Tell me the problem in three words.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

The “Favorite Three” Listening Game

Today I want to talk to you about something that was a communication tool and kind of a game. And it all centers around the number three. When my kids were younger, I used to play a game with them in the car. And the game was Favorite Three. And it was such a natural hit that we would use it at parties.. And it really is kind of a not only a cool icebreaker, but it’s sort of a demonstrator of how well people listen. It’s a game you can play with your staff and in meetings, too. If you have a staff meeting and you’re waiting, you can play Favorite Three. It kind of sharpens your mind a little bit in the process, too.

So, here’s how this works. Favorite three basically means you pick your three favorite things. Someone asks you your favorite three things. I mean you can say what’s your favorite dog breed? What’s your favorite Italian food? And what is your favorite state? You go around the room and people answer. They don’t say well my favorite state is… No. In the order that they were asked they need to answer. Usually, there’s a long pause while people’s gears are turning. Seriously, try this. So, the person asking the question names the person who needs to answer and they start and go around in a circle. Many times people actually forget and they’ll say, “Well, wait, what was the second one?” It’s literally three things that you have to remember, but for some reason, for some people, it’s actually quite hard to keep track. So in the example that I just said, the next person would say hopefully husky pizza Colorado and then it would go to the next person and so forth. And those people are devoid of context. They just know the answers of the person in front of them. all the amazing things that we do in life, all the things that we can work through, reading entire novels and keeping track of screenplays and and all the complexities of your job, you may actually have difficulty with that.

So, play it at your next event and tell me how it goes.

Using Three Words for Conflict Resolution

So, here’s the other thing centering around the number three. This helps in conflict resolution. And again, this is something that I used with my kids when there’s a conflict or when they had a conflict and there was a lot of back and forth. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of two people talking over each other and screaming and emotions and things like that. I would pick one to start and I would say, “Tell me the problem in three words.”

That was it.

And then the other person would go and tell me the problem in three words. And it’s really easy to figure out which person is stuck in their emotions and which person is just trying to convey a point. And it’s all because of the three words that they choose. And this is something you can do in your relationship. I mean, if you’ve been married 20 years, you can still do this and say, you know, tell me in three words.

Now, people don’t like to have their communication filtered, adjusted, or controlled. So, it may be difficult for some personality types, especially in the heat of the moment, if you tell them, “No, you’re not allowed to communicate to me in sentences. You need to tell me that in three words.” So, use carefully and wisely.

But even in your job, if you need to do conflict resolution, this may be really eye opening and you think, “Mark, they’re just going to take three verbs.” No, they’re really not. You’ll be shocked at which words they choose, especially the first time. And when they sort of get the gist of it, they’ll choose better words. They’ll say, “Ah, okay, I need to clarify.” M. And it’s that focus on the cerebral act of clarifying which allows for the emotions to leak out to go away because the focus is on communicating now instead of you know sarcasm or taking a shot at the other person and so forth. You don’t have the room for it. You literally have three words to use and don’t waste them. People aren’t going to use he is idiot. they’re going to choose other things. Okay?

A Real-World HR Example: Manager vs. Creative

And again, you may be thinking, “Well, this is kind of rudimentary, Mark.” No, it really is a different way to get your brains to communicate. Let me give you an example. Imagine you have a manager and someone who’s uh creative underneath them, someone who’s producing something and there’s there’s a conflict and there’s always a conflict between them and you don’t understand because they both for the most part are are fairly stellar in in their work and the work ethic, but you have them in your office because you’re the HR person and you get the creative to tell you what the problem is and the creative starts to go on and on and on about stuff and personalities and you go, “No, no, no, give me the three words.”

And the creative thinks for a second and says work, frustration, recognition.

Doesn’t that tell you a lot? Doesn’t that tell you a lot in just three words? The person is frustrated because their work isn’t recognized. They They’re not asking for a raise necessarily. They’re not even saying anything negative about their manager, but they’re frustrated because they work really hard.

And so let’s say in this hypothetical situation, the manager goes, “Wow.” Because the manager probably didn’t even realize that, but he now has to answer himself and he thinks for a moment and he says, “And uh hours um uh documentation deadline.”

And so when he may be asked to expand on that, it’s that the person under him isn’t really documenting their work. So it’s kind of hard to recognize what’s gone in on the back end. And perhaps that person also isn’t great about tracking their hours, which again makes it frustrating for the manager to say, “Well, I I don’t know how much time or effort you spent on this. I I don’t I don’t know.”

Now, as an aside, this is usually a disconnection between the departments, departments like, you know, like sales and the people who actually accomplish the things the salespeople are selling or managers and creatives and all that stuff. Sometimes there’s a disconnection that really shouldn’t be there because they should have a better grounded understanding of what’s involved to create the product, whether it’s a a service or whether it’s a a tangible item. So that’s an aside. But do you see how forcing a minimum of words can make a huge difference in a conversation?

How Word Scarcity Forces Clarity

And I am sure that in the annals of HR and and and employee relations, there are tons of things like this. But I’m just telling you from a personal standpoint, I have used this and it’s been really amazing. In fact, I’ve used it on myself as I do with many things that I have tried to get myself to be concise about using just three words and three is really a cool number. It’s more than two and you know what? It’s less than four. So, right then out of the gate, it’s it’s a good number.

So, my challenge for you would be to first of all see if you can facilitate conversation like this in a conflict. And again, if you if there are any bruises involved, I I I’m giving you a warning that if someone has really high emotions, this may not be the best thing to use at first. But it also may be good as a tool for you in a case where you are just sort of feeling kind of strung out and and frustrated and you don’t know where your head is on certain things. Now, you could use my UPS method and see the episode on UPS, but with this in mind, you can actually just use the three words to force yourself to just say, “Okay, I need to express this in three words.”

And it’s pretty cool because typically one of the words is going to reflect a feeling, one is going to be an action, one might be a state of being, but you’re not going to get three words that basically mean the same because they’re so precious. And you’re going to choose you or they are going to choose words that really convey a lot of meaning or power because again scarcity creates this sort of thing. And you know when it comes to words and language and talking there’s not a lot of scarcity there.

I myself force scarcity in this podcast. And that’s why we only have a minute left because I won’t let myself go over 10 for the most part. So, play the two games of three and let me know what the outcome is. I’d love to know the situation. Was it personal? Was it with your kids? Was it HR related? Was it business related? Did it actually help you to express yourself even in marketing materials in which you have a marketing material and you’re like, you know, there’s paragraphs here. This is too much. And I I want to inject this. There’s a very specific rule about presentations, PowerPoint, and so forth that people regularly break, and that is keep the text to a minimum, but people typically have paragraphs and and whole books up on the screen where just three words would make a ...