If You Have to Explain It, It’s Not Working…

My father was an artist, but once he settled down to raise his family he earned his living as an advertising and design executive. He had a tremendous eye for print advertising, and he enjoyed talking about the critical interplay between the design of an advertisement, and the message it was trying to convey.

He said a successful ad had to do three things:

• Grab the viewer's attention
• Stand on its own
• Speak for itself

If it couldn't do those things, if someone had to explain it to the viewer, then the ad wasn't working. Maybe you've seen the E. B. White quote about jokes: "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." My father would tell you that although White was writing about jokes, he could easily have used the same simile to write about advertisements.

I was thinking recently that most of us probably assess business communications using roughly the same standards my father used to evaluate advertisements, but with a twist. We have been traumatized by years of exposure to lame jokes, rootless speeches, painful presentations and ill-reasoned papers, and we are under pressure since the volume of communications we see seems to be growing steadily. Circumstances have forced us to adapt and develop into discerning judges with low patience, high expectations and absurdly short attention spans.

So when we consider whether a particular communication is worth our time and attention, we decide very quickly. If it's not important, if it doesn't engage or enchant us, we ruthlessly shift our attention elsewhere. That shift can be quite noticeable at a live presentation. Next time you find yourself in the audience at a presentation that isn't going well (easy to do, unfortunately), take a look around and you will see audience members whip out their smart phones or tablets and begin brazenly swiping through screens just as if they were home sitting at their kitchen table. Some might even attempt "quiet" telephone conversations from their seats. Once this happens, it is as if these audience members have exited the room. They are no longer listening, so they have no chance of receiving or remembering or using the information embedded in the presenter's message.

No matter what you think about this behavior, it is the new normal and it is happening all around you--at conferences, in meeting rooms, in offices, in cubicles, on video conferences and on teleconferences. It even happens one on one. I used to work with a particularly exasperating CEO who would schedule a meeting with me, ask a question, and then never lift his eyes from his Blackberry as I answered. He was an unapologetic multitasker--confident he was absorbing what I was saying while he was clearing his email. Of course in his mind he was also a fabulous public speaker, and I suppose under the right circumstances (convention of robots?) his lifeless, monotone expostulations might have been well received.

When it comes to multitasking, here's the reality: humans cannot read and listen with comprehension simultaneously. If you are talking to someone and they are reading their email, they cannot process what you are saying. Douglas Merrill describes why in his blog Why Multitasking Doesn't Work:

When you’re trying to accomplish two dissimilar tasks, each one requiring some level of consideration and attention, multitasking falls apart. Your brain just can’t take in and process two simultaneous, separate streams of information and encode them fully into short-term memory. When information doesn’t make it into short-term memory, it can’t be transferred into long-term memory for recall later. If you can’t recall it, you can’t use it.

What's the solution? That depends upon whether you believe there's a problem and, if so, how you perceive it. If you think folks are justified in tuning out of presentations that aren't working, turning on their devices, and dropping out of the audience, then you might believe the solution has something to do with requiring presenters to deliver more engaging presentations. If, however, you think the electronic devices are the problem--that they are enabling unwelcome and inappropriate audience behavior--you might support a ban on audience electronic communication devices at presentation sessions. Or maybe you think that both solutions, applied together, make sense.

I tend to look at presentations the same way my father looked at ads. I think people who presume to stand in front of a group (or a microphone, or a video camera) to deliver a message have an obligation to deliver it in such a way that it works, i.e., the message grabs the audience's attention, stands on its own, and speaks for itself. I also believe audience members should give a presenter their undivided attention, but I suppose a legitimate question is for how long? I watch a new TED talk each day and I admit that even when confronted by a talk that is by definition limited to 18 minutes, I will move on if the speaker hasn't hooked me in the first minute. I don't pretend I am multitasking, I just move on to something else. While that approach may be fine for TED talks, where what's being communicated is usually potentially interesting but not particularly important to me, shouldn't the standard be a bit different in a business presentation setting?

I think so. If we want business communication to work better, we could start by being better presenters and listeners. Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, has said: "A successful talk is a little miracle--people see the world differently afterward." My father would have said the same thing about a successful ad. And whether the ultimate objective is to entertain, direct, inform, inspire or convince, isn't that really the whole point of communicating, even in business?

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on Property Casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through LinkedIn or Twitter.

Dirty Tricks?

I recently read a vigorously worded document published by the American Association for Justice (formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America--ATLA®--an organization that supported plaintiff trial lawyers) entitled Tricks of the Trade: How Insurance Companies Deny, Delay, Confuse and Refuse . Even though the document reads like an alarmist commercial for plaintiff law firms, it got me thinking about a series of half-day seminars on claims management principles I delivered to groups of property casualty insurance agents a few years ago. The objective was to familiarize agents with the claims process and help them become more effective as coaches and claims advocates for their insureds.

The class was usually relatively sedate until we started discussing how an insurance company handles claims. Many of the agents already had fairly well-formed opinions on that topic, i.e., they were convinced the claims process took unnecessarily long, that it was needlessly complex and inconvenient, and that claims payments were delayed and unfairly minimized by claims adjusters who they believed were rewarded by insurance companies for underpaying claims. Some of the agents had been involved in or had heard about at least one nightmare claims situation, the details of which they always enjoyed sharing with the group. So while I was often surprised by the students' general lack of knowledge and understanding of the claims handling process, I was never surprised by their fascination with the "dirty tricks" they were convinced claims handlers commonly used to minimize claims payments.

I thought it was important for the agents to understand all of the forces that exerted influence on the claims handling process, so I gave them a quick overview of the elements of fair claims practices regulations that had been implemented in many states, including this list of some of the prohibited behaviors in California:

• Misrepresenting coverage
• Failing to acknowledge and act reasonably promptly upon communications
• Failing to adopt and implement reasonable standards for the prompt investigation and processing of claims
• Failing to affirm or deny coverage of claims within a reasonable time after proof of loss
• Not attempting in good faith to effectuate prompt, fair, and equitable settlements of claims
• Compelling insureds to institute litigation to recover amounts due under an insurance policy by offering substantially less than the amounts ultimately recovered in actions brought by the insureds.
• Failing to provide promptly a reasonable explanation of the basis relied on in the insurance policy, in relation to the facts or applicable law, for the denial of a claim or for the offer of a compromise settlement.
• Directly advising a claimant not to obtain the services of an attorney.
• Misleading a claimant as to the applicable statute of limitations.

Once the agents realized that California didn't just dream up this list of prohibited behaviors, once they understood that claims adjusters had indeed been doing these things in California, and that was why the behaviors had been prohibited, they were intrigued. At that point, to illustrate the impact regulation has had on claims handling, I would tell them stories about some of the things claims adjusters were taught to do before fair claims practices regulations were in place, back in the 1970s, when I worked as an adjuster. Like refusing to reveal policy coverage limits, or negotiating to "save something on the policy limit" (Supervisor to Adjuster: If we are going to pay out the full policy limit, why do we need you?), or "controlling" cases (contacting a claimant quickly to establish a relationship and encourage him/her to deal with you directly, without an attorney involved) or engineering "drop-check" settlements (sending out an unsolicited check along with a release to attempt to settle a claim.) I would also relate the urban legend about an insurance company claims officer who introduced a short-lived loss cost management program that had a catchy name, something like "Operation 3%." It supposedly worked like this: once the adjuster figured out what a claim was worth, he (adjusters were almost always men back then) would deduct 3% from the number and that would become the new maximum to be paid on the claim.

With the exception of "Operation 3%," these probably were not really dirty tricks--they weren't illegal or unethical-- they were simply best practices at that time. The agents would usually agree, although a few would remain unshaken in their belief that adjusters are rewarded for underpaying claims. And they wouldn't budge, even when I described how most insurance companies routinely reviewed closed files to assess claim handling quality, and when they found an underpayment they immediately corrected it.

If those insurance agents were any indication, there is a receptive audience out there for publications such as Tricks of the Trade. Google "dirty tricks used by adjusters" and you will get a quarter of a million results, many of which are links to law firm websites shrilly warning consumers about ploys, tactics and dirty tricks used by adjusters. Unspeakable, heinous and despicable tricks such as attempting to talk with a claimant, or to get a claimant's statement, or to secure a medical authorization form.

"Some matters are simply contentious" wrote Sara Sheridan recently in a Huffington Post blog totally unrelated to claims. Indeed.