During its use, many people have been criticised, rightly or wrongly, for expanding their thoughts too much in a presentation, an email, or a simple report. To top it all off, in 2006 Twitter introduced a new standard for brevity: 140 characters, not one more…
Those in a hurry, the restless or the positive will point out that you can already say a lot in 140 characters. Of course, but it’s a bit short - so to speak!
Mastering the synthesis or knowing how to summarize a statement in one phase is an art that few people master. We can only admire them when we have the pleasure of hearing or reading them, but there are slippages and some democracies, including the United States, suffer from them.
But that is not the point. Reducing the complexity of the world to a few lines is often dangerous, even perverse, but in any case, very Manichean. The world of journalism refers to this as the ‘friendly’ term ‘short news’. There is always nothing wrong with this, except for one thing: in most cases, the summary does not fully correspond to reality and without some form of experience and distance from this type of news, one very quickly falls into misinformation.
In companies, we are increasingly witnessing the same phenomenon: to be brief is to be dynamic, efficient and effective for many, with top management often pushing in this direction, arguing that senior managers have no time and, above all, are intelligent enough to understand the context. This is true, but there is a danger with every PowerPoint page that is dissected: under the pretext of contributing to efficiency, certain details, certain indirect consequences, certain opportunities are not represented.
To those who try to show that the devil is in the details, the answer is often abrupt: either the presentation is shortened or the content is ignored, at the risk of going in exactly the opposite direction to that which would bring added value.
Reducing the complexity of a process, a project or a concept - whether intentionally or not - also reduces its substance, its importance and often its criticality. It also gives the impression that any fool can find the solution in two minutes. Reactions from senior management to this often take the form of a scathing question: why didn’t we do this before? That’s it, that’s it…
Manipulation by concealment or elision is as old as the hills, and the 140-character principle is not going to disappear any time soon: many smartphone applications offer the same functionality, by text or video…
After a chaotic 2022, unfortunately tarnished by conflicts, hostile reactions between countries, questions about democracy, sports events in unlikely places, and a climate that is going crazy, let’s hope that 2023 will be better for everyone. Whether it’s in 140 characters or more, it doesn’t really matter…
Happy New Year 2023, happy reading and see you soon.