At NACFE, we pride ourselves on gathering information and listening to what other people have to say. Our ongoing Run on Less – Messy Middle Bootcamp is one way we do that. As many of you know, we changed the format of the Bootcamp this year and added a two-hour workshop after we had completed three webinars on a powertrain technology solution.
While we had decent engagement during our natural gas workshop, we decided to try something different with our recent battery-electric workshop. Rachel Ellenberger, NACFE’s’ industry engagement manager, researched some technology tools we could use during the workshop to do a better job of increasing participant engagement. She selected Mentimeter, which is an app that allows meeting participants to provide real-time feedback during a meeting. Other companies may offer something similar, but this is the one we chose.
To begin the session, we asked people to use one, two, or three words to tell us which topics they found most interesting at ACT Expo. We chose this question because this year’s ACT Expo focused on much more than battery-electric vehicles. Workshop participants anonymously entered their one-to-three-word answers. The program creates a word cloud and amalgamates the answers. It increases the size of words that are mentioned most often, so you come away knowing what is top of mind for most people.
See also: How OEMs are reducing electric truck prices
Figures 1 and 2 are the word clouds created during our workshop.
As you can see, uncertainty was very much on the minds of workshop attendees, but they also had a lot of other things to share.
The outcome isn’t really all that important; what is important is that limiting people to one to three words forces them to be really specific about what they want to say. They did not have a paragraph or even a sentence in which to communicate their ideas. They had, at most, three words. In addition, the anonymity allowed people who are not comfortable speaking up to share their insights with the group.
I encourage all of you to try an exercise like this one because it forces your brain to work in a different way, and that might help you come up with some creative solutions to problems that you’ve been struggling with; at the very least, it might help you distill those problems down to their essences.
For years, Denise Rondini, NACFE’s communications director, has been telling me that words matter. This exercise confirmed that, and it was one of my big takeaways from this exercise.
We can all learn a valuable lesson while navigating through trucking’s messy middle by carefully choosing our words so that we are saying what we really mean. I have been trying to do that and have found that sometimes finding the right word can be more difficult than you would expect. But when you do, things become immediately clearer.
