach.
Mike,
I am very familiar with the Amazon one-pager as my current company has adopted the narrative process as well. I appreciate the way you tied that skill to the way Adler and Van Doren are encouraging us to read. It seems like precision and emotional intelligence are the magic combo for writing and critical thinking. Which do you think is the harder skill to develop?
Mika,
I agree that balancing efficiency/precision and emotional intelligence is fundamental. You can’t separate the two in your actions/responses and can’t ignore one completely. I will use the adage of marbles in the jar. This was a key learning as I completed the Core Values Index (CVI) assessment about 10 years ago. Unsurprisingly, I was a decisive innovator or solver, which could correlate well with strategic or critical thinking. I have many more marbles in the jar, which is where one of my core strengths lies. An abundance of marbles (energy and flow) around that value has brought me success in most professional roles. Where I fall WAY short is the merchant value (emotional) with very few marbles. The key difference I learned from this teaching was that once those few marbles are spent each day, they are gone. I cannot replenish them. This ties very much to my overall reading/writing. So, underlying all of our doctoral requirements, I only have a handful of marbles to act upon in the writing, and I know I need to plan accordingly. This new art of reading outlined by Adler should diminish some of the need to draw down the balance of marbles in my merchant jar.
On a side note, I have even incorporated more art-related language into my actions in the distribution buildings. It’s all purposeful, and I am an engineer by degree. I often get quizzical looks when I tell the team that a well-designed warehouse can look, sound, and feel like a finely tuned band or orchestra. But then I followed up on the statement with other actions. I walk into the warehouse floor with them and ask them to close their eyes for 30 seconds (it’s safe) and then open their eyes and share what they experienced. I will do this in various warehouse sections to draw analogies to different orchestra sections. For some, it might be a struggle; for others, it’s illuminating.
Thanks for your question.
What great insights on the whole concept of Processing Complex Information as an art form. I have considered so many realms as an art form. But the whole matter of knowledge management and process management has pretty much eluded my conceptual thinking, especially as it comes to reading as prescribed by Adler and Van Doren.
I must confess that for most of my life, I have processed my thoughts verbally and then reconstructed my thoughts in a way that I could not only understand but effectively communicate them to others. I confess that it was intrinsically artistic in the most artsy way of thinking. My processing was whimsical and without structure. It was enormously fun, but in the end, there was a lot of winging it going on.
Learning to process complex information is becoming increasingly complex because of the multiplicity of variables emerging and the sheer amount of information available today, not to mention AI. You have given me something to really think about.
Thanks for sharing this blog, Michael. This excerpt caught my attention: “The fairminded thinker has a balance between pursuing their own needs and the needs of others” and “Fairmindedness is having a consciousness of the need to treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interests…”. It’s a great way (and mindset) to strengthen the workings of a team.