Communication often demands our best judgement. When we have a lot of information to share, we have to decide the most effective way to group and share that information.

Most people tend to think about what makes the most sense from their personal perspective, which is natural. But it isn’t particularly effective.

If we truly want to inspire some action or takeaway from our message, we need to flip this idea on its head. Our message shouldn’t be crafted so that it makes sense to us, it should be crafted to make sense to our audience.

As a simple example, I often want to share information that I gather from a conversation with a customer.

In my mind, the obvious and most convenient way to share this information is by cramming it all into one message. One meeting, one email. Right?

But pretty quickly, I end up with 10 or more people on a distribute list who are stuck reading about tidbits and action items that they don’t care about it. The message reads well, but it tends to fail at it’s objective because people rarely take any meaningful action from a long, messy email.

So instead, I chose to change my approach.

Rather than a neat comprehensive summary, I break the content into bits and provide each snippet only to the people that need to know. And, possibly most importantly, I provide it in a context and a place that makes sense to the audience.

It’s more work up front, and it doesn’t bode quite as well for neat sorting of my notes, but I’ve found this approach to be much more effective.

-Brandon