Ben Timpson

Anyone can produce words. Very few can read the room. Very few can anticipate the incentives, risks and pressures sitting silently at the top of the table.

That’s not a writing skill. It’s a perspective skill. And it’s the secret to communicating upwards.

80% understanding. 20% expression.

That’s the work. Because when you understand that, your briefing changes.
It gets a lot shorter. Cleaner. Sharper. You stop “updating.” You start enabling decisions.

And in a world where AI can generate competent content in seconds, this becomes the differentiator.

Most teams preparing to brief their boss spend 80% of their time perfecting slides. They debate wording.
Very few spend serious time asking: What does our boss already believe about this issue?What are they being measured on right now? What decision are they actually trying to make?

Spend 80% of your communication time & effort understanding what your audience ALREADY knows & believes. Don't say or write anything until that’s done.

Your message never arrives on a blank page. It lands on top of the story the audience already has. It has to make sense in that context.

The UK military gave me a year off and £22,000 to study strategic communication at one of the world's best universities. Here’s the single most valuable thing I learned:

Don’t do that. Follow the Columbo rule instead.
Every time you communicate - hit them with the killer information up front.

And that’s how a lot of people communicate too.

How often have you waded through an epic email waiting for the ‘why?’
Or sat through a presentation that buries the important point on slide 12?

Do you follow the Columbo rule? 🧵

Columbo is different to every other detective show - because you find out the killer in the first 5 minutes.
In most murder mysteries you don't get it until the end.  
There’s hints, diversions and revelations before it finally makes sense.

What do you get a middle-aged politician from a country with zero relationship to the UK?

But eventually I realised they were an opportunity to be taken. If you do the hard work to find an opening gesture that’s genuinely meaningful - it pays off.

I can imagine the amount of work that went into it behind the scenes.

A someone who used to plan military diplomatic meetings, I started out ignoring the power of that kind of stuff. The gift exchanges that preceded a ‘sit down’ were often stilted and awkward affairs.

Starmer had very few cards to play. But that act gave him the best chance of landing any sort of message.

A second state visit was probably inevitable anyway. But choosing that moment - with the theatre of the letter & the King’s signature - milked it for max value at a key juncture.

Last week was pretty bleak.
But one element really impressed me.

Put politics aside, when Starmer pulled out the letter from the King it was a masterstroke. It changed the tone of the meeting instantly from tension to something approaching rapport.

Here's the guide, taken from Elad Gil's brilliant High Growth Handbook: growth.eladgil.com/book/the-rol...

Small, crucial stuff it would take people years to learn alone. The things that add up to effective communication with a leader. Creating your own leader ‘user manual’ might seem self-indulgent. But it’s the opposite. You are ensuring that your team know how to influence you. It’s about their voice

Claire created a manual called ‘Working With Me’.

It’s brilliant. Not just practical stuff about communication styles, but insights into how to constructively challenge her. What time of day she responds best. The fact she loves being copied into ‘FYI’ emails.

That knowledge & empathy was a massive leadership advantage day to day. People ‘got’ how she operated and put her in the best position to make decisions.

But soon she was interacting with complete strangers who had none of that. Other leaders would stamp their feet and complain. She took action.

As a Google leader, she saw the firm explode from 1,800 staff to 60,000 in the blink of an eye.

Her small team used to know everything about her. Her communications style. How to get her attention. How she processed information.

Wouldn’t it be great if your boss came with an instruction manual? 📖
Claire Hughes Johnson made that a reality: 🧵

In London. Heard good things about it.

That Reference: Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889–6892.

It would be great if the solution was just to make less decisions. But the leaders I work with don’t have that luxury.

Solving that problem is what my training is about - sharing the tools top military leaders rely on to make the right calls under immense pressure.

Like and follow to hear more.

For judges, that means denying parole. They avoid hard questions about risk if they just keep someone locked up. But that comes with far reaching consequences in peoples lives.

Despite having worked for just a few hours, when we are pushed to make decision after decision in quick succession – we quickly burn out. We stop applying reasoned judgement, and fall back on simpler, easier patterns of thinking.

By just before lunch that drops to 10%. It’s led to some people calling it the Hungry Judge effect.

But Daniel Levetin’s brilliant book ‘The Organised Mind’ argues that it’s nothing to do with appetite – and everything to do with another enemy we all face:

Decision Fatigue. 🥱

It’s got nothing to do with your lawyer, your crime or how smartly you dress.
It’s about your judge.

And specifically – what time of day they DO their judging.

A 2011 study (reference below) showed that judges grant 65% of their cases parole in the morning.

Criminals (and aspiring criminals) – I have some great advice for you.

In court, there is one thing you can do to boost your chances of parole by 55%.

A thread 🧵:

People confident in making their voice heard when it matters. Like Margret Hamilton.

If you don’t build the skill of influencing upwards (both as an individual or as a company), you are accepting a huge risk.
Important new insights often DO NOT speak for themselves. You need talented people able to land concise messages with their leaders.

Her technical brilliance AND ability to influence decision makers quite possibly saved Apollo 11.

A $24 billion project which the US had staked their international reputation on.

So what?

The computer (already at maximum capacity with the landing) was now overloaded.
Hamilton’s code – written for this very eventuality – kicked in. It prioritised the landing, deprioritised the radar, kept the computer from crashing and allowed Armstrong to manually pilot the Eagle lander down.