Tell Them What You’re Going to BORE Them?

To give your audience all they need, keep something back

It seems so hard to communicate through the noise at work — to even get your audience to take in the key points of your message.

What to do? Popular presenting advice says “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.”

That advice is rubbish.

“Tell them what you’re going to tell them…” etc. is a way to lose your audience after the first telling. They’ll miss the vital detail and context that would have let them truly get your message.

For sure, repeating a message in various ways, at various times, can help it sink in. But not hammering it 1-2-3 in quick succession!

It doesn’t work for presentations, and it doesn’t work for paragraphs either. In First You Write a Sentence, Joe Moran says:

The Victorian educationalist Alexander Bain saw the paragraph as 'a collection of sentences with unity of purpose'. Bain's idea of the paragraph as a single developed thought came to rule over the school lesson and composition class. Students were taught that a paragraph should have a topic sentence stating the main idea, supporting sentences that amplified that idea, and a wrap-up sentence revisiting the idea. George Gopen calls this the Wizard of Oz paragraph, with its middle three sentences chanting because, because, because. The trouble with this sort of paragraph is that its life is over by the first sentence and the others are just there to write its obituary. The paragraph's entire story was foretold, its topic baited and primed from the start.

I quoted this on Twitter, and apparently it resonated:

Someone in business who does communicate with life and vibrancy: Jason Cohen . He’s a rare animal: a tech investor and founder who has time for nuance. Read his blog to see. He doesn’t like this “tell them what…” either:

That advice is interesting: “hook, tell story, leave utility or feeling”. Does that mean we don’t have to give all the information up front? That goes against some other common communication advice: to give the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF).

BLUF splits summary from detail, for better or worse

The BLUF approach to communication is popular in the military.

It packs as much as possible of the conclusion into a very short passage at the beginning. Giving the main point for busy or stressed people who would skim the rest. Better that the audience gets some key information rather than getting nothing — that’s what BLUF thinks.

But isn’t most of your message key information? Presumably you’re already including just those things you feel your audience needs to know. If not, maybe trim it down instead of burying it as “optional reading” at the end?

Another thing about BLUF: the Up Front bit can state something you believe, and the rest of the text can justify the conclusion. But is it OK that readers skip the rest?

If your research and reasoning skills are great, perhaps it’s OK for readers to skip that bit. But mightn’t the “working-out” help them get behind your conclusions better?

Also, mightn’t there be bits of working-out that they should be aware of? What if your Up Front conclusion doesn’t quite match the evidence — perhaps because there are alternative interpretations you haven’t thought of. Or even because organizational factors push one convenient interpretation above others? An example is the slide that contributed to the Challenger shuttle disaster — see How skimmed information helped doom a space shuttle .

BLUF isn’t bad when readers may need various levels of detail and understanding. But sometimes you do really need the reader to get more of the context and reasoning. In that case, what textual forms typically grab and keep people’s interest?

Beyond BLUF

The most engaging forms of writing create an information gap that you’re motivated to close. Detective stories are a great example. They hook you at the beginning, and only let you off the hook right at the end.

What if we try to combine the two? The Hound of the Baskervilles written in BLUF:

“Chapter 1: Jack Stapleton Kills Sir Charles Baskerville”

Not so enticing.

Perhaps the best inspiration for busy managers to read is the “reverse pyramid structure” of newspaper articles. It is often described as packing all the crucial information at the top, but it is more than that. The headline acts as a hook too, to get you reading the rest.

A nice example is the Evening Standard, 21st July 1969: “The First Footstep” (with a picture of the lunar lander so you pretty much know that it was successful, but still, it makes you want to read the rest)

By the way, I’m thinking more of the classic print journalism style rather than online clickbait headlines. You could get away with this report heading style at work maybe once at most:

“Ten Reasons to Move The Office Location — you’ll never believe number 7!”

But the classic journalism style “reverse pyramids” can help to give your audience some crucial detail at the beginning, and still make them want to read the rest. That is, if you’re thoughtful about it. Don’t be like the journalists of 100 years ago who author GK Chesterton criticized (in the voice of one of his characters):

I know it is the practice of journalists to put the end of the story at the beginning and call it a headline. I know that journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

You need to give enough of the background and of the key characters that the main information makes sense (see “Need help from a colleague? Paint them a picture. ”)

(By the way, GK Chesterton’s detective stories exemplify Jason Cohen’s advice above: “Hook. Tell story. Leave utility or feeling.” Sometimes Chesterton left both a feeling and some “utility” — some kind of reflection on human nature from his perspective. The reflections were of their time and from his particular standpoint, but the technique worked. A message was delivered without feeling too much like a lecture.)

How else can we keep audiences reading to get key details and context? How about hinting at what’s coming up, like the classic “after the break” teaser when TV programmes had predictable ad breaks.

Previewing flow keeps interest and doesn’t give the game away

In The Art of Explanation, BBC presenter Ros Atkins shows how he previews what’s coming up without trying to give all the information in a too-short space of time. He would say something like:

“I've explained how X happening led to Y and how that in turn led to Z. That series of events meant that A became inevitable, as did B. Let me show you how.”

Signposts like this let you know where you are in the structure of a story. They recap a little, but don’t bore. Rather than making you switch off and miss crucial information, they encourage you to keep watching.

Tension keeps attention

We desire to be challenged and solve mysteries, or just to find out what’s around the corner. As we plan communication, whether presentations or pieces of writing, let’s use this desire to guide audiences through vital information.

Just don’t over-hype! If you promise something good, make sure that you fulfill that promise. Most situations have some interest — see if you can use that to hook your audience.

(For an example of making seemingly dry technical info more interesting, see “An engineer got his white paper unstuck by figuring out the story ”.)