Explaining Technical Work to Your Non-Technical Leaders with Chris Fenning, Author

(Chris Fenning at 00:00:00) And this came off the back of I'd just given the board of directors of a Fortune 30 company the news that the program they just announced to Wall Street was going to be delivered late. And the model is a really simple three-part model. It's perspective, impact, and simplicity. And if you can keep those three steps in mind, you can take whatever your message is and reform it in a way that's going to make it much clearer and much more likely to be understood and appreciated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) And our audience is CTOs, mostly technology leaders, people that want to become CTOs or just want to learn what great leaders are doing. And when David pitched this episode to me, I was pretty excited because it takes a lot of work to translate technical complexity and the business impact. It takes a lot of work to make it simple and to communicate it properly. And then I found that you were, like, a rocket scientist that became a communication coach. I was like, that is so odd. We have to talk to Chris. Chris, how did that happen?

(Chris Fenning at 00:01:12) Well, it happened over a period of time. It wasn't a one day to another moment. But yeah, my training, my degree is aeronautics and astronautics. I focused in satellite design engineering and materials design and manufacture. It was about as geeky as I could get at the time. And moved into—my first job after university was in a defense company, and they discovered I could speak technical and business. And I didn't realize that that was an unusual thing. And they kept putting me in roles where I was translating between these two different sides of the business. And they kept describing them as two different sides of the business. And from my perspective, it was just different people doing different jobs. So throughout my career, I was in defense, telecom, web hosting, travel industry for a little while. I sold bread and milk out of a cart for a time. But most of the jobs involved a technical element and a business element, and it just evolved over twenty-something years working around the world and building up more of the business and the communication skills as I moved further away from the detailed technical side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) You know I'm going to ask the follow-up question about the eggs and bread. What—how did that happen? Was this fun? Like, you're helping your kids do an egg stand or something?

(Chris Fenning at 00:02:32) That would possibly be a better justification. This was a side business. I've always had multiple jobs. My—I think my yearbook entry was I was the person most likely to have seven jobs at the same time or something ridiculous like that. When I was at school, I was running a bike repair business and carrying bricks for a local builder and working in a pub at the bar. So I always did a lot of things. And then when I got a proper job after university, I still had interests on the side. And one of them was an idea that I couldn't get out of my head while I was traveling for my work. I was traveling across Europe. I was going to Asia, the U.S., and I'd always come back late at night. This was early 2000s, and I never had anything to eat for breakfast the next day. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if someone could meet me at the airport with a bag that had milk, bread, jam, OJ, just some basic stuff for breakfast so I could just get in my car, go home, and I've got breakfast? Because in the U.K., there were no stores open at night. So I had this idea and thought, well, let's—can I turn it into a business? Called up the local airport near me. Just found the number for their business development department. Called them up, pitched the idea, and they said, can you come in tomorrow and pitch this as a full service? And that's what I did and had a six-month trial run. It didn't make the money to make it fully viable, but it was a great experience for a while. Taught me a lot about running my own business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:02) There's at least one person who was excited about it, right?

(Chris Fenning at 00:04:05) Oh, there were. Yeah, there were. I had repeat customers, families who would come again and again, and I would wheel this big cart across the airport arrivals lounge and hand people milk, eggs, and bread.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) You were so close to DoorDash. You didn't even realize it.

(Chris Fenning at 00:04:22) They were going to roll it into—they had—they promised me the dream, which was they wanted to roll it into their prepaid parking packages, but they needed proof that it was worth enough that they would do it. That would have made it excellent because it would have been point of service. I could have just stocked everything up where the cars were, so easy to deliver, great orders. I just couldn't get the numbers. It's okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:46) But you're on the right track, though. You're innovative, understanding the customer. I like it. I like it. So you're a communication coach now?

(Chris Fenning at 00:04:56) I am. I've left bread and milk behind. And, yeah, so for the last six, six and a half years, I left a senior role in a large U.S. company where I was over a tech department, and I split my time between technology and running mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and stepped into the world of helping bridge the divide between tech and non-tech teams or between specialist and non-specialist teams within the companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:25) Did you realize that was, like, how—did you realize that you were more excited about coaching in that last position that you had? Did you find that you were helping these people understand? You're like, I just want to help the people all the time.

(Chris Fenning at 00:05:39) That sounds like—I'd love it to be that answer. That sounds quite altruistic and a good realization, but it was a little messier than that, as with most things in life. It's never quite that simple. I had a health crisis. I had a work stress situation. My family—we live—we're living in the U.S. now. We were living in the U.S. at the time. We wanted to move back to Europe to be closer to our families. And all of these things were going on. And out of the blue, a different—the CIO of the company, but who's also just getting into information security, came along and said, hey, Chris. I've been told that you're the guy who gives the best executive briefings. And can you come and teach my division how to do that? And this came off the back of I'd just given the board of directors of a Fortune 30 company the news that the program they just announced to Wall Street was going to be delivered late. And that was a happy, fun conversation for me, but it got me known in the company as being able to explain why these big, big programs were or were not going to succeed. And he came along and said, hey, come teach my people how to do it. So I did. And then my best friend who worked for me at the time said, hey, you need to teach this stuff. And if you don't start teaching it, I'm going to come along and hit you on the back of the head every day until you do. And so all those things came along together at the same time. I had that desire for a change. I was burning out in the senior role and had had this great realization, like, thrust in front of me that this is one of the things I'm good at. So I ran with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:20) How do you teach it? Do you boil it down to a framework? I know you've written books. Let's—what's the book that we want to talk about the most? Like, what book that you've written would bring the most value to CTOs, technical leaders?

(Chris Fenning at 00:07:33) The one that I am writing is going to be the most value. So it's always the one I am writing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:37) Sorry, guys. It's work in progress.

(Chris Fenning at 00:07:40) But this can be an opportunity. They can be part of it if they're interested. The book that's most useful for CTOs would be one that—it's called "The First Minute," and they should give it to their teams because it will enable their teams to be clear, concise, get to the point, and summarize anything in just a few lines. And that's—for the one that's written, that is the thing that would help CTOs the most because their teams will get to the point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:08) Yeah. Is the whole book just, like, paste it in the Claude? Is that it?

(Chris Fenning at 00:08:15) I wonder if I would have the guts to write it now because of exactly that. I don't know. The book isn't that, but Claude does occasionally reference the frameworks from the book. And other AI tools are available, of course. But it does occasionally, by name, reference the methods in the book. So it's been fed in enough to be coming out again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:38) That's what—you know, we did an interview with Seth Godin. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He's in marketing and strategy.

(Chris Fenning at 00:08:45) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) But his most recent book, he included prompts in the book. So he, like, explains this whole concept, talks about this specific strategy, and then he gives you a prompt to then use—like, copy that and go paste it and then continue that conversation with your own unique details. And he was early on that because that interview was, like, over a year ago. And I was like, wow. That's such a good thing to add to books. That keeps them valuable.

(Chris Fenning at 00:09:13) It does. It's almost—if you don't do it, it's almost like you're missing out something significant. Go back ten years. If you didn't have stories and examples in a book, well, that was a failing in a book. Now for a nonfiction book, if you're not connecting it to AI in some way, it makes it less relevant because most people are looking for that connection. How do I take this set of information and then use it most easily? And, of course, people are turning to the readily available, time-saving shortcut tools.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:45) Yeah. So this new book, when is it going to come out? Do you have a release date, or are you still writing it?

(Chris Fenning at 00:09:50) It's still being written. I'm actually still in the—I've been writing it for a couple of years. It's had a couple of false starts. But middle of next year—middle to end of next year is the goal for it to be published. And it's a book about bridging that expert to non-expert divide. How do experts communicate with non-experts? Whether that's people in finance talking to people in marketing, whether it's software engineers, whether it's scientists, academics, but communicating with people outside of their field. And I have a particular interest in CIO, CTO roles because they are at a critical communication junction within a business because they have to understand enough about the tech to be able to communicate to other people, but they're constantly translating to other areas of the business and not just to other C-suite. They communicate up and down across the business and outside. So that role has some of the greatest pressure for being able to translate, being able to communicate across that tech to non-tech divide. And so talking to CTOs to get really good current painful experiences and brilliant solutions helps build on and make the model that I've already got, the model I already teach, far more robust.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) What was the model that you had where you said, okay, this is effective enough. I need to build a whole book around it. Because that's how it started, right? The idea.

(Chris Fenning at 00:11:21) Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice if there was just a flash of inspiration and suddenly the book appears? But teaching this stuff in reality is where you test it, it's where you find the edges, where does it break down, and there's never a one size fits all. But there is a—I say there isn't a one size fits all. That's actually my goal is to find those universal truths. So I mentioned "The First Minute," which is a universal framework for being clear and concise at the beginning of a conversation. And 95-plus percent of the conversations you'll have, it will work in. So I like those universal truths. And for this, for anyone in tech roles and for anyone in the CTO role, there is a model. And the model is a really simple three-part model. It's perspective, impact, and simplicity. And if you can keep those three steps in mind, you can take whatever your message is and reform it in a way that's going to make it much clearer and much more likely to be understood and appreciated. So it's perspective, impact, and then simplicity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:25) Okay. So perspective, you know, how do you work out what your audience cares about? Is that what—

(Chris Fenning at 00:12:31) Yes. And the key thing about perspective is we fail at it so much. We fail at it almost all the time because we consider our own perspective first. And not from a selfish point of view, but it's how we live. So the CTO has goals, objectives, deliverables for their division, their department, their area of the organization. And whenever they're solving a problem or getting information up from their area of the business, they're going to be thinking about it through that lens. It's what they're paid to do. As soon as they start talking to somebody outside of their area, they need to be able to consider what is the perspective on this topic from where they are sitting. Is the CFO going to care about the tech detail? Pretty much no. Most of the time, they're most likely to care about the financial impacts, short-term, medium-term, ongoing, one-off costs, etc. Anyone who's involved in ops is going to be caring about the efficiency. They're going to be caring about other outcomes, customer satisfaction. What's the impact on the processes and the policies within the system that they operate in, usually the people side? So considering the perspective is the first step. And there are a number of things we can do within that. But at the very least, if somebody just said, all right, I want to give this message. What does that person care about? Even just asking that simple question is a huge step towards being able to adapt your message to make it more relevant to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:08) And then step three is just to simplify it, but, like, without dumbing it down.

(Chris Fenning at 00:14:12) Simplifying without dumbing it down. Step two makes step three a lot easier. So when we talk about impact, it's what is the impact of my message on something that you would care about? If I—let's take an example that's a really hard one to justify. Let's say the company's going gung-ho for AI integration. And a crazy idea, right? No one's doing that at the moment. But to do this, there's a problem with the quality of the data in the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:42) This is, like, 99% of the conversations I'm having off the podcast right now.

(Chris Fenning at 00:14:47) Okay. Great. Okay. Then I will run with this. So I read something that Gartner, in 2025 and again this year, predicted and then found that 60 or 63% of AI integration projects fail, and the core reason they're failing is because of data readiness within the company. The data is all disparate. It—you can't just plug an AI system in. And one of the solutions is code refactoring and updating the architecture. But let's stick with code refactoring. Trying to justify code refactoring is really hard because from any other perspective in the business, there's nothing to show for the work. It's money that produces exactly what we have today. Because from the perspective of ops, there's no new functionality, no new features. Everything that's working today works tomorrow. Why did you spend three to six months refactoring? And so if the CTO has to justify this, hey, we want to do this big AI integration project or even a small one. For it to work, we need more stable data or we need a more consistent data layer or some database solution. And a barrier to us being able to do that is the quality of our code. How do they justify that and explain it in a way that the rest of the company understands?

(Chris Fenning at 00:16:10) And the way they do that is steps two and three of this process. It's about impact and then simplifying. I'm gonna go into that, but I just wanna pause for a moment so I'm not giving a seven-minute-long answer. Anything you wanna jump in before I go into how they would do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:27) No. Let's jump right into... First of all, I love communication. You could tell by the past thousand episodes I've done, and I like talking to really bright people of all different...

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:38) Everyone's bright in different ways, right? And I'm like, oh, Chris has taken what I know to be true, and he put a framework to it, and he's putting words to it, and he's thought it out deeply.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:51) And now he's packaged it and he's communicating it to my audience in a way that I could not communicate it. And so I'm like, keep going. Let's keep hearing it.

(Chris Fenning at 00:16:59) You've just described my whole job. I need to take that and give that to my wife because that's a better description than the one I give for what I do. Outside ideas, getting someone else to put an idea back at you is a great way to test how clear it is. So let's go...

(Chris Fenning at 00:17:17) We're in refactoring. Code refactoring is the big time-intensive, therefore, there's a cost associated with it. That is the proposal that the CTO is putting before the board.

(Chris Fenning at 00:17:30) The board has a lot of pressure from the rest of the company, from the COO, from the rest of the C-suite to get AI in, and the CTO is saying no until we've done this. How do they communicate that clearly? Talking about impact and simplifying using analogies is going to be the best way to do this. So we could say, if we try and shove AI in, the impact is we could break critical systems. And I'm not talking about my teams have to work a bit on Friday.

(Chris Fenning at 00:17:58) I'm talking about customer services go down. The tools that drive revenue for us break. We either lose customers or we're doing rebates or we've got... Our reputation goes down, which means we don't get renewals, which means next year, we're gonna have a lower revenue and miss those targets. All of those things are impacts that other leaders in the company will care about.

(Chris Fenning at 00:18:22) I didn't talk about the tech at all in those statements. I talked about impacts and outcomes that other people will care about. Customer satisfaction will go down, which leads to lower renewals, which means less money. I'm joining the dots between technical failure and something that a lot of other leaders will care about or that's important for the company goal.

(Chris Fenning at 00:18:43) That's the impact. Now how do I make that more real, particularly when it comes to code refactoring? Use an analogy and say, hey, guys. For the last five years, we've built this company fast. And here's what it looks like from a tech perspective.

(Chris Fenning at 00:19:01) We've got five people standing around a table building a tower out of wooden blocks, and they are building it fast. They are throwing blocks in and building a tower. And the result is something grew very quickly. But now if we put another brick on the top, that whole tower is not very stable. It might collapse.

(Chris Fenning at 00:19:21) That's the stage that we're at because we've grown so fast. If we pause and we spend a little bit of time just making small changes to shore up that tower and to make it a little bit more stable, we can put a lot more on top. But we have to take that pause and adjust the foundation and realign those blocks that are a little bit off. Because we've gone fast, we've built something, we can't continue doing the same thing. Otherwise, it's all gonna fall down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) And honestly, historically, where I've seen the most problems here is people not even having the experience to know the least amount of things to adjust. Like, when it comes to actual technical execution, they'll do that story and even tell it with simplicity and be like, we have to basically start over. We have to rebuild this from the ground up. And no one wants to hear that.

(Chris Fenning at 00:20:12) No one wants to hear that. No one wants...

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) It's simple and it sucks. We want simple and it's awesome. That's what we want.

(Chris Fenning at 00:20:18) Yeah. Yeah. And so that's going to be the case because no company will say, okay, we'll stop and do nothing. We won't launch any new products. We won't do anything else. Then the conversation changes.

(Chris Fenning at 00:20:30) If you get to that point, it's actually a good sign because you're not being rejected out of hand. They're not saying, no. You can't do any of that. No. We don't understand the need for it.

(Chris Fenning at 00:20:41) What you've entered into is a priority discussion. So ideally, we'd say, stop everything. We'll rebuild from scratch. Well, yes, in an ideal world, but that's not realistic. The other end of the scale is do nothing and then calamity will come or some problem will come.

(Chris Fenning at 00:20:58) But there's a middle ground where can we shore up some bits? And what are the steps we can do it in? What are the small changes that will deliver the biggest difference? And it comes down to a question of priorities and trade-offs.

(Chris Fenning at 00:21:13) And once you're in that conversation, it's no longer about the merits of your idea. It's about how does that idea stack up against everything else the company is trying to do. And it's a very different discussion, and it removes almost all the tech. All the detail gets taken out. And it becomes down to, okay, is this a speed versus risk?

(Chris Fenning at 00:21:37) Is this a new customer acquisition versus existing customer experience trade-off? And you, again, come back to the impacts and outcomes that everyone else in the business is going to understand. It's their language. It's common words. And talking about that means, okay.

(Chris Fenning at 00:21:54) What is the priority for the business? Is it getting new features out the door as fast as possible? Or is it keep customers because we'll make more money next year and it's cheaper to keep than acquire? Which one is it? And at that point, the answers begin to become slightly more obvious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:09) I'm sure when you go in and you teach communication to these executive teams or at these companies... Because I've run into it a lot where I'll ask that basic question. I was like, woah. What outcome are you trying to achieve this year or this quarter?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:22) And they'll just look at me, like, with blank faces. Like, I don't know. We gotta get more sales, and we have to make the customers happy and stuff. But they don't sing in unison, the executive team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:33) And whenever I walk in and I meet a CTO who's, like, heads down in some project, I'm like, okay. Is this directly aligned with what the CEO is trying to do and with what your CFO? I don't know. This just needs to get done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:49) It's like, wow. So you need to get with your peers and you need to make sure that you're all singing the same song. Otherwise, it's gonna be... Because I've seen incredibly talented technical people just fail miserably in business because of communication issues.

(Chris Fenning at 00:23:05) Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hard. If it wasn't, we'd all be great at it, or most people would be great at it. One of the reasons it's hard is because of all those variables. So the language and how do you categorize priorities is one of the things that I have a little framework for. And the framework is it's not a perfect solution, but it's a really, really good starting point for conversations.

(Chris Fenning at 00:23:32) So let's say the executive team is trying to decide between which programs are going to be funded for a year. And marketing has got some ideas and product has got some ideas and the tech departments have got some ideas, although they're mostly waiting to be told what to build, but they're going to have some ideas of their own as well. You then got a bunch of different possibilities. How do you compare them? Well, it comes back to what is the impact on the effort required and the outcomes?

(Chris Fenning at 00:24:01) And at that point, we go, oh, well, my outcomes are this and someone else's outcomes are that. And they're all using different words, but there is a way to standardize them. There are five effort categories and nine outcome categories. It's a lot, but bear with me. There are a number of categories that enable us to change any idea into a standardized format that can have a side-by-side comparison.

(Chris Fenning at 00:24:26) Because once... As we all do this, every website that has software as a service has three products, and then you can see which of the features have a tick next to them. You can turn business decisions, exact decisions into that if you use these categories. And when it comes to effort, it's what is the time, money, resources, mental energy, and physical energy required, or mental effort and physical effort required. And whatever we're proposing is gonna have some impact on those.

(Chris Fenning at 00:24:56) They'll go up or down, good or bad changes. And then for outcomes, the outcomes are financial, speed and efficiency outcomes, safety, quality and compliance, and then satisfaction, reputation and engagement. And each of those categories can be evaluated from the business perspective, the employee perspective, the client perspective, a system perspective. And if you pick a perspective, you can evaluate all the different ideas, proposals, and options against these categories and start quantifying. And then you've got apples-to-apples comparison.

(Chris Fenning at 00:25:35) And it comes down to a question of what's the priority? Is it efficiency or is it satisfaction? And then you're talking about business priorities. And once you've picked those, the solution is usually easier to find.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:51) That's interesting. And did you come up with this?

(Chris Fenning at 00:25:54) I did with the help of a lot of people that I've trained. I think it started off with six or seven items in the outcomes list, and I'm always looking to be challenged on those. And there were additional items added. So engagement and reputation got added. And there's one other that always comes up.

(Chris Fenning at 00:26:13) I say always. I shouldn't talk in absolutes. None of us should talk in absolutes, he says.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:17) We always... Using an absolute. There we go.

(Chris Fenning at 00:26:23) It's legal. If we go, oh, what about a legal outcome? Well, a legal is a situation, and the outcome of that... Well, the situation is caused by usually a safety issue or a compliance issue or something like that.

(Chris Fenning at 00:26:38) And the result of a legal problem is either a financial outcome, fine or a penalty, a reputation outcome, in the press, the company gets a lot of bad press, et cetera. So there are additional outcomes that legal is a path to. So it... By itself, it's not an outcome. It's a situation, and it leads to an outcome that a company will care about or not depending on the scale and the significance of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05) I can't get over that line. That is so good. None of us should talk in absolutes. That makes me happy, Chris. I don't know why, but it... I haven't heard that one before. I have not. That's a first for me. I'm sure a lot of people...

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:20) See more. Yeah. It is.

(Chris Fenning at 00:27:24) It is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:24) So you've got... So this framework, I mean, there's gotta be some instruction with it and some examples. Is that content that's going to be in your book?

(Chris Fenning at 00:27:34) Yes. Yeah. If we were working together and training either one-to-one or coming in and working with the team, there are very simple models that are built out, including, as we talked about earlier, you gave the Seth Godin example.

(Chris Fenning at 00:27:46) With here's a prompt. Put this prompt into your AI tool, and then just talk about your situation, and it will help you work out how to translate into using this framework to get to the key points that will work for communicating with other people in the business. And all of that is baked into my training, and it is going to be at the core of the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:06) Okay. So this is actually a good time for us to do some business professional work. If people are interested in having you come on, how do they reach out to you?

(Chris Fenning at 00:28:16) Yeah. My name is my brand, so I don't have a complicated company name. Go to my site, chrisfenning.com, or find me on LinkedIn and get in touch. I still answer everything personally. I don't have an agent set up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) All right. And now let's say... I like to all... Given step two, I think, perspective. Or was that step one? I'm not sure. But perspective, what experience would these technology leaders listening be currently having, a pain point that they're currently having that they think, okay, I should reach out to Chris?

(Chris Fenning at 00:28:53) Yeah. So a good pain point for a senior-level person is they are... They need to make a proposal that is a significant budget impact, and they have to make this proposal, and they don't know if it's gonna land. So they're trying to convince their peers. They're trying to make a budget case, and they have this big thing.

(Chris Fenning at 00:29:13) It's not an everyday item, but let's say, a CTO in a hospital group is making a case for significant security updates, and they know they're gonna need $50 million for updating system security, which is seen by the rest of the hospital group as such a low priority until that leader can point at the other hospitals that have had ransomware attacks recently and the impact that had on patient care, on revenue, on complete system rebuilds. So, again, we're coming back to... From the perspective of other people in the room who will be decision makers, what are the kind of impacts and risks they care about? And we would then work through how do you make this proposal in a way that makes the most sense, and how do we find examples that very clearly show what those impacts are and why others... Makes it easy for them to see why they should care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) Interesting. You're like a PR person for business decisions.

(Chris Fenning at 00:30:12) That's a good way of thinking about it. It can be. It's about simplifying. It's about being able to describe your job to your grandparents.

(Chris Fenning at 00:30:21) That... It's the same thing. You're trying to translate and bridge that gap with all of that vast technical knowledge that you have, the deep, deep expertise. And you have to be able to just pick a few bits of it and shape it into something that just makes crystal clear sense to whoever is hearing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:42) Oh, yeah. I read this article maybe fifteen years ago about reducing complexity and complex systems, and it came down to this concept of three R's, reduce, refine, repeat. That's all you gotta do. Just reduce it, refine it, and repeat. And essentially, you'll boil it down to, like, a first principles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:59) And when you have that, that's when you win.

(Chris Fenning at 00:31:03) Yes. Yep. And that's a process that takes time and iteration. It does. And unfortunately, as a society, as individuals, we are now short... I will press the button. I want the fix. I need instant gratification. And when it comes to comms, that just doesn't work. It doesn't work.

(Chris Fenning at 00:31:22) You need to put in the reps. Very simple tools. None of my stuff... And I can literally say this, and I know it's so cheesy, but none of this is rocket science. And I can say that with...

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) All righty. You must be a dad. That's a dad joke. Yeah.

(Chris Fenning at 00:31:37) Yeah. As I say it, I both cringe, and I'm proud thinking I've become my own father. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:45) Circle complete. Yes.

(Chris Fenning at 00:31:47) Now if I'm gonna get my kid to do this. So it's not complex, but it does take reps. It's hard to do to remember in the moment. And I had an example of this last week, working with the CTO of... It was multinational, and they have a process that they are...

(Chris Fenning at 00:32:05) They were trying to explain their initial engagement audit process to a client, but kept getting stuck in this seven-step process. And they found themselves being dragged into here are the seven steps, which is a terrible way to sell anything because no one remembers anything beyond the third step. So we were trying to find an analogy for it where they could say one thing and get the clients almost all the way to understanding the process. And it took us over half an hour to find a great analogy. No shortage of ideas, but none of them were quite right.

(Chris Fenning at 00:32:42) They always began to break down at a point, and we came up with a brilliant one. It was perfect for every step, and it was that their team were like crime scene detectives. And they would come in and gather evidence, have a theory, interview people to support it, and come out with seeing how this whole thing tied together.

(Chris Fenning at 00:33:01) The problem with that was it gave such terrible negative connotations because crime meant bad things. Like, nobody wanted to be associated with crime. So this perfect analogy didn't work because it introduced something that was a negative association. So we went back to the drawing board. We went round and around and explored different ideas and ended up with a home inspector as being the analogy.

(Chris Fenning at 00:33:29) In that if you wanted to make a renovation to your house—and we're back in AI territory again—if you want to introduce AI to your systems, it's like making a major renovation to your home. You don't just go in and start knocking down walls. You need to have an architect and work out what you've got.

(Chris Fenning at 00:33:46) Well, you can't just go into the room and say, oh, I see some walls. You need to get specialists to look at the electrics, at the plumbing. You need to find the plans, see what previous work has been done, find the gaps, and work out how to overcome them. It's like having an architect and a home inspector come in. You tell them what you're hoping to do, and they tell you if it's possible and if major work or minor work is needed to make it happen.

(Chris Fenning at 00:34:10) Three, four sentences there got the client almost all the way to understanding what it was without talking about any of the individual steps. But it took time. And that's where comms is hard, and we have to go through those iterations. And you have to be willing to do that because the saving in the long run is so, so good because he's now got—he and his team now have this analogy that takes about fifteen minutes out of their sales conversations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:37) Oh, that's brilliant. That is so cool. Chris, this is fantastic, man. You brought some serious value, multiple frameworks. You got a book that's out now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:48) What's the book that's out now that they can hand to their teams?

(Chris Fenning at 00:34:51) Yeah. The First Minute. That's the one that for their teams, they will love it. They can summarize anything in three lines that answers most of the key questions they're going to have at the beginning. Why are we doing this?

(Chris Fenning at 00:35:02) Why should I care? What do you need from me? Three bullet points. Their team are going to be able to get to the point so fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) Nice. Well, is that available on Amazon?

(Chris Fenning at 00:35:11) Yep. Yeah. Anywhere that you like to buy books. It's been out five or six years. Depending—

(Chris Fenning at 00:35:16) I suppose depending when this airs. Five or six years. Yeah. And that's the book I'm most known for, and it's helpful to everyone. And then there's the book that's in progress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.