“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.” – Anthony Robbins
Communication is hard. It’s hard enough when its with a person or small group, harder still when some members of the conversation aren’t invested or see things a different way. The larger the group, the larger the groups of disengaged individuals and the greater the number of viewpoints.
All of that being said, time and time again I encounter the same gaps to making communications the best they can be.
As a note, most of my experience is in technology – everything from outages to initiatives. But in my observation, this phenomena is not limited to my area, and may be more thoroughly considered in IT than in many other disciplines.
“Communication works for those who work at it.” – John Powell
Good communication takes time. It takes effort. It takes investment.
Sure, when you someone well you can shortcut some things, but the important things still require clarity and care.
When you are communicating broadly, you have even more work to do – first you need the recipient of your communication to know why they should care, and once that is sufficiently established to understand and engage with the message.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw
It is natural when a person is communicating to start with their own perspective or what they find important. When the goal is to reach a large population, you need to flip this on its head — what is important to them? Why should they care? What is the benefit? How do they perceive the topic? What is the impact?
If you communicate from your perspective, chances are that you have spoken (or written, etc.), but you may not have communicated. If you did reach members of your audience, their takeaway might not be what you expected it to be.
“There is no communication that is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood.”― Luigina Sgarro
I cannot count the times a communication has come from me, my department, or another entity that had been looked at from multiple perspective, seemed clear, seemed well written….and then it went out and the deluge of calls and questions started. All of the reviewers have typically already been familiar with the message contents and did not see the lack of specificity, confusing language or jargon, or overlap between this and a similarly named thing in another part of the larger organization. You have assuredly seen this in your home life as well as your professional – your doctors and insurance, your utilities, your cell phone carrier, places you buy from, your municipality, and a hundred other entities communicate with you. Periodically it will absolutely go wrong. And you develop habits of mentally filtering out information from so-called “unreliable” sources that give you unhelpful or unclear information.
How can you be clearer and more directed for your audience? Almost immediately you encounter the next challenge: your audience is not a monolith. In fact, it isn’t really one audience at all.
“Use different messaging for different groups to ensure your communications are relevant.” – Andrea Plos
In one recent project, we were preparing for the planned departure of one chief executive, and the arrival of another. We knew that both prior to the change and afterward there would be large personnel changes throughout the organization. Initially the team had a plan that had 2-3 communication messages and channels. I felt there were gaps so I asked that we do an exercise defining audiences. We used a little bit of journey mapping and some other techniques to walk through the skeleton timeline and tease out all the places where different people would need different messaging. We ended up with over 20 distinct audiences and a complex communication calendar ensuring that each group got the most relevant communication at the right time.
Most initiatives don’t need this level of differentiation. The initiative I’m referencing was multiple months and hundreds of person-hours of work produced.
Right now I am looking at a project where we are dealing with the public website, intranet, and individual intra-department recordkeeping and communications. After a look at the information architecture and current publications I found myself with my age-old question: who are these sites for? And why does the content not match the assumed answers?
“The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.” ― André Gide
I spent a little bit of time with my markerboard and defined 3 audiences and the types of information each requires, and noted examples for each – what I came up with seemed logical and obvious to me. And. In looking at the existing sites, the categories of information are not delineated in a way that seems to me to suit the audiences of the published sites.
According to my assessment, we need 3 or possibly 4 distinct datastores/sites depending on the capability of the tools, rather than the existing 2, and we need to fill some gaps where information is not published. Then we need to make this information discoverable, particularly for more occasional visitors.
This exercise reminded me of the work I had done with previous teams and why I had been so insistent on audience definitions. This circles back to the earlier point of differentiating communications.
This allows you to get the right information with the right context to the right individuals at the right time. All four of these are needed for the effective communication that leads to effective change management and to successful adoptions, and also allows clear crisis communications. Add with empathy and you have a recipe for success.
It’s also work. This kind of effort can seem huge. But I have leaned to ask “what is the cost of skimping on communications?” The answer is never good. It’s risk.
Now, here in the real world we are don’t have endless resources and we are not in a risk vacuum; some risk has to be accepted. You may choose to combine some audiences and call them “close enough” and we are all going to do our best. But trust me when I say one message will not fit all, and a wall of text full of if/thens is is not the differentiation you need. Invest time and effort up front, share templates when messages overlap, and keep the work well organized to allow for the contextual changes and nuances that tell your audience groups you mean them. You will minimize drama, get more engagement, and generally have smoother changes.
I will assuredly come back to the topic of communication and also audiences as they are part of my professional lifeblood. For now though, this is what I have.