127. Four Principles of Powerful, Focused Communication, Pt. 1

[00:00:00] Jenny Luna: Hi, I'm Jenny Luna, executive producer of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. One of my favorite things about working on this show is when we do live events. We get to hear from people from all over the world. 

[00:00:14] Matt Abrahams: This was so exciting, Jenny. We had hundreds of people join us from over 65 countries. And today we're going to share that information with everyone. We're going to do this in two different episodes. 

[00:00:27] The first episode, you'll hear me talking about the lecture I gave on how to be more clear and concise in communication. And then we'll run a second episode where you'll hear the answers, I gave to the questions our audience asked. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy this live episode.

[00:00:45] Jenny Luna: Now it's time to bring on our host, Strategic Communications Lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter, and your host, Matt Abrahams.

[00:00:56] Matt Abrahams: Well, thank you so much, Jenny. I am thrilled to be here and thank you to all of you for joining us. We are excited to bring our community together, thank you for your support. 

[00:01:09] One of the biggest challenges we have when we communicate is being focused, making sure that our messages are clear and concise. The reality is this, attention is the most precious commodity in the world today. Our attention is constantly being pulled in different directions. And we need to make sure that we can break through all of those distractions by making sure that our messages are clearly focused. So today we're going to talk about techniques to help us be better, focused, and clear for our audience.

[00:01:48] A great example of a focused message happened when the very first iPod came out. The iPod could have been discussed as a tool for the technological wonders that allowed it to work. The slim, cool features that made it available and easy for people to find what they wanted. But the message was clear and focused, 1000 songs in your pocket. Clear, relevant, concise, and precise. And those are the very elements that we're going to look for as we design our communication content.

[00:02:23] So today I want to share with you four specific areas that we can use to focus our communication. For each one I'm going to introduce the concept, explain it, then I'll give an example, and ultimately, we'll talk about how to deploy these to help you be more focused. 

[00:02:42] So, to begin, let's start with concision. Concision is all about making sure that our message is clear. My mother has a wonderful saying. I know she didn't create it, but I try to live my life by it. And it's, tell the time, don't build the clock. Many of us, based on our expertise, or our desire to really help people understand how we came to the knowledge we have like to build clocks. We just need to tell the time. And if people want to learn more, they'll ask, or we can ask them. So, when we start out to say something, let's focus on making sure we use minimal words. 

[00:03:25] My wife has this mantra, and she uses it with me all the time when I talk to my two kids. I like to explain things, I like to pontificate, give rationale. And in fact, what works best is just minimal words. Say what you need to say. Nothing more, nothing less. We have to be thinking about what is the least amount of information that we need to share to get our point across. This is particularly true if you design slides or other written content. Ask yourself, what is the least amount of information I need to share to get my point across? And this will help you be more concise and ultimately more clear to cut through all of the distractions that many of us have. 

[00:04:10] Now, I was very fortunate when I wrote my latest book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, to interview just some really cool, interesting folks. And I had a chance to meet and talk to cartoonist Hilary Price. Hilary has been drawing a single panel cartoon for many decades, it's called Rhymes with Orange. And it's a great way for me to start my day, and I encourage all of you to get a laugh as you start your day.

[00:04:34] And what Hillary told me, and if you think about it, her job is really hard, she has one panel to get information across, and she has to be funny. And what she did is she talks about how she actually thinks about her content. She comes up with an idea, in this case, the notion of a snail using its shell as a recliner. And you can see on the top part of the slide, the iterations she went through. How can we convey the silliness of this particular point and do it with minimal words? And you can see the result. So, the lesson I take from talking to Hillary is that we have to think about what's the least of information I need to give? And how do I think it through and iterate to get there? She doesn't just draw her cartoon once and send it out. No, she does lots of thinking about it to get the point across. And we can all benefit from that type of thinking. 

[00:05:29] So how can we make sure we're more concise? First, I encourage you to apply the billboard test. If you've ever been driving down a freeway or a motorway and seen a billboard, it's designed for you to be able to take in its essence, its meaning very quickly. Because if you don't, you might get distracted and bad things would happen. 

[00:05:51] So as you create content, do a mental billboard test. Can somebody quickly understand it? And you might not be the best judge, take time to ask others to see what they think, can they understand it quickly? Challenge yourself to use the fewest words possible. How can you say it in the fewest words? It always easy to add more words. It's much more difficult to take words away. 

[00:06:20] And then follow advice that comes from the military Bottom Line Up Front, B.L.U.F. Take a moment to take the most essential idea and put it first and then build the information that follows. This often will help you be more concise. So, we can be more concise and focused by following some of these bits of advice. That's the first step to helping messages cut through the clutter. 

[00:06:47] The next step is to make sure that the information is relevant. Relevance helps us focus our message. When it comes to relevance, we have to remind ourselves that our job as communicators is to be audience centric, we are in service of our audience. We need to make sure our messages are relevant and important for them. Which means we have to do some reconnaissance, reflection, and research. We need to think about our audiences. What knowledge do they have? What are their attitudes and concerns? And what motivates them? This information helps us determine and decide what is most important, and that helps us make our content relevant. And when possible, we need to pull in emotion. 

[00:07:34] We have known for millennia that emotion matters, but more recently, neuroscientists have helped us to understand that emotion gets into our brain differently than information. It tends to stay longer, is remembered more, and often leads to more action. So, is there a way we can pull emotion in as we are trying to be more relevant?

[00:07:56] Now I have enjoyed Lego for many, many years as a kid, and actually still today, it helps me sort of relax. I had the utmost pleasure talking to some people at Lego to better understand how they think about making their content relevant. And one of the things I learned is that they know a lot about their audience. In fact, A Lego instruction manual designer, somebody who creates what you see on the screen, start their jobs and spend a full year learning about the differences between their audiences. So, they know what a five-year-old can do with Lego bricks versus a seven-year-old, a ten-year-old, etc. They really understand their audience. And further, and this I found fascinating, they build emotion into their instruction manuals. And you have to remember, Lego instruction manuals have no words, it's all images. You could make every single step identical, same number of moves, same number of pieces, but they don't. They make some of the steps easier, quicker to do, and others a little more challenging, so that you as a person building Legos have an emotional experience. Think about what it would be like for you to build your messages the same way Lego instructs people to build their products. Think about what your audience needs and is relevant and build in emotion.

[00:09:25] So we can make things more relevant by first making sure that we bring our audiences into our stories. So, I don't just tell you a story and tell you information. I bring you in. How do I do that? I might use your name, or I might say things like you, or us, or we. That pulls the audience in so they're part of the story, not just listening to the story.

[00:09:51] Similarly, I can use time traveling phrases. Things like imagine, or what if you could, or think back to when. When I use that language, I make it relevant for you because you're seeing what I'm saying. I could simply tell you something or I could ask you to imagine that very same thing. Very different, much more engaging and relevant.

[00:10:13] And when possible, try to build curiosity. Curiosity is a huge motivator for people to pay attention. It could simply be, what does this mean for you and your job? Or it could be just this good story that gets people really interested in the outcome. So, by making messages relevant, you help make them more focused for your audience and more memorable.

[00:10:36] So we've talked about concision, being concise, and we've talked about being relevant. We next have to think about the notion of accessibility. How do we make our content understandable to our audience? 

[00:10:49] There's a difference between accessibility and simplifying or dumbing something down. Many of our listeners of Think Fast Talk Smart do things that are very complex. Maybe it's scientific or technological or financial, these are topics that have lots of complexity. We need to make that complexity available to our audience and we do that by making the content accessible. 

[00:11:14] The reality is many of us suffer from the curse of knowledge or the curse of passion. We know too much about what it is we talk about, and we care a lot about it. And because of that, we structure and craft messages that are overly complex and detailed and not accessible. The only antidote to the curse of knowledge and the curse of passion is empathy. We have to put ourselves in the perspective of our audience, and that can make a big difference.

[00:11:46] We also have to think about the language we use, the jargon and the acronyms. When you know a lot about your topic, it's very easy to slip into a lexicon, a language, that others might not have knowledge about or have it being accessible for them. I once did some work at an organization where I made this very point about the curse of knowledge and passion. And somebody raised his hand and jokingly said, we don't have that problem here, we have a goat for that. And I was confused. You have a goat? You write all the acronyms on an animal and somehow everybody understands? What do you mean? And with a smile on his face he said, no, we have a glossary of acronyms and terms. In other words, they had so many, they codified it, they put them all in one place and they gave it a name. A goat, an acronym itself, pretty ironic. 

[00:12:41] In my research for my new book, I got to interview people from CliffsNotes. And if you're not familiar with CliffsNotes, CliffsNotes, among with other types of note providers help distill down the essence of literature and plays, plots and characters, themes. And I spoke to one of their editors and he made a really powerful point. He said that the role of CliffsNotes is not to just repeat what is in the book in a distilled way, but their job is to be a translator. And I found this fascinating. 

[00:13:14] In fact, when I interviewed Carmine Gallo, he made the same point that the role of a communicator is to be a translator. You have to take complex, difficult information and make it easily accessible to your audience, just like CliffsNotes does. So how do we do it? Well, there are many tools you can use to make your content accessible. You can use analogies and comparisons. This can really help, take something that people know and compare it to something that they don't know or don't know as well. There's one caveat here though. You have to make sure that the analogy you use is understandable. Here in the United States, we use lots of sports analogies. Hit it out of the park, push it across the goal line, it's a slam dunk. And these are analogies that make sense if you know the sport.

[00:14:02] So we have to take into account the knowledge of the audience relative to the analogy. And sometimes culture plays a role. I had a student in one of my MBA classes, who in the midst of his presentation he was delivering, used an analogy to the game of cricket. And while cricket is popular in many parts of the world, I think it's safe to say here in the United States, it's not that popular yet, and many of our students were dumbfounded, they didn't know what the analogy was for. And my student stopped right after he used that analogy, and he looked at all of us and said, that's how I feel when all of you use references to American football. He made a very powerful point, use analogies, but make sure people understand them. 

[00:14:45] Another way to make things accessible is to chunk similar ideas together. In other words, deconstruct and break things down. If you've ever baked cookies or baked a cake, you know that the recipe typically deconstructs information. You combine the wet ingredients, the milk and the eggs, and then you do the dry ingredients, the sugar, the flour and the salt. Those are two chunks of information, and then later you combine them. Is there a way to deconstruct the complex information you're talking about into ideas that people can understand? 

[00:15:16] And then another useful technique is to diagram or draw or create pictures or perhaps infographics or videos that help people follow the flow of the information. So, we can make complex ideas accessible that help our audience focus on our key message and it helps us focus too. So, concision, relevance and accessibility, which leads us to our final focusing mechanism, which is precision. Targeting, it's all about making sure our messages are targeted appropriately. 

[00:15:50] So precision is all about making sure we have a clear goal. And to me, a goal is about three things. Information, emotion, and action. In other words, what do you want your audience to know? How do you want them to feel? And what do you want them to do? The information piece is the ideas and concepts you want to get across. It's all the things we've been talking about in terms of concision and relevance and accessibility. We also talked a bit about emotion. How do you want people to feel? Do you want them excited or concerned, fear of missing out as we spent a whole episode talking about. Maybe you want them validated. Maybe you want them to just feel empowered or happy and joyful. What is that emotion? 

[00:16:34] And then finally, what's the action and make sure it's specific and concrete and measurable. So, by defining a clear goal, it helps you target your message to be more focused. It also helps you to set expectations. I often use the analogy of crafting content to being like a tour guide. I, when I was an undergraduate in college, was a tour guide, and to this day I can still walk backwards in a straight line while speaking. Any good tour guide will tell you that it is critical up front as you begin your tour to clearly define expectations of where you're going, how you're going to get there, and where you won't be going. The same is true when we come to try to target and be precise in our communication. Set your audience's expectations so they have an idea of what's coming, very critical. 

[00:17:20] And then finally, if you have listened to our podcast at all, you know that I am a huge fan of structure. Structure is essential to concise, clear, focused communication. And there are many, many structures. We've talked about several on the podcast. The new book I wrote has several more. And in fact, I'll share my favorite one with you very shortly. 

[00:17:44] Many of you are familiar with the Dummies series of books, wonderfully helpful. They teach you everything from different languages to about different cities, to different technologies. I had a chance to interview one of the editors of the Dummies books, and what she told me was really fascinating. Dummies books are structured very purposefully to allow people different ways of getting through the material. They call it wayfinding, finding your way. And they set different expectations based on what it is you want to get from the book and from the topic you're learning. And they do so by setting structure, very clear flags to tell you which way to go and where to go next. And they make it clear what their goal is for you, depending on what it is you're trying to learn. Pick up one of those books and you'll see what I mean about how they clearly target their audience and focus them based on the goal that they have. 

[00:18:38] So how can we be more precise in our communication? First, make sure that you have a goal in mind when you start, and at the end clearly state your goal so it helps you bring it all back and wrap it up. Most of us don't spend time thinking about how we're going to end our communication. We figure, when I get there, I'll figure it out. And that's why most presentations and meetings end with us saying, uh, I guess we're out of time, thanks, very ineffective way. To be precise and targeted, I think stating your goal, no field due, is a great way to wrap up. 

[00:19:14] And as promised, I said structure is important. My favorite structure in the entire world is three simple questions. What? So what? Now what? What is your idea? Your message? Your product? Your service? Your feedback? Your update? That's what you say. The so what, is why is it important and relevant to your audience. We've already talked about the value of relevance. And now what, is what comes next? In fact, everything I've said in this talk so far has been in this structure. I've introduced the concept, I've told you why it's important, and then I've shared with you specific ways that you can use it. Very powerful way to target your communication through structure. 

[00:19:58] And then finally, we have to think about how we start. I talked about how we end. I believe we should always start our targeted messages by getting our audience involved right away. Most presentations and meetings start with somebody saying, hi, my name is, and today we're going to talk about. Not only is that boring and silly because you're often showing a screen that has your name and your title of your talk, it's not engaging. An action movie starts with action and then it tells you the title and the credits. Is there a way you can have your precise messages engage your audiences right away? So, by focusing our messages, we can cut through the clutter and get people's attention. And we do it through concision, relevance, accessibility, and precision. Taken together, these can help us be better communicators. 

[00:20:52] We started with a technological example of a good, focused message so I'd like to end in the same way. Google spent a lot of time thinking about their company mission, and they had lots of long-winded ways of saying it, but after lots of iterations and work being precise and concise and relevant, they came up with the notion to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. A very focused and relevant message. So, we can all be focused if we take the time to really leverage the techniques that I've talked about. I hope you feel that you have this ability to do so, and I'm excited to hear the messages that you create as a result. 

[00:21:38] Jenny Luna: There you have it. Matt shared his teachings from our live episode on clear and concise communication.

[00:21:45] Our next episode, part two of the live event, will be the questions that we took from the audience. Stay tuned. 

[00:21:52] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for listening to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. This episode was produced by Podium Podcast Company, Jenny Luna, and me, Matt Abrahams. Please follow Think Fast, Talk Smart on LinkedIn and Instagram.

[00:22:05] For more Think Fast, Talk Smart content, go to FasterSmarter.io to check out our language learning modules and to sign up for our newsletter. For transcripts, go to gsb.stanford.edu. And if you enjoy Think fast, Talk Smart, then please leave us a positive review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.