Want to Distill Your Message? Try a News Reporter Approach
Communicators I coach seek endless tips on how to distill their message, especially in ad hoc situations, and especially within high-stakes meetings. This super power feels even more vital now when overworked audiences feign enthusiasm for any topic, let alone your exciting ideas. Meanwhile, leaders want crisp, shareable summaries for their own impatient audiences, like boards, investors, and their bosses. Long-winded, overly detailed (or off base) messages frustrate others and don’t meet the cut.
One fun and refreshing tool in my coaching toolkit: Applying journalism techniques to get to the root of what you want to say, why, and to determine what’s in it for the audience. Consider these five journalism techniques for determining the ‘so what’ and which parts to include (and exclude) in your next message. These techniques can feel fruitful when you’ve time to prepare your message; but some can help, even on the fly.
Technique One: Determine What Kind of ‘Story’ Your Message Is
As you gather your ideas and approach, determine what kind of message or ‘story’ you’re offering. Do you want to inform, persuade, uplift an audience? Do you want to deliver bad news? Either way, just like a journalist must decide where their story fits in the daily news, a business communicator can distill their offering by asking first: What do I want my audience to know or do as a result of my message? How does my message add value or move the conversation forward? Taking this analytical step helps a vital self-editing process on which angle to pursue and which parts to add or exclude.
Technique Two: Apply a Faux Headline or Tweet your Message
As you answer this helpful question, keep your response to a sentence. The idea: A journalist solidifies their angle and their ‘hook’ to win their editor’s ‘yes.’ This pre-headline ensures the idea seems solid (to the writer and to the editor) and that no repetition exists.
Headline’s must run (per the Associated Press style guidelines) five to eight words using plain vs. complicated language, no jargon, and a fair and authentic insight into what the rest of the story contains. You want to capture your audience’s attention and place on the head of a pin the essence of what your message says.
An additional technique: Write or envision a Tweet of your message within 280 characters or less. This step helps your brain relinquish fears you might miss something vital or chose the wrong details to help your audience.
To complete this step, you might find you’re not entirely sure what your audience wants. That’s ok. (And that awareness alone can liberate.) If so, ask someone you trust for their input. And on the fly, when someone’s asking for your input, a preamble might be: I can offer A, B, or C in response to your question. Which part feels most helpful now? Which can wait?
Technique Three: Determine the ‘So What’ and the Relevance
Figuring out the relevance of your message can feel tricky. But asking yourself a few questions (or having your coach or a trusted colleague ask them to you) intuition takes over and declares the right path. Try these questions as prompts:
- What do I want my audience to know or do as a result of my message?
- Why must my audience know this information (or perform this act) now?
- If my audience doesn’t learn of this information (or perform this act) now, what’s likely to happen? Asked differently: What’s at stake if the status quo continues and nobody hears this message at all?
Whatever comes next helps build a timeliness to your message which hooks and retains your audience in ways a less focused response cannot. And as you respond to these questions, keep the headline you created earlier front of mind to help you stay committed (and connected) to the main point.
Technique Four: Use the Memory and Your Senses
Another favorite technique: the Truman Capote technique made famous when the literary journalist wrote his bestselling book: In Cold Blood. The Capote technique, revered and used by literary journalism writers, requires writing down a base draft of your message (a presentation or report) without having taken notes or recorded any interviews.
The idea: Whatever surfaces to the top as you compile your ‘story’ becomes the most vital part to include and captures the essence of the subject. The rationale: What you remember most compelled you the most — and will likely compel your audience, too.
In oral communications, you might even frame your distilled message that way for transparency. E.G. I’ve no reports to back this up; but I know how this situation/topic impacted me, which might help. Want to hear this insight?
Finally, Capote abandoned traditional newspaper reporting techniques because he believed the note taking and recording prevented him connecting with his sources. Instead, he applied active listening techniques which include sensing what’s there, asking open-ended questions, noticing what the receiver says (and doesn’t say) and how they say it.
Even in business, using our senses to feel what the audience truly wants and needs, or what fear you sense behind the request for information, can become a powerful tool for distilling our message indeed. An example might be: “I hear you asking about ABC, but I notice more discomfort/angst around DEF. Which area feels most vital for us to tackle here and now?”
Technique Five: Cherry Pick The Best Data/Story/Details
Experienced journalists distill and boil down messages well to meet cruel word constraints, even for enormous topics, and to hook and retain impatient, distracted audiences.
To get there, our editors train us to keep that bottom line up top, which I write on here. Also, to choose the best data vs. tons of data, choose the most compelling quote vs. truckloads of repetitive, redundant quotes or the same quote said in different ways by different people. We’re also trained to choose only impartial experts to analyze what’s going on and one expert to represent each side of the fence. You can apply this selection technique, in service of your audience, to your distilled business message, too.
To get there, consider mental fitness techniques to discover what’s driving you to over report and over share anyway? Here’s what I hear from the field. Communicators feel:
- Inadequate if they don’t share all their data, successes, or other details.
- Fearful audiences will question their knowledge/value if they’re sparse.
- Attached to sharing in service of them vs. their audience and pride/arrogance/superiority drives a resistance to modify or reduce.
At the risk of losing or overloading your audience, manage and notice that fear. Also, indicate your offering’s not complete, it’s simply most helpful or briefest for now. In oral form, as you’re sharing your message, you might offer:
- “I’ve a ton of stories to illustrate this point, but the most revealing (or the most helpful, or the most powerful/memorable) becomes this one.”
- “We’ve numerous data points which back up this point; however, the most startling data (in my view) is this one here.”
- “I’ve endless data (or testimonial or research) on this topic, which feels most pressing to learn of now? Which can I send after?”
Whatever approach you use, consider these three prompts to help select and reduce on the fly:
- Resist the desire to offer all you know. Trust that less = more.
- Share the most memorable, compelling, or useful bits. Know: This distilling technique showcases a rare skill.
- Stay audience centered and ask your audience for input if you’re not sure.
Now you’ve some journalistic techniques to experiment with as you distill your message. Hopefully you’ll feel less panicked, more confident — and with that, more audience centered — when sharing your beautiful ideas.
Debbi coaches and trains leaders all over the world to become more concise, compelling, and with that more confident and effective. She owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching, based in Wisconsin.