Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact

I often see operators who explain things poorly, and then are shocked and horrified when people are confused or there's skepticism, there's apathy. I'm a big proponent of asking myself, "If I'm not getting the reaction that I'm looking for, how might I be contributing? How could I explain this more clearly? How can I be more compelling? How can I anticipate any questions that they might have?"

You are one of the best teachers of communication I've ever come across.

(clicking)

I made a list of people's favorite tactics and frameworks and approaches that you teach. In writing, any tactics you can share for someone to be a little more concise.

I think the blast radius of a poorly written memo is way bigger than most people think. If you were just shooting off a message in a Slack channel with 15 other people and it's confusing, you didn't include information you should've included, there's gonna be a bunch of back and forth, whereas if you, uh, just take another look at it, those 15 people would be off to the races.

You have an awesome framework called MOO.

MOO stands for Most Obvious Objection. A lot of times, we're surprised by the questions that we get, especially in meetings. We feel blindsided, when really, if you thought for even two minutes about, "What are obvious objections that I am likely to get?" you often immediately come up with what some of those things are. Are you gonna be able to anticipate every single objection? No. But can you anticipate the obvious ones? Absolutely.

(Intro music) Today, my guest is Wes Kao. Wes co-created the ALT MBA program with Seth Godin. She co-founded a company called Maven, which I often collaborate with, which makes it easy for people to host live cohort-based courses. She recently left Maven to launch her own course on executive communication and influence. There's a quote that came to mind after I stopped recording this conversational with Wes, by George Bernard Shaw, "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." By the end of this podcast, if you listen to what Wes suggests, you will be a lot closer to becoming a world-class communicator. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Superhuman, Notion, Linear, and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Wes Kao. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny. Wes, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.