 like, can you see me, Tracy? I think everyone that the woman between us and our drinks today is named Tracy Evans. No pressure here. As the week and the event developed, a slot came free and the organizers asked if we had anything else that we could contribute. I'd already been planning on showing you what I showed you this morning. And Tracy was supposed to be here, but we were practicing operational risk mitigation by sending me to be quarantined with the fish and chips. And she can stay home in the comfort of her lovely home. And so here I am. Tracy said, yes, she did have an idea. And just give me a moment to think about it. And she's actually come up with a completely brand new presentation that I have never seen before. This is an absolute premiere. And she's done it especially for this event. So I think that's pretty exciting. And she's done it in the last two days. So thank you for that, Tracy. And I showed you some really practical aspects of how we approach building strategically relevant, accurate, compelling communication, and how you can use the same thinking to do it yourself. Tracy is going to talk about the other side of how we got to working like we do, which is we have pretty strong feelings about culture and about ethics and about feeding into clarity from a perspective of honesty and transparency. So Tracy, I'm going to let you take it away. You have up to 45 minutes if you need it. So everyone, my business partner and the other partner at Open Strategy Partners, Tracy Evans. Hi, Tracy. I'm partner Jam. We founded Open Strategy Partners about 2 and 1 half years ago together and with patients. Well, I learned how to navigate to systems here. OSP about 2 and 1 half years ago. And OSP was born out of some conversations and strong ideas about communication, which has now become our communication model, which underpins essentially everything that we do. And it's called authentic communication. And it's based on the three omens that you see on the screen, empathy, clarity, and trust. And so naturally, I gravitate towards any material and books and blog posts, any videos written on any of these two topics. And when I was at home over Christmas, I came across a book that ended up inspiring this talk. And that book was written by Canada's former Governor General David Johnson. And it's called Trust, 20 Ways to Build a Better Country. And in this book, he implores us to see that trust is actually gained through our actions and decisions on our doing and not merely saying on the basis that can be observed and measured rationally to quote the book. And he wants us to basically explore the different attitudes, habits, and approaches that make people, businesses, organizations, and countries trustworthy. And so in this talk, I'd like to actually share with you 10 practical tips to mindfully build trust into your communications. And I'd like to make the argument that if we put actions like these at the core of how we communicate, we could build better connections, better businesses, and better communities. So why does trust matter? Well, these days, there's been, especially in the last couple of years, there's a trend towards more and more people making values-based decisions, including and especially around things like where they work, where they contribute their time and their effort and their money, and then definitely to what tools and services they use or support. And when I was doing a little reading and a little research on this subject, you might have in mind that this is just really pertaining only to millennials and the younger generation. But the research shows that this is increasing across all generations, that people are making more values-based decisions in everything that they do and everything that they contribute to. And while there's a lot of easy examples that might come to mind, where people make values-based decisions based on their moral values, I'd like to share an example of one that is close to an example from our work that is based on business values rather than just moral values. And the example that I thought of for us is our use of the project management tool, ASANA. Basically, ASANA evokes a lot of trust for me and for my team members. And I trust the operations of my company, so the operational health of my company, in ASANA. And the design of the user experience that they've put into their product evokes the trust that they've designed for a smooth workflow that my team will feel comfortable and engaged using it, unlike for me, just writing it, unlike Giro, which feels, looks, and acts very clunky to me. And so that gets in the way of me engaging with it and using it, which is a core part of the value of the tool. And in another aspect, the training materials and the content that ASANA puts out there not only enables me to do better project management, but because I have a really very full view of their knowledge and best practices on project management, I can see and trust that they align with my ideas of project management. And I can trust that they've built that into the UX of their product. So that being said, and that example being shared, I'd like to argue that trust is one of the most important or always underlying values that influences people's choice. And for people to engage with your company, your project, or your product, they need to connect with you. And to do that, they need trust. So when we ask ourselves what is trust, the very basic Oxford English Dictionary definition is that it's a firm belief in a reliability truth for ability of someone or something. But it's actually a lot more complex than that. And trust is one of those things that's often overlooked. But it's an extremely important thrown on, and it's one that's worth deeper consideration in your strategic thinking and when you're building all of your communications. And one of the models that I really like that talks about trust, I looked at a few different ones. And there's some great ones out there in terms of trust in personal relationships. But in terms of trust in the business sphere, I'm really glad to see in Kobe's trust model, I think that you can really, I think you can easily see how this might come across in everything that you communicate and everything, all of the assets and the touch points that you have as an organization that you put out there. I think that you could probably take a look at this and see how this really resonates. And I like how he's broken it down to both character and competence. And I think that these things are equally important in terms of the way that people either consciously or unconsciously build trust with your grant. For example, that Asana example, I had never thought about until today until I ended to think of an example of this presentation. It's not something that I consciously thought about, but the transparency that they have with things like their pricing model or transparency around and sharing of their project management practices is definitely something that unconsciously played an impact in my view of that. And so I think we come back to when we think about trust, the things that might go through our mind are things like, you know, can you actually, can you solve my problem? And can you solve it better than any of the alternatives? And this goes to everything that's there under capabilities. And for me, I definitely, when I look at any technologies that we use as an organization, I want to see that their business model is fair, transparent, and competitive. So there's the number of software companies out there that choose not to list their pricing, for example. And it always gives me a very negative feeling. And I assume that it's going to be. And I would rather see that they give me a starting point and that it's transparent, that I know that I'm getting the same pricing as the rest of the market. And the third question that I think that people tend to ask themselves are, do the organization's values align with mine? Moral values, business values, and technical values, which practices that we're using and things like that. So I thought that this model was really helpful to frame our thinking. And I want to talk about just a couple. I just wanted to sort of paint a picture of the different domains where we really need to think about trust. And so for me, there's definitely different cues and different hands that you see in the support and interaction, how accessible you are via Slack or the way that you interact with your clients. Your training, how available it's, well, it's done. And technical documentation, there's a lot of various cues in there. But the two that I really want to focus on today are your product communications and editorial communications. So product being things like product pages on your website, data sheets, demo presentations, and that sort of material. And your editorial communication being things like blogs, PR, social, and things like that. So those are the two that I'd like to focus on and start sharing my 10 ways to build more trust. So the first one that I want to talk about is accurate always. This was one of the very first conversations I think that I had with Jim about his ideas around authentic communication and how important it is to be technically accurate in everything that we do. And the way that, for example, the way that we go about doing that is to interview the experts, to interview the technical person who knows the topic and to get that information verified. And that's something that, even if you're applying these internally for yourself, this is where you can encourage your marketing team or your marketing person to make sure that they're interviewing or sitting down or having a work review with a technical expert. And on the other side, it's encouraging your technical experts to contribute their time and really connect with the marketing team and support them to make sure that your materials go out there with technical accuracy. So this is probably, it's number one in the list and probably one of the most important tips. The way is to be precise in your language and absolutely avoid hyperbole at all costs in the clients and companies that work with their, often their target, their audience is developers and developers are especially allergic to hyperbuzzwords and hyperbole. And a good practice that actually makes for better communication is just be more precise in the language that you're using. So the way number three is to have tight writing. So making sure that all of the writing that you do is crisp and sharp and focused, making sure that it is clutter-free and it doesn't have any extraneous words or sentences or paragraphs. And this is something that, for me, for myself as a non-technical consumer of technical information, whether I'm thinking about using a piece of software or engaging some of our clients, I get lost very fast when there's extraneous information. Some of the topics are difficult enough to track on their own and so to keep it crisp and sharp and only include the essential information to make your point means that it's going to resonate that much stronger with your audience. And this is one that I feel personally very strongly about when I'm consuming technical information. To have a clear narrative structure, this one is similar to the tight writing principle and it's something that I also feel really strongly about when I'm reading, especially blog posts, this applies particularly well to blog posts. If there is no clear narrative structure, it has a similar impact to the extraneous information. I just get lost. And some of these technical topics are difficult to deal with on their own that if you don't have a clear narrative structure, it can be really difficult for your audience to follow and actually helps to make the point that you're trying to get across. Point number five, similar point, you need easy to navigate informational structure. So this is keeping the number of pages and the flow of pages on your website easy to navigate and easy to understand where people need to go to find information. It also pertains to things like e-books or any other longer material to make sure that it's really easy to navigate the information. Point number six is a strong logical rigor and definitely be wary of those logical fallacies. We have created something that we use internally so far and have shared with a couple of clients called our Rigger's Guide. And we've created an additional special chapter just on this topic of logical rigor because it's something that I think is it can be quite challenging or easy to fall into certain traps. And it's one of the most important points to keep things clear. Hey, Tracy. I was telling people about our intention to share even more of what we do. And so I'm just going to jump in here for one second. We're in the middle of relaunching our website. And we haven't figured out the exact style yet. We think maybe like the GitLab company handbook. These writer's guides and these principles and stuff, we've documented an awful lot of it so that we can onboard new writers and new team members. And we are going to have that all available online in the reasonably near future. Depends on like, especially if somebody's clamoring for it, that would really help me get it out faster. But we consider this something else that will be really important and good to share and enable other people to help us do it better, but also just communicate better in general. Yeah. And I've got here, and I wanted to share a couple of the examples from our writer's guide of some of the logical fallacies that we can easily fall into. And the first one is over-generalization. And that's where the writer faces the argument on insufficient evidence, where the writer draws a larger conclusion than what the evidence supports. So for example, if you're claiming that Drupal is a better CMS, you've actually got to do a fairly exhaustive comparison with very objective standards and unbiased results to be able to make that thing. And you'd have to share your whole process with the reader and be fully transparent about that if you wanted to make a claim like that. What would be better is if you shared the specific use cases where Drupal was a better CMS as a better choice. For you, right? For you, yeah. Exactly. So that's one example. Another example that I kind of like is the non-tech order, where it doesn't follow. And that's where the writer's conclusion is not necessarily a logical result of the facts. So for example, stating that because Drupal has more functions, that it's a better CMS than WordPress. But obviously, more does not equal better. That isn't logical. So that's a trap that I'm sure we can come up with a better example for. But anyways, those are two examples to share for this particular point, moving on to point number seven. I think worth drawing out on make mindful claims. So avoid binary claims. Things like good or bad or absolute claims, which is like best or worst. And actually, just respect the nuance in the situations where your product may not be the best and the competition may not be terrible or bad. Again, it goes back to coming up with specific use cases where your product has a lengthy, very good fit for the user this time. So back up your claims with MMM. And we've got two types of evidence or two main categories of evidence. We've got quantitative evidence, which is things like statistics or any other research. It's things like case studies with quantifiable outcomes. But what can also be valuable is qualitative evidence and things like expert claims or testimonials, even anecdotal stories or examples are great pieces of evidence. And other things like case studies with more qualitative outcomes rather than quantitative ones. And I think even to some degree, referencing your technical documentation can be really great evidence in some circumstances. And what you want to think about when you're choosing what kind of evidence to provide, things that indicate quality or if you can answer, is it valid? Is it relevant? And is it unique like within the article? And ask yourself, does the evidence directly connect with a cause and effect relationship to the claim that you're trying to make? And it's absolutely OK to make claims without evidence, especially when we're quoting somebody else. So for example, it's absolutely OK to say, by working together, we make something greater than the sum of its parts. So that's more of an emotional claim, which is also acceptable. Number nine, speak from or reference an authoritative voice. This, I think that a lot of people do this really well already, especially in the Drupal community. If you're writing a blog post quoting or interviewing or referencing another expert, it helps build a lot of trust. Around a particular topic, and number 10. So recognizing and acknowledging others, they're recognizing their expertise and their knowledge, recognizing their contributions, and recognizing the competitive offerings can also help build a lot of trust. And this point also goes back to one of the original conversations that I had with JANBA authoritative communication and making sure that you're being very intentional about recognizing and acknowledging the expertise and the work of others. So that was point number 10. And I would like to make the argument that if we take all of these types of actions, these add more, that we'll be able to build more trust. And more trust equals more connection. And that will be better for our businesses and better for our communities overall. Pictures that I found on a splash. And so I can share all of the buildings here at the end of the presentation. See, and that's building trust, giving credit where credit is due, right? Exactly. Hey, so nice presentation, Tracy. Thank you. Thank you. I like the contrast between the sort of mechanical pseudo-scientific stuff that I showed this morning and the art and what goes into then turning that into words that are the most effective, right? All of that goes into then choosing how we say the things that we've determined to be relevant and important, right? Yeah, yeah. I'd love to hear. I don't know if it's a great format for this, but I'd love to hear any input examples, feedback, or even just to pose the question, is this something that you think about either when you're creating your own materials or when you're consuming materials from other companies? I'd love to put that out into the room, if it's a format that works. Tim, you wanted to put your hand up? Well, Finn, I have a question for you. You operate within a collective and work for a lot of public bodies and people and organizations who want to make the world a better place. Does this resonate with you? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it resonates with everything. I find it particularly interesting to think about. Can you hear him? No. OK, hold on. Sorry. Sorry to put you on the spot there. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? OK, good. No, I think it definitely resonates. I found it particularly interesting looking at the different domains, thinking through the domains of your communications and where trust comes in. Obviously, you mentioned support and training and then going into the product communications or editorial. But thinking at every level, how is what I'm communicating actually portraying the trust that I need to build? And am I being absolutely true, correct? And I think I'm going to go back over your slides if you'll share them and just think about those 10 things and take it back to the rest of my team and indeed people that we work with. Yeah, I think that's crucial. I love the idea of sharing what we do. We're open source by nature and open sharing and sharing better ways to do things, better ways to communicate, builds us as a community, builds us as individuals and helps our clients. And I think that's great. Cool. Thank you very much. Thank you, Finn. Thank you. All right. Anyone else? It's the end of a long day here. Everyone needs a beer. I'd really be good. Enjoy your beer. So I'm totally happy to share those slides with you, Finn. I have them on my machine. So are you here this weekend as well? Yeah. I'm just going to shoot out a PDF out of the two presentations from today and then anybody who wants them, I'm totally happy to send them. And Tracy, thank you so much. That was really, really awesome that you put that together and it really captures some things that we haven't talked about in public before. So thanks for putting in that effort. It was definitely worth it.