Option C: The Efficiency Funnel
Imagine that you take your family to Florida for a much-anticipated vacation. You have a spectacular time. When you return, your neighbor asks, “How was the trip? What did you do?”
Instantly you’re confronted by two options:
Option A: Provide a day-by-day, hour-by-hour account of your 6-day trip to Orlando. By providing every detail, you would faithfully answer your neighbor’s question and you wouldn’t run the risk of leaving out a topic your neighbor might find fascinating (you never know, he may really want to know that your 7-year-old didn’t throw up on Space Mountain after eating two snow cones and a bag of caramel corn).
Option B: Only tell him about what you consider the absolute highlight—Harry Potter’s Wizarding World at Universal Studios. Of course, this abbreviated option dramatically understates everything you experienced on your amazing trip, and you’re not even sure your neighbor likes Harry Potter.
If only there was an Option C. An option that allowed you to list everything you did, focus on the best part, and not take up the entirety of your neighbor’s afternoon.
Well, wait no longer, Option C is here. We call it “the efficiency funnel.”
The efficiency funnel begins with a sentence that lists a wide array of your experiences but then quickly tapers down to the few things you want to highlight. In the case of your vacation, the efficiency funnel would look something like:
“It was an amazing trip! We spent 2 days at Magic Kingdom, rode the Skyliner, went to Space Mountain, Epcot, took a day trip to Tampa and the beach, but the most amazing thing...Harry Potter’s Wizarding World! It was amazing because...”
By deploying the funnel technique, you let your neighbor know a lot of what you did, provided him an opportunity to ask questions about anything that piqued his interest, and still gave you an opportunity to highlight what you felt was most important. And you did it all in less than 15 seconds.
Now imagine that you’re at work. You and your team have spent the last 8 months developing a plan for a new product. All that’s left is to get the green light to launch from the leadership team. They have given you 15 minutes in the next monthly strategy meeting with the request, “Get us up to speed on where you’re at.”
Immediately, you’re confronted with Option A and B from above. But this isn’t just your vacation, this is your career, and you feel yourself gravitating toward Option A. After all, you owe it to your team and all their hard work to tell the leadership team everything you’ve done, plus you also aren’t sure what they’ll want to hear. You elect to tell them everything.
Fast forward to the meeting, you’ve been talking for 26 minutes, you’re only 65% done, the CEO is scowling, and your boss has finally cut you off.
The next day, after tirelessly scrolling job postings on Indeed, you fall asleep wishing you had said,
“Over the last 8 months, the team analyzed the market, evaluated our competitor’s offerings, met repeatedly with our engineering team to discuss feasibility, built a prototype, assembled a preliminary marketing plan, but what I want to focus on today is...initial product development costs and a timeline to profit.”
If only you had remembered Option C. If only you had used the efficiency funnel. On the bright side, at least you took that Florida vacation before you got fired.