What Is Your Waffle House Index?

Recently the Wall Street Journal had a great story by Valerie Bauerlein called How to Measure a Storm's Fury One Breakfast at a Time.  


The story explains that one of the index's that FEMA uses to track recovery from a disaster is how quickly Waffle House restaurants come back online.

"If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?" FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. "That's really bad. That's where you go to work."

I was fascinated to read how the chain prepositions supplies outside of storm areas, works with a limited menu in areas without power, and generally works hard to provide a place of refuge from any disaster.

This made me start to think about what my "Waffle House Index" is during presentations, or when I communicate.

During presentations I have the "Blackberry Index".  Take the number of people in the room and if Blackberry usage is great than 20% of your participants, you have a problem.  You solve this problem in a couple of different ways.

1. Know your material so well that you can actually pay attention to how people are responding to it.
2. When the Blackberry Index hits 20% drop in a statistic or a story.  These tend to grab the crowd and bring them back.
3. Speed up a bit.  People listen at a rate that is twice as fast as you can talk, and think 10 times faster than that.  Speeding up a bit catches peoples attention and helps them pay attention.
4. Vary the pitch and tone of your voice more.  If you drop down and start to speak softly the Blackberry folks will notice this and look up to see what is happening.
5. Add some complexity.  When we start with a simple message, sometimes an audience will dismiss it.  By adding another layer of complexity you can lever up the attention it takes to understand the information.  It will also bring questions to the audiences mind that will then allow you to start with simple answers and then add depth.

Clip the Waffle House story and add it to your Evernote account.  Tag it as a story, company history, and with WSJ as it's source.  What is really interesting is that in the South, Waffle House and Chick-fil-a a stories that win with audiences.  Use them.