The "Well-Actually" Graph | As The Crowe Flies Episode

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe Podcast, Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. On Fridays, I sit down to share some thoughts, philosophies, concepts that can help you become a tangibly better communicator. And this week on as the crow flies, I'm gonna do something a little bit different. I am going to share a clip of a larger talk that I gave at the Cooperative Communicators Association's Leadership Summit. This leadership summit is a big deal. There are communicators that work on behalf of cooperatives that represent farming, banking, energy all over the country. And once a year they get together to say, Hey, we have a rare job. We oftentimes are communicating with hundreds of thousands of people at the same time. And the structure of our business is a little bit different than other people. So why don't we get together and talk about our challenges and some of the things that we've learned along the way. So this is a high octane group. They are people that are creative, they work on really small budgets, but do some pretty extraordinary work. And I had been invited to come in to give a talk on how to value your attention so that you can get all the things that you know you need to get done, done, but still have time and energy and focus to be able to get out into the chaos, to try new things, to learn things, to experiment where you are uncomfortable. And as a part of this talk, I described how ideas move from a small group of people out into wider society.

Vance Crowe [00:01:36] This is a thing that I call the well actually graph. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a few months now, you may remember the story of me visiting the Santa Fe Institute where I was making the case that you should learn how to draw your ideas. And in fact, when I ran into David Krakau and he wanted to know, what are you doing and why should I let you in here, the well actually graph is the thing that I drew that got him on board with my ideas and, and, and got him prompted to want to let me explore and meet some of the people in his amazing think tank. So what you're going to hear is a clip of me describing the well actually graph. Now I realize that the whole point of the well actually graph is actually that you see me draw it, but I think it's worthwhile to put on the bonus episode to see what happens when you only have this one channel of listening when you only have one way of understanding what this other person is trying to say. And I want you to try and absorb what do you think this graph looks like in your head? And then when you're done, you can click on the show notes and you'll be able to click to YouTube link that will show me delivering this talk. And I'm gonna put it up on YouTube so that anybody can get to it. But you'll know that you're looking for it to see how good was the model you drew in your head based off of just what I said and how much more impactful is it. If you had watched me drawing this, and I, I mean, I'm a very firm believer that drawing this idea is really important.

Vance Crowe [00:03:08] Now, there is one caveat because this was a very large group of people and I needed to make sure everybody could see and hear what I was doing. I didn't actually draw this, I did PowerPoint and I just made it. So each time a line came on, it was only one line at a time. So I, for all intents and purposes, you can imagine instead of it being a PowerPoint, it is me drawing it. But I'll let that rest. I'm gonna head to the bonus episode in just one second. But last week I was overwhelmed by how many people found resonance with the conversation that we had about letters to your future self and the idea that journaling is a way to keep track of your ideas, to help you understand and have perspective on how you've been doing and what's important in life. And one of the commitments that I made that I am more than happy to keep with is that I said I would give some journal entry ideas. And I, I thought a lot about this this week because I was really pretty overwhelmed by the number of people that sent me photos of their new journal. They sent me photos of the corner, the edge that they were showing how they start their journal out, putting the date, putting what things they wanna track on there. If you're interested in, in that conversation, just go back, it's last Friday. It's an easy enough episode to to pick up. But I think it's a good one. And I am so deeply moved that people were into this idea that they want to start a journal to track these things for themselves. And I know when you're first getting started at this the white blank page, it's really hard to think, what should I write down?

Vance Crowe [00:04:42] What should I put in here that's gonna be valuable that I'm gonna wanna see in the future? So after about a week of thought, and I think I got about 15 to 20 miles on my path towards running 500 miles for this year, I came up with this journal entry. What is the sacrifice you made this week that your future self will be most grateful for? So take that for whatever it means. What is a sacrifice that you made this week that your future self will be the happiest about? Take that, make it into whatever question works for you. But the core of what I'm saying is what is something that you gave up in the present moment so that your future life will be better? Maybe that's your life. Maybe that's the life of somebody in your family, somebody you care about. It could be with finances, it could be with what you were eating, it could be with how you spent your time, whatever that is. What were you willing to give up so that things could be better in the future? This is not something I'm gonna ask anybody to share with me. If you do you have some insight that you wanna share, I love it. You can always contact me on Twitter. I am at Vance Crowe. And if you're really loving these, if you're getting a lot of value out of this, the greatest compliment that you can give me is that you share it with a a friend. What that means is just write somebody a letter, say why this podcast is important to you and why you think it might be important to that person. Doesn't have to be long. They will appreciate it. Anytime somebody is thinking of you, when they hear something, it makes you feel gratified. So think about who might find this valuable, who you wanna bring into this community because it is growing more and more every week, both on Twitter and at the Facebook page.

Vance Crowe [00:06:21] And I'm very grateful for that. So without further ado, I'm gonna jump into the bonus episode. Don't forget, you can click on the link below in the show notes to get straight to the YouTube video so you can see what it looks like when I actually draw this idea out. Have a great week and we'll be back on Wednesday with another interview. When I was working at Monsanto, I was very worried that the time that I was spending was going to feel like a lot was being done, but that it wasn't actually getting anything done. So when I was traveling around meeting with those 50 people on the first list, and then the 50 people on the next, I was getting to talk with geneticists and statisticians and chemists. And so I was able to ask them questions like, how do you think ideas spread into society? How does an idea go from a small group of people out to being what everybody knows is true? Right? How does everyone know that Monsanto is evil? And so over time we began to develop what I call the well actually graph, which is a depiction of how ideas spread into society. So we're gonna do this, we'll walk through it. It's two axes on this axis. There's value. All ideas have some discreet amount of value, right? And then you can put that against the number of people that know that idea, right? And so imagine if you are Monsanto, for example, and you're hacking away through the genome of corn and ping, you discover something totally new and novel that no one has ever seen before.

Vance Crowe [00:07:54] The value of knowing that idea about how roots grow or about a new genetically engineered solution is really high. But the number of people that know it's really low, it's just a cluster of scientists, maybe one company. But now let's zoom the camera lens back. And let's say we're not just talking about genetic engineering or monan, we're talking about any piece of information like a stock tip for example. As more and more people begin to hear and activate on a stock tip, the value of that idea goes down as it spreads out against more and more people. You can't get as much work out of that, out of that discreet piece of information. And so I always talk about down here, right? This is when I get a phone call from my mother, right? And she says, Vance Vance, I was watching CNN or M-S-N-B-C or Fox or whatever she's listening to. And I heard this thing about farming or about energy to my mother, CNN, Fox, M-S-N-B-C. This is the cutting edge. This is where news happens. But everybody in this room knows those are large, slow lumbering organizations. By the time they get to an idea, it has already come from way up the graph. And one time I was giving this presentation and this old grain trader was, was listening to me intently. And he stands up and he takes this, I was drawing it on a whiteboard, and he takes the marker out of my hand and he says, you know what, Vance, you're exactly right. That is how information spreads. And Monsanto, we respond to things out here. How many of you is that true for?

Vance Crowe [00:09:28] Right? You wait until the information is way out there to respond, and that means that you are competing with everyone else that wants to get my mother and everybody else's attention all the way down the graph. Which means it is really expensive because if everybody is, is trying to get their news and ideas all the way down to the bottom of the graph, it increases the cost, how creative you have to be, how much money you have to spend to get that attention. So we decided that what we were gonna do was we were gonna try and move back up this graph as high as we could go. So we started doing things like writing for the Huffington Post or getting, letting Vice News in, right? Or doing articles on LinkedIn. One of the things that you realize is that as you go up this graph, the audiences get smaller and smaller. But the depth with which people want to know things gets deeper and deeper and deeper. Which is why I mark this point right here. This is the point where, and all of you have experienced this, and I suspect because you're communicators, you might be this person. You know when you're at a party and everybody's standing around talking about whatever's going on in the news, and they're just kind of, people are just sharing what they know. And there's always that one person that waits for a pause in the conversation and then they go, well, actually, and then they jump in and tell you whatever it is that they know. And they say this because they've watched one documentary Food Inc.

Vance Crowe [00:10:59] Or Cowspiracy or something about on Netflix with the energy. And they know just a little bit more than the other people in that conversation. So what they assert is the thing that becomes what everybody knows and it further throws that idea out into society. So what we decided, my, my team that was not trying to do mass publicity, we weren't trying to run ads, that was another team, my team was focused on. Let's get up the graph as high as we can to what we call the tribes, right? The tribes are a group of people, and they are in every single domain that you can possibly imagine. They are the ones that cluster together around certain types of information. It could be that they love a sports team. It could be that they go to certain churches. It could be that they work out at CrossFit or in a certain way, maybe they do juujitsu, right? But they cluster together and they have the same news outlets and the same valuation of how does the world work that they start thinking in somewhat of a similar way. And so the way that I often describe this is imagine that you're out in the world. This is, so there's a guy named Yosha Bach, and he was an artificial intelligence researcher out of MIT. And he decided that what he was gonna do, if he's gonna study artificial intelligence, what he wants to do is say, how do we get computers to think like human beings? Well, if you want computers to think like human beings, you first have to know how do human beings think.

Vance Crowe [00:12:33] So he went out and did 10 years of research, and he stood up at this conference, I found it on YouTube during one of my explorations. And he's standing up at this conference and he says, after 10 years of research, I have discovered that human beings know almost nothing at all. Which that becomes a paradox, right? How, how is it possible that we have lights and wifi and fly on planes? How can you possibly say that human beings don't know very much at all? And he said, well, human beings are not designed to know very much at all. We are designed to know one or two things very deeply. And everything else we rely on our tribe to help us understand, because we don't have time to understand everything else. So we just rely on those groups of people that we share news and information with. So imagine that you're out in the world and imagine that you hear, Hey, did you know chemicals are being used to grow our food? No, I didn't. I didn't know that. I, I don't have any way to feel about that, good or bad. So I'm gonna turn to my tribe and I'm gonna say, Hey guys, did you know whether it's my CrossFit gym or my school or my church, did you guys know that chemicals are being used to grow our food? Well, whatever answer they give back to me, I don't have some deep knowledge of it. So if they say that's poison, that will kill us all. Okay? People that think like me, people that are in my tribe, we think this way. So they go to put it out into social media, right? And what happens if somebody that knows more about that subject, somebody in agriculture walks past that and says, wait a second, chemicals aren't poison.

Vance Crowe [00:14:04] That'll kill us all. And they start shooting at that idea. How does this person perceive that? Not as you're shooting at their idea, but that you're shooting at their tribe. And so they entrench, which we've all seen this on social media, right? They get really, really upset and angry and say, you know, crazy things even though you know more about the subject than they do. So what we decided was we are going to focus on those tribes. How can you get in there not to change one individual that's gonna fight to the death to be a part of their own tribe, but how can you choose clusters of people that have a reason to change their way of thinking? And I wanna give you an example of, of this and how it works in particular, how it works in a domain that a lot of you are familiar with. I'm, a lot of my examples are agriculture. I know there are energy people in here, but you bear with me 'cause this is the tribe I know I'm more than happy when we're done to have somebody show me. These are the tribes in energy. I would love to know that. But do any of you recognize this man here? This man is an exceptional person. He is a cattle rancher in Oklahoma, and his name is Jared McDaniel. He's standing next to his beautiful wife. They have six children together. He runs a podcast called Ag Uncensored. This is a, you know, small podcast. He has a little building in his downtown area. He's set up a podcasting studio. And he started saying, I'm gonna do interviews with those people that have the unorthodox opinions, the ones that get you in trouble if you say 'em at the coffee shop, the ones that you don't always hear about.

Vance Crowe [00:15:42] And he started having these interviews with people and just publishing it online. And before you knew it, he had popped all the way up to the top of the graph. He now is where new opinions pop out of the ground and start getting shared out in the wider world. And you guys should see, if you've not listened to this podcast, he is getting better and better and better. Right now, what's going on in the cattle industry is that producers and meat packers are fighting over how much should the price of beef be? And that fight's getting real, right? It was in front of Congress yesterday. Well, somebody from the NCBA, the National Cattle Association is coming on his podcast next week, and it will be a better interview than we hear on any traditional news outlet. So by knowing that there are people out there that are like Jared, that are the tip of the, of the graph, then you can find where should I be putting my people? Where should I be getting my information to? Who should we be willing to have conversations with that will get us all the way up this graph? Because the conversation he's gonna have with the NCBA that's gonna rocket down that graph and be shared with potentially millions of people and actually have an impact on how does that spread out into the world? You need to find creators like Jared. In fact, you should follow Jared. You should tell him, Hey, I'm at this conference. I heard about it. I'm looking forward to seeing this talk. And then he will know that you're out there and he, if you ev, if he ever has a question where your leader is the one that would be a great person to talk with, to get a new idea out there, then you're the first person that comes to mind.

Vance Crowe [00:17:18] So by focusing your attention on social media, on podcasts that are up the graph, you start getting way more leverage out of your energy. Does anyone know this person? She's pretty obscure, but there might be some people in this room that know who this is. This is a woman named Hannah Morgan Miller, Hannah Mo Miller on Twitter. She, I, I would share her Facebook, but I always feel like Facebook is a neighborhood thing, right? It's like, you know, telling people, Hey, come to my town. She is really prolific on Facebook. She is not an opinion creator. She is a connector. She creates various groups, little tribes that get together and share information in those Facebook groups and says, Hey, I'm working on this problem. Does anybody have an answer for it? Hey, I, I'm struggling with this idea. Hey, I have a customer I can't service. Can anybody else do it? She is one of the people that is always in a tribe. They're not the loud flashy person. They're not the person that goes out and gets everybody to pay attention or jokes around on Twitter. They're the person that collects all the dots and then connects all the dots. And by being that person, they create communities that make that tribe form together. I have a sense that there might be quite a few of you in this room that are connectors. You don't necessarily want the spotlight, but you're really happy to connect different people together so that they can get ideas out there. If you can find the connectors within a tribe, you can connect with them and they'll get your ideas out.

Vance Crowe [00:18:51] And if you can't find it, then you can become it for your own tribe, however you define that tribe. And then finally, does anybody know this character? I'm referring to the man on the left as opposed to the little girl. Anybody here? This is a man named Dwayne Faber or D Faber 84. Anybody know him? Now I see some smiles. That's right. Why? Why do you know who he is? Because he is hilarious, right? He's a comedian. Comedians are in every single tribe. Now you may know people that are a comedian for a tribe and not know it because all humor is tribal. And here's the reason for it. I, I think Dwayne Faber is one of the most fascinating people in all of social media, regardless of agriculture. He is fascinating because what a comedian can do is they can say, Hey, I know there's an idea here and an idea over here, and if I can connect these two ideas, the further apart that they are, if I can connect them in your minds by making a joke, then you'll laugh. And then you'll see the world the way that I see the world. So comedians have the power of being further down that graph because they can get into other tribes and share an idea so that it's so funny, it spreads out and gets into another group of people. And you can watch Dwayne be able to work out ideas about agriculture that then spread into wider society in a way that no serious document's ever gonna do. No infographic, nothing.

Vance Crowe [00:20:23] So if any of you have a good sense of humor and you are not using it on social media, you may be missing the opportunity to be connecting with other tribes. And if you're not the type of person that has a great sense of humor, my brother makes fun of my sense of humor all the time. But I'm not trying to be that. But I can find people that are humorous, that have these good ideas and propagate their ideas out into the world as well. Finding the comedians within a tribe is deeply important because I don't know who it is for energy, but I will guarantee you there are people that are making jokes about energy production and distribution. You just have to go out and find them. So also be thinking of 'em. 'cause I wanna write 'em down after we're done. And the further that you can get that down the graph. Now, if he sees a podcast that Jared McDaniel put out and he makes a joke that can spread it out into the wider world, now you're watching ideas go all the way from the top of the graph way out into society. Ah.