Group your thoughts!

1) What does this even mean?

The best communicators do not ramble on, or list every little detail. They summarize information in manageable chunks by grouping similar items together for ease of digestion. ‘Rule of 3’ typically works best (it’s how we’re wired).

2) Give me a simple example!

➡️ Let’s say you’re at a banquet that’s serving all kinds of delicious food:

➡️ Grouping these might look something like this:

➡️ When someone asks you ‘what kinds of food are at the banquet?’ Your responses might range from:

😵 ‘Worst’ — “well, there’s duck, chicken, spring onions, bok choy, winter melon, watermelon, orange….”

🥴 ‘Better’ — “well, there’s food like chicken, broccoli, and oranges.”

😇 'Best’ — “well, there’s 3 types of food – meat like beef & chicken, fruits like watermelon & oranges, and vegetables like spring onion & broccoli.”

➡️ As next step, let’s say the individual follows up with “wow, fruits sound great; can you give me more details on the types of fruit?”……how might you respond??

3) Cool but…..how do I use this in a professional/academic setting?

➡️ Same way! Let’s say you’re a Google employee working on a new product, and you’ve just been given a list of potential launch markets.

➡️ There’s multiple ways you can group this data when you present it.

1. By continent

   • APAC – Singapore, India, South Korea, Thailand, Japan

   • EMEA – Germany, Finland, United Kingdom, Norway, Czech Republic

   • AMER – United States, Mexico

2. By development status

   • Developed countries – Singapore, Germany, South Korea, United States, Finland, Japan, etc.

   • Developing countries – India, Thailand, Czech Republic, Mexico

3. Other ways – e.g., by geographical / population size

4) Anywhere else it could be relevant for me professionally?

➡️ Tons of places! In your resume write-up, in your interviews/networking (i.e., how you concisely verbalize your background), etc.

Let’s take the resume’s ‘Executive Summary’ section as an example. Instead of rambling off every project you’ve ever done (i.e., laundry list that’s hard to follow along)…..you might ‘group’ your experiences into 2 or 3 KEY highlights:

In the above example, this individual might have done multiple ‘strategy development’ projects (across Indonesia, Japan, etc.), but grouped these into ONE category. Much easier for the recruiter/hiring manager reading the resume to follow along, and thus gives this individual a higher chance of moving past the resume screening.