KISS me, please
My Little League baseball coach was a good communicator. On the first day of practice, he told us we were going to use the “KISS principle” for our signs. He meant we were going to “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
“If I touch my skin,” coach Redpath told us, “that means steal. Get it? Skin. Steal. If I touch my belt, that means bunt. Get it? Belt. Bunt.”
That was it.
Coach would go through all kinds of crazy gyrations from the third-base box. Nearly all of it was to distract the other team. All we had to do was watch for him to touch his skin or touch his belt.
We remembered the signs throughout the season (and into midlife) because they were indeed simple and memorable. And perhaps because using words like “kiss” and “stupid” with 12-year-old boys makes them giggle. And listen.
As I struggle to develop effective communication about technology on campus, I’ve concluded that we make almost everything too complicated. Case in point: I could not articulately explain campus email to you. We made it too complex.
IT professionals obfuscate when we should elucidate. We need to change that. If you read Wikipedia’s entry for the KISS principle, you’ll see a reference to Albert Einstein’s maxim that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
If Albert Einstein could make his world simple, imagine what we could do with ours.