Keep It Super Simple (KISS)
Learning to communicate more simply—fewer points explained clearly, concisely, and succinctly—is a powerful technique for ensuring your message land with your audience.
Welcome back to Curiouser, our monthly newsletter with insights about leadership. This edition is about communicating simply.
Here’s a party trick: try tapping on a table with your fingers the rhythm of a well-known song (e.g., “Happy Birthday”) and see if others can guess the song you’re tapping. Chances are no one will guess correctly.
When we’ve run this exercise in class, the listeners get confused, sometimes frustrated. But the tappers get genuinely annoyed: how can you not hear the tune I just tapped?!
The Curse of Knowledge
Based on an experiment conducted by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford University in 1990, this tapping exercise demonstrates what’s known as the curse of knowledge: a bias that leads us to assume others have the same information and understanding that we do. Because we hear the melody so clearly in our head, we struggle to hear the tapping from the listener’s point of view. Where we hear “happy birthday,” the listener just hears “tap, tap, tap, tap.”
When it comes to communicating in the workplace, the curse of knowledge is an even greater challenge. By assuming others have our knowledge and expertise, we’re apt to share too much detail, use overly technical lingo, and fail to provide background and context. We’re less likely to explain things clearly and succinctly. And our audience is unlikely to understand our main points, let alone remember them.
Break the Curse With Simplicity
The curse of knowledge may be an inevitable struggle, but we’re not powerless. Learning to communicate more simply—fewer points that we explain clearly, concisely, and succinctly—is a powerful technique for ensuring our messages land with our audience.
Here’s how to keep your communication super simple:
1. Find Your Core Message
In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, authors Chip and Dan Heath identify simplicity as one of six defining characteristics of messages that are memorable, or “sticky.” As they explain it, “You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by ‘simple’ is finding the core of the idea.”
Finding your core message can be challenging when you have lots of information to share. And it’s when you have lots to share that simplifying is most important. Here’s how to do it:
Layout All Your Ideas
Write down all the key points you might want to share with your audience. Don’t filter anything out just yet—put it all down on paper.
Narrow Your Search
There’s likely no shortage of information you’d like to communicate, but what does your audience really need to know? Read each point you’ve written down and if it’s something your audience doesn’t absolutely need to know, cross it out.
Pick Your “One Thing”
Your audience won’t remember most of what you tell them. If you’re lucky, they’ll remember one thing. And if you don’t prioritize that one thing in your communication, you’re leaving it to your audience to prioritize what’s important.
Apple is an example of a company that’s particularly good at communicating their “one thing,” as Carmine Gallo explains in his article, The Art of the Elevator Pitch. Whether it was “1,000 songs in your pocket” with the first iPod or the MacBook Air as “the world’s thinnest laptop,” Apple executives focus on one feature they want consumers to remember about a product.
To land on your “one thing,” look at the remaining ideas on your list and ask yourself this: “If my audience remembers nothing else, I want them to remember…” The idea that answers that question is likely your core message.
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2. Create a Clear Headline
Early in my career I had a manager fond of interrupting his team by asking “what’s the headline?” If felt as dismissive as it sounds, but I eventually learned that he was trying to get us to articulate the main point. In his own (albeit, abrasive) way, he was training us to deliver a headline—our core message—up front in a clear, concise, and succinct way. Here’s how to do that.
BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front
Save the big reveals for magic shows and surprise parties. In the workplace, business leaders want to know the main point up front. BLUF—Bottom Line Up Front—can help you remember to lead with your core message.
Declutter
Jargon and buzzwords exist for a reason—with the right audience, technical jargon offers specificity and buzzwords provide useful shorthand. But unless you’re certain your audience understands specialized lingo, avoid them. Communicating with plain language as a default will help ensure you communicate more simply.
3. Test for Simplicity
These simple messaging techniques may sound straightforward as you read them. Putting them into practice is much harder. So here are a few tests to help you gauge how simple—or unnecessarily complicated—your messaging is.
“What’s My Headline"?” Test
Ask a colleague to read (or listen to) your message. Then ask them: “If you had to write a headline for this, what would it say?” If their suggested headline aligns with your core message, you’re on the right track. If their headline captures a different idea, then you have some work to do.
Trim the Fat Filter
Concerned you’re being overly verbose? Not sure if you’re being too wordy? The Writer’s Diet is a tool for analyzing and simplifying your language.
Buzzword Detector
It may be fun to play buzzword bingo with your colleagues at a corporate town hall event. But are you sure your communications aren’t buzzing with the same trendy lingo? Try the Buzzword Detector to find out how buzzwordy you are.
The Bottom Line
We all tend to make things complicated because, as it turns out, it’s easier. It takes intentional effort to keep things super simple. But that is the art of powerful messaging.
Stay curious!
- Leadership & Co.
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