Critical communication situations demand crystal clarity.
With apologies for my abusive but personally amusing alliteration above, I’m banging the drum again on the need for all of us to carefully form and frame our messages before we open our mouths and trip on our tongues.
There are many critical communication situations that we face in our organizations and in public, and the moment that you open your mouth is not the time to begin thinking about how to best get your points across. And it’s certainly no time to start rambling like so many politicians or hapless business executives caught on the wrong end of a microphone without a plan. We all know the outcomes, ranging from empty blah blah blabbing to disturbing utterances that demand later apologies.
I use a simple but powerful tool called Message Mapping that is ideal for all of those critical communication situations, including:
- Developing and delivering a speech
- Presenting to executives
- Preparing and participating in a job interview
- Launching a new product
- Communicating a new strategy
- Announcing organizational changes
- Helping to get a group on the same page
- Preparing for an interview
- Delivering difficult news
- Anything else that you can think of…
A group of us learned this approach from a public relations professional years ago and went on to adapt it to serve our own needs in creating corporate and product messaging and helping to ensure that trade show and briefing teams were on the same page about new product launches. Ultimately, we’ve all used it to great effect in our personal professional lives for interview and other presentations.
Creating the Map-Simplicity and Complexity at the Same Time:
The approach is simple to explain, easy to visualize and darned challenging to master all at the same time.
Let’s start with the visual in my poorly constructed, but hopefully, illustrative picture here. In its’ simplest incarnation, the map is constructed on a single sheet of paper (landscape), with the core message placed at the center, no more than 4 key supporting points external to the core message and then supporting data or evidence adjacent to each supporting point. That’s the easy part.
The challenging issue is to distill your core message down to its bare-naked essence and get it right. If you are preparing for a job interview, the core message is your personal-professional value proposition, which for most of us, is something that takes a lot of teeth gnashing and revision work to capture and describe properly. If you are launching a new product, this is the core value proposition of your offering…the essence of why this is important and for whom and how it is uniquely different. And yes, this is captured in one or two sentences.
Once your core message or in this case your core value proposition is defined, you need to back that with points (examples, facts, experiences) that support this message. Once again, you face the task of distilling a lot of examples and supporting points down to the very few that most effectively support your case. And yes, I’m serious about limiting yourself to three or at most four supporting points that make the case for your core message. Any more than that, and you’ve not worked hard enough to sharpen your messaging.
The outer ring as I describe it is used for the facts and supporting points that back your logic. The constraint of a single page or flip-chart challenges you to summarize the critical points and to jettison extraneous anecdotal information.
Using the Map:
Once the map is in place and appropriately tested, it becomes an invaluable personal or group tool. You’ve now got a tool to help you practice and deliver in the most difficult of situations. If constructed properly, your map drives your script and serves as an aid in answering questions. Proper use of the map involves making your case according to the flow and answering questions by referencing back to the supporting evidence…key supporting points and core message every time.
One point of caution: politicians are often observed abusing this tool by answering questions using their maps, with complete disregard for the question being asked. Don’t disrespect your audience this way.
The Bottom-Line for Now
I’ve worked for weeks with teams using this tool to form corporate and product messaging and days and weeks with individuals to help frame their own professional value propositions. I’ve also used this in minutes to prepare for interviews or executive updates. We frequently provided these maps to our trade show teams to ensure that everyone could answer the questions, “What do you guys do?” or “What’s new this year?” with something that actually meant something to someone, other than the inconsistent corporate gobbedly-gook that is often spewed in these settings.
Keep in mind that just because you own the finest woodworking tools doesn’t mean that you are capable of creating beautiful furniture. The message map is a tool that demands care and handling and then and only then, rewards you with rich and productive communication experiences.
Measure twice, cut once.
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