233. Tech Tools: Write with Confidence and Impact

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: This Tech Tools miniseries is brought to you by Prezi, the presentation tool that makes your ideas easy to follow, hard to forget, and faster than ever to create with Prezi AI. The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade. At Think Fast Talk Smart, we are taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous US inventor and founding father, very seriously. As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and improve your communication and careers. These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology. I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Tech Tools miniseries of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. In this multi-part miniseries, we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fast Talk Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication. And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them. Taken together, we hope these communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart. I'm excited today to speak with Max Lytvyn, who is one of the co-founders of Grammarly Max, welcome. Thanks for being here.

[00:01:14] I always love to learn, what was the origin of Grammarly? What led you to create it? 

[00:01:19] Max Lytvyn: First, my co-founder, Alex, and I previously ran a company that did plagiarism detection, and we often had to answer a question why so many people plagiarize. And actually staggering number of people plagiarize. In our user interviews, we learned that actually the biggest reason for plagiarism is the difficulty, and even perceived difficulty of just taking thoughts from your head and putting them in writing. So many people, most people who plagiarize, they actually knew what they wanna say and it's just putting it in writing was the barrier that they couldn't overcome because of lack of time or lack of confidence or combination of things. And they resorted the plagiarism. So that gave us an idea why don't, instead of policing plagiarism, we just create a tool that makes it much easier to take your thoughts and put them in writing. But in addition to that, we looked at where humanity and technology were going, and we saw that people make fewer and fewer things and more and more knowledge. What's knowledge? Knowledge is essentially communication. When you write a book, your communicating, when you make a video, you're communicating. Pretty much any knowledge we create is communication. How do we create knowledge? In the process of creating knowledge we collaborate through communicating as well. So communication is both the process and the result. If we can improve that by even a fraction of a percent for couple billion people, it's tremendous impact on the humanity level, and that seemed like a very compelling idea.

[00:02:50] Matt Abrahams: It is incredibly compelling and so important. I find it really exciting that you're doing the work that you're doing to help people in this information based world to communicate better. Personally, I think it's great that rather than just building a better plagiarism detection tool, you actually said what's causing all this plagiarism? Turns out people aren't comfortable writing or feeling competent in doing it, so you work to help them. Some of our listeners might not know yet what Grammarly is. Can you share what your product is using the elevator pitch structure I teach my MBA students, what if you could, so that, for example, and that's not all. 

[00:03:31] Max Lytvyn: Absolutely. What if you could transform every email, document, and post that you write into a effective, polished, professional piece of communication without spending hours editing. So that you could focus on what truly matters, sharing your ideas with confidence, building trust with your audience, achieving your career and professional goals through clear and effective communication. With Grammarly, over fifty thousand teams and millions of individual users save time and mental effort by instantly catching any challenges with their writing, improving their tone, addressing their audience in a more effective way. And that's not all. Grammarly continues to evolve. Soon you'll see even more support from real time suggestions tailored to your unique personal style to the standards and norms and benchmarks of your industry, uh, your company culture and company style, and even compliance. 

[00:04:25] Matt Abrahams: Wow. So you get an A plus on using the structure, and it sounds like you actually used your tool to help you with that answer. Can you share more about that? 

[00:04:34] Max Lytvyn: Exactly. I used some of the new AI based features of Grammarly, and essentially I pointed it to the structure that you suggested. And I pointed it to some of the pitches I made earlier, but also to make it a little bit more forward looking, I pointed it to our roadmap. And that's what it produced. It took me about two minutes to accomplish it.

[00:04:54] Matt Abrahams: Now you've spent a lot of time thinking about how to help people write better. What have you learned that really seems to make a difference?

[00:05:03] Max Lytvyn: I spent literally years wracking my brain on this very question. 'Cause Grammarly helps people to communicate better and what is better? It's critical for our company's existence to be able to answer that question. The answer we came to is, it depends. The definition of better or what makes writing better is very situational. I think what really makes difference is starting with a goal, understanding what you want to accomplish with your communication, and it can take a moment just like, what do I wanna do? Do I want somebody to act or do I want somebody to know something? Or do I want somebody to change their opinion or do I just wanna entertain people? Having clarity on that before you start communicating, it helps to communicate better and faster. 

[00:05:48] Matt Abrahams: I one hundred percent agree. And one of the foundational principles in all of the work that I do and many of our guests have shared on the podcast, is this notion of you have to understand your audience and you have to have a clear vision of your goal. And once you have those two things, then you can craft meaningful communication for them and you're just echoing that. So thank you. Before we end, I'd like to ask you two questions that I'm asking everybody who is part of this miniseries. Are you ready for that?

[00:06:13] Max Lytvyn: Yes.

[00:06:14] Matt Abrahams: Great. I would love to know who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:06:19] Max Lytvyn: This is difficult question for me because my just personal philosophy is I can learn from everyone and I pick specific pieces that a person does really well or differently from everyone and learn these pieces. But one name that comes to mind is Adam Grant. What I like in his communication, and what I want to do better myself, is explain complex things simply in a way that makes it easier to apply to practical situations, but without obscuring the nuances, without obscuring the depths of complexity. 'Cause it's easy to simplify things, but that sometimes does a disservice to your audience because we just don't get the lead into the nuance. But the way Adam does it is making it simple, but without hiding that there is more. 

[00:07:11] Matt Abrahams: The notion of making things accessible is really critical, so it's not about dumbing it down or oversimplifying it, as you said, that can be risky. In fact, what it's all about is finding ways to make it accessible so people can appreciate the depth and the nuance. And Adam Grant does a great job with that. Thank you. Final question, question two. Beyond your tool, beyond Grammarly, what is one communication hack or tool or shortcut that you use to be more effective in your communication? 

[00:07:40] Max Lytvyn: Oh, I love this. One thing that dramatically changed my communication for the better is whenever I'm in a contentious situation, an argument or just a high stakes discussion, and I have an instinct to attack somebody's point or start focusing on like differences in opinions, I just start my response with yes. And not yes, but, but genuine yes. And it's for, it's mostly for me. It's not for the other person. What it does, it switches my brain into collaborative communication mode where I focus first on things that, where there are commonalities, where there is mutual understanding, and then develop into things that we see differently. And that is a simple thing, but it has such a dramatic effect in the results.

[00:08:25] I'm sure you, you've dealt with a collaborative versus competitive communication a lot. In competitive communication it's usually a zero sum game at best. In many cases, it just destroys value. In collaborative communication it's one plus one equals three. To explain that, I often use analogy of Legos, that I have my Legos, you have your Legos. Instead of arguing whose Lego pieces are better, we just put them in one pile and build something together. That's how it can explain collaborative communication to people who are new to this concept, but that, starting answer was yes is a great tool to first switch your brain into collaborative communication mode, but then it also switches your audiences, uh, brain into that collaborative communication mode and leads to better results.

[00:09:08] Matt Abrahams: People can't see this, but I'm smiling from ear to ear. We have talked a lot on this podcast about the principle from improvisation of yes, and, and how it really brings you into collaboration. And I love that you have found somebody in your role, as a senior leader of a company, that's doing really cool stuff. You start from the yes, and mentality and you personally see your benefit. And I just wanna highlight for everyone listening that what Max did was he actually followed some of the things he's talked about. He repeated himself in a couple different ways. He made something that's very complex, the notion of collaborative communication, people have spent their academic careers studying this, and through an analogy of Legos, made it more accessible. So Max, thank you so much for the tool that you've created. Thank you for taking the time to share with us key takeaways that can make us all better communicators. I appreciate your time. 

[00:10:00] Max Lytvyn: And thank you, Matt. That was a very enjoyable conversation. 

[00:10:05] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for one of our Communication tools episodes of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Please be sure to listen to all of the episodes in this miniseries. We appreciate Prezi's sponsorship of these episodes. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.