Bring the calm

Last winter I was on the way to the mountains with my college roommate. It was just after 5am and our eyes were pried open by a medically inadvisable amount of caffeine. He’s a firefighter so if he’s up at that hour, it’s probably because he’s en route to the scene of one of the worst days of someone’s life. He told me what they taught him to keep in mind as he goes on those calls: bring the calm.

Its striking simplicity befits its user’s mission to be the person who saves someone else’s life. It also struck me as a good standard for what a strategic mission (or purpose, or proposition, or whatever your preferred term) should do for teams on less life-critical endeavors.

One can imagine what it took the fire department to get there. Maybe they did a workshop where they asked everyone to bring ideas. They wanted a rebrand but we’re quite sure what they wanted brand Fire to stand for. “Service with courage” was an early leader. “Serve courageously,” was someone’s build on that. “Be the calming influence in a dangerous situation” got the group excited because it left nothing out. Finally (in my imagined working session) a brusque chief with a walrus mustache came in and said crisply, “We bring the calm.”

The chief just might have been reading Mark Pollard’s Strategy Is Your Words’ section on monogamous words. The book cites a research paper that says, “Memorable words are monogamous: The role of synonymy and homonymy in word recognition memory. Indeed, the most memorable words have a one-to-one relationship with their meanings… The best recognized words have few meanings and few synonyms.”

Pollard goes on, “Big words, in particular, can try to mean too much. And so it is useful for you to ask; ‘What are we pointing to with this big word? Can we use a shorter word? What about a one-syllable word? We don’t have to keep it, but let’s see if we can get there.’”

A good ideas go, bring the calm breeds other ideas. It comes with implications for further actions for someone in my friend’s position, the one who holds the hose or gives CPR; for the one who drives the fire engine; and for the captain giving orders throughout the emergency.

A three-syllable strategy is a tough standard to uphold. We ask a lot of these fragile bits of sentences. We try to prepare them (and the teams who will use them) for their mission by bolstering them with context, like that classic slide that breaks down three words into 75-word explainers. But we know that they value comes from their proven utility; when we look back on a project or around at our colleagues and see that a clear purpose is helping us make better decisions toward a shared goal.

Shane Parrish writes about utility in The Great Mental Models:

Not only did Napoleon come up with brilliant battlefield strategy, but he seemed to instinctively understand that in order for a strategy to work, it must be communicated in a way that could be understood and executed. The more time people spend decoding complex instructions, the slower they will move in the direction you need them to go.

Pithiness is a high standard, but understandability and executability sit even higher. Do it all and you’ve got a strategy that’s harder to forget than a bad tattoo.

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben