how to craft influential messages that stick · 2017-11-12 · jargon can be even peskier. every...

How to Craft Influential Messagesthat Stick

Dan AganFounder and Principal, Ninja Communications LLC

Founder and President, Panthera Group LLC

This copyrighted guide is the intellectual property of Daniel C. Agan of Ninja Communications LLC. It has been licensed for your personal use only. It may not be re-transmitted, posted, shared, edited, or otherwise disseminated, in whole or in part, through any means now known or yet to be devised, without the expressed, written consent of Dan Agan.

© 2014-2015 Daniel C. Agan and Ninja Communications LLC All rights reserved.

Masterful Messaging Page 1

The ability to communicate complex ideas, concepts, and abstractions separates hu-mankind from virtually all other species. It is a profoundly human activity.

And for professionals, today’s supersonic-paced, highly-competitive, Gordianly-complex, and increas-ingly global working environment, makes having the ability to communicate crisply and influentially all the more crucial. Sharing your ideas successfully with those both inside and outside your field hinges on your ability to convey them convincingly. Winning support for your ideas, plans, initiatives, products, and services means communicating their signficance and value persuasively.

In short, possessing robust communication skills isn’t really an option. It’s a necessity. Through no fault of their own, though, many professionals—perhaps yourself in-cluded—have never been exposed to any meaningful instruction in effective communication. That’s the bad news.

The good news is communicating effectively is an acquired skill. We’re not born with it. It’s not innate or instinctive. It’s learned. Virtually anyone with the desire and will to do so can become a powerhouse communi-cator.

And while communicating winningly certainly entails the ability to convey ideas efficiently and charismatically to others, the essential first step is to create the compel-ling, masterful messages that separate effective, persua-sive communications from everyday conversations.

And that’s what this guide will help you do.

The Communication Challenge

Before diving into the ins and outs of message devel-opment, though, let’s briefly step back and talk about how communicating works and explore why communi-cations don’t always achieve what we want.

Here’s a simple representation of communication. This came from two Bell Lab scientists—Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver—way back in the late 1940’s. Their communication simulation or model, often referred to as the “transmission model,” consists of a sender, a receiv-er, the content communicated, and a transmission chan-nel. Many scholars, researchers and theoreticians have built on this initial work since the time this model was introduced, and diligent research to more accurately re-flect the increasingly complex dimensions and subtleties

of communicating continues today. The point here isn’t to explore the vast landscape of communications theo-ry. Rather, it’s to highlight the fundamental components of communications, namely the presence of a sender, a receiver, a message or communicated content, and a transmission medium. Take away any one of these and there’s no communication.

Now having said that, it’s a common sense observa-tion that human communication poses a thornier prop-osition than this basic model implies. If it were as sim-ple as merely transmitting a message to a receiver, then there’d never be misunderstandings, confusion, uninten-tional offenses, misconceptions, and so on. So let’s dig a little deeper.

One aspect that makes communicating such a chal-lenge is the very thing that allows us to communicate in the first place—our ability to assign meanings and characteristics to things that don’t actually possess them. Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this Abstract Symbolic Reasoning, and it’s what enables us to represent thoughts symbolically—through language, numbers, pictures, sounds, and so on.

Adding to the challenge is that we routinely assign scads of meanings to the very same symbol or set of symbols. University of Virginia psychologist Dr. Judy De-Loache calls this multiple meanings dexterity Dual Repre-sentation Theory. Dual Representation Theory allows us to see this...I...as a line, or perhaps as an integer (I00), or perhaps as a letter (soIar), or even perhaps—if it were to blink on and off—as an indication of where to start typing. They’re all the same symbol, but what that sym-bol means, changes with the context in which it is used.

In other words, when we communicate—either verbal-ly, or non-verbally—we’re talking in code. We’re rep-resenting objects, ideas, concepts, action, abstractions and more as symbols. As senders, these thoughts are


first encoded into coherent, comprehensible verbal and/or non-verbal symbols, which are then conveyed to the receiver(s) using a transmission medium. The receivers then decode the symbols to arrive at some interpreted meaning. If we as senders skillfully deploy symbols that we know, or conclude, receiver(s) will decode proper-ly, then the receiver(s)’ interpreted meaning will closely align with our intended meaning and effective commu-nication likely occurs. By the same token though, even a single mismatch can derail a communication.

Obviously then, for everything to work right, these symbols need to be chosen carefully. They need to par-allel and reflect the receivers’ expectations, situation, experience, education, and level of sophistication—to name only a few. If they don’t, then we run the risk that what we say will be misinterpreted—that our intended meaning will be misunderstood (and that never hap-pens, right?).

Equally important, we have to organize these symbols in a context that enables the audience to correctly de-code them. We don’t want them interpreting a letter as an integer, or a line as an insertion mark. There will be more to say about context in a bit, but for now, let’s move on from the sender and talk about the receivers.

Clearly, the sender plays a starring role in commu-nication, but it takes two to tango. In fact, the majority of scholars today agree that the communication cycle is incomplete unless and until the receiver acknowledges that communication has occurred (this acknowledgment is frequently called “feedback”). So, what creates this feedback? What’s happening on the receiver’s side of the equation? If we map it along a linear spectrum, it might look something like the figure below. To better un-derstand the spectrum, picture in your mind the simple act of waving at someone.

• The receiver starts out UNAWARE. He or she has no inkling of the communication about to occur.

• As the sender initiates communication—in this case, through non-verbal means (a wave)—the

receiver becomes AWARE that something directed at him/her is occurring. Once the receiver under-stands that the sender is attempting to communi-cate, all five of his/her senses perk up to decode the sender’s symbols.

• If the sender’s and the receiver’s ABSTRACT SYM-BOLIC REASONING and DUAL REPRESENTATION closely align, then in all likelihood the sender’s in-tended meaning is accurately decoded. If there’s a mismatch or ambiguity, however, then mix-ups occur and the result is misunderstanding.

• Based on his/her interpretation of the sender’s symbols, the receiver now makes a decision. He or she elects to ACCEPT or REJECT the commu-nication as credible, relevant, meaningful, and worthy of further engagement. Marketers call this moment “critical judgment” and it’s the inflection point where conclusions are drawn. It’s when we decide things like relevant or irrelevant, true or false, interested or uninterested, buy or don’t buy, real or unreal, do it or delay it, I totally get it or I totally don’t, and so on.

• Once critical judgment occurs, the receiver COM-MITS to act on the decoded meaning either then and there, or at some future point when presented with an opportunity to do so. Accepting the mean-ing yields one type of commitment; rejection an-other.

• And finally, based on his or her commitment, the receiver RESPONDS accordingly to complete the communication cycle. Acceptance leads the re-ceiver to respond as you desire—in this specific case a wave back. Rejection might result in avoid-ance, disdain, or in the case of an uninvited wave probably evasion. For other, more formal types of communication, it might even lead to more active opposition, such as arguing against the sender’s position or outright antagonism.

Effective Communications Are Built on Ef-fective Messages

Truly effective, purposeful communications convey truly powerful messages. It’s what dis-tinguishes them from routine conversation, and elevates them to the higher purpose of influence. Powerful messages:

• Resonate with an explicitly identified receiver or group of receivers;


• Convey how the subject under discussion directly and personally aligns with the receiver’s’ needs, beliefs, motives or aspirations; and

• Produce a desired outcome.

In short, a message represents what you want the re-cipient(s) to carry away after exposure to your commu-nication, and encompasses not only the outcome you desire (e.g., acceptance of new ideas, changes in opin-ion or attitudes, alteration of behavior, and so on), but also the specific claims, assertions, and evidence that argue for that outcome. Three things characterize mas-terful messages:

1. First, they are CONCISE. Concision is a calling card of the best messages.

2. Second, they’re PERSONAL. Great messages are strategically calibrated to resonate with the inter-ests, motives, beliefs and goals of specific audi-ences.

3. And third, effective messages communicate CLEARLY, avoiding unnecessary details, complex or specialized language, acronyms, and jargon.

Let me expand a bit. Masterful messages are efficient. They generate maximum impact from a minimum of content (verbal or non-verbal), and that means econo-mizing what you say and how you say it.

Yet, all too frequently, the very opposite happens. Peo-ple conceal the message in the weeds of minute details, and obscure it behind a thicket of jargon and acronyms. Why? What makes communicators do that?

The answer, or at least my answer, might surprise you. When communicating, many professionals suffer from the “curse of knowledge”— they simply can’t remember what it was like to NOT know what they know.

Each of us becomes so immersed in the knowledge we routinely apply and use with those around us, that we can’t, or don’t, remember a time when we didn’t know

all of that stuff. Consequently, when the time comes to communicate clearly with those outside our immediate cohort, we find it nearly impossible to divorce ourselves from the deeply ingrained knowledge we use day in and day out, and that we find fascinating.

Being steeped in so much information, especially when trying to be influential, urges us to share every shred of our deeply seated knowledge with others, even when it means adding layer upon layer of unnecessary technical detail—detail that may be of little or no consequence to the effectiveness of the message, achievement of the objective, and most importantly, engagement of the au-dience.

Simultaneously, because we use this knowledge con-stantly, we develop communication shortcuts that save time with our colleagues and co-workers when referring to more complicated information. Jargon is a communi-cations shortcut. So are acronyms. We know what these shortcuts mean and we don’t remember not knowing what we know, so when the time comes to communicate beyond our immediate circle, we don’t think either to ex-plain the concept behind the shortcut, or avoid the short-cut altogether. An acronym like NSF (National Science Foundation) is a shortcut. So is EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research). You per-haps know what they mean, but to the uninitiated, NSF might just as easily suggest a brand of clothing, and EPSCoR might well prove meaningless.

Jargon can be even peskier. Every profession teems with specialized language and vocabulary unique to itself. The challenge in communicating effectively lies in unraveling exactly what in our professional lexicons constitutes jargon, and what doesn’t, for any given au-dience.

For instance, most people today readily know that the television term “HD” refers to particular types of video


picture resolution known as “high definition.” Just a few years ago, though, you could probably count on one hand the number of people outside of TV production who knew this. Somewhere along the line, “HD” trans-formed. What started out as an acronym turned into a term of art, and then ultimately migrated into almost everyone’s living room. Does that mean it’s no longer jargon? Not necessarily. For a certain group of motor-cycle enthusiasts, “HD” might first, foremost, now and forever more, mean only one thing: Harley-Davidson. So it depends on the audience (there’s that pesky notion of context again).

Here’s another example: “theory.” Scientists common-ly use “theory” to identify a set of statements or principles that definitively explain a group of facts or phenomena. Most of the rest of us, however, generally use “theory” to indicate speculation or hypothesis: “Here’s my theory..” So what happens? If a scientist says “theory,” he or she expects this to mean facts. The non-scientific audience, on the other hand, thinks it means guesses. It may seem a small point, but the resulting mismatch between the sender’s intended meaning and the audience’s inter-preted meaning can sabotage your effectiveness as a communicator, call into question the reliability of your claims, and undermine the entirety of your communi-cation.

To be crystal clear, I am not suggesting “dumbing down” your content. Not at all. I am suggesting that simple, intelligible, jargon- and acronym-free messages trump intricate ones every time.

To Communicate More Effectively, Plan More Effectively

In the end, I believe, and my experience bears this out, that most communication problems arise not from the complexity of the subject matter itself, the perceived credibility of the sender, or even the communicator’s command of the topic. Instead, they most often boil down to a failure to plan effective messages. So to be-come effective communicators we need first to be ef-fective message creators and start by knowledgeably defining:

• What will be said;

• Whom it’s most desirable to say it to;

• How it will be stated so that it matters to the re-cipient;

• How stated claims will be authoritatively substan-tiated; and

• What outcome will be expected by saying it.

Addressing these crucial dimensions upfront creates a shrewdly crafted blueprint for constructing and con-veying compelling messages. It clarifies not only your thinking, but also your purpose. And in the end, effec-tive, persuasive communications are purposeful commu-nications.

Getting there involves developing a plan, and then translating the plan into actionable messages. This guide provides two tools to help you achieve this: The Strategic Communications Planner, and the Strategic Message Triangle.

The Planner is the roadmap that prompts you to de-fine and organize where you are, where you want to go, and how you’re going to get there. It captures both the factors affecting your message (such as the audience and the context) and the crucial components of your message (such as the outcome you desire, the argument you’ll make, and the evidence you’ll use to support your argument), but it is not your finished message. Rather, it contains the building blocks from which you will con-struct your final, polished message.

The Triangle helps you distill the plan into the essentials from which you’ll create a crisp, memorable message, and helps you remember your message in extempora-neous communication situations, like a media interview, or a meeting with a potential funder.

The Strategic Communications Planner

The primary tool we’ll use to plan the message is The Strategic Communications Planner. To illustrate how the Planner is used, I’m going to walk through it step-by-step, using an example. (NOTE: A copy of the Planner accompanies this guide, and I urge you to print it out, or


open it in a separate window, so that you can refer to it during the discussion that follows.)

Let’s say I’m a scientist—it’s reaching I know, but bear with me. Anyway, let’s say I’m a scientist and I’ve been asked to address a meeting of legislators, politicians, and other government types on the subject of science and the scientific enterprise. It’s really no more specific than that, so I have a lot of running room.

Being granted the latitude to talk about whatever I want, provided it relates to science, is a grand opportuni-ty, and one not to be squandered. All too often, though, that’s exactly what happens when we fail to step back and carefully assess what we want to accomplish—what we want receivers to understand, what we want them to think, or what action we want them to take—through this communication. If we don’t have a plan for what we want to achieve and how we’re going to achieve it, then we’ll likely fall back on what’s most familiar to us, namely what we do. Consequently, the communication ends up inventorying a laundry list of activities, rather than convincingly conveying why our activities matter, or should matter, to those we’re addressing. Helping you plan how best to persuasively communicate importance and meaning is the purpose of the Planner.

Before exploring each of the Planner’s entries in more detail, though, let me make an important point. Look at Planner Items #1 and #2. Item #1 calls for you to establish the topic of your message. Item #2 involves defining, in broad terms, who will see and/or hear the message.

In some respects, the sequencing of these two, cru-cial planning elements is arbitrary. Undeniably, there are circumstances where the audience with whom you

will be communicating will at least inform, if not dictate, the topic you’ll address, such as when you’re invited to address a specific community group or make a confer-ence presentation. In instances such as these, Item #2 should take precedence over Item #1 and be completed first.

In other situations, you might want to actively advance a particular message with multiple audiences, so the topic is established upfront, and defining the audience comes second. If you think about it, this is what market-ers and advertisers routinely do.

Under still a third set of conditions, a general definition of both the topic and the audience may be given to you, such as when you’re tasked with giving a speech at a particular venue. This actually is fairly common. In these instances, neither Item #1 nor Item #2 has precedence so the order in which they’re completed is immaterial.

Which Item—audience or topic—takes precedence or no precedence in your plan results from the individual circumstances under which each communication will be developed and delivered. Both approaches can be ef-fective. The crucial point is that both Item #1 and Item #2 must be completed prior to moving on with your planning. They are essential to bringing your message sharply into focus.

Planner Item #1: Setting the Topic

To be sure, a topic is not a message. A topic merely defines the subject of the communication. It simply states what you’re going to address, and doesn’t stipulate or imply any particular stance. For example, if the topic is climate change, you shouldn’t state your position on the topic at this stage in the Planner (the Planner will help you make clear your position later, after you’ve fleshed out the plan a bit more).


For your communication to be optimally effective, you must narrow the field down from the scores of things you could talk about to the one specific subject you will talk about. This keeps you centered on the task at hand, and helps prevent digressions into matters that do not directly support achievement of your desired outcome.

Having thought things through, I decide that I’m go-ing to talk about public funding of basic scientific research. (NOTE: Throughout this guide, the example worksheet entries I’ll make will be indicated by bold ital-ics.) That’s my topic, and it gets entered right at the top of the worksheet under Item #1. Note that my top-ic—public funding of basic scientific research—doesn’t indicate whether I’m in favor or opposed. It’s simply a straightforward definition of the subject matter I want to address, almost like a discussion Item on an agenda.

Planner Item #2: Define the Addressable Audience

Next, under Item #2, you need to describe—as best you can—who will hear and/or see this communication. Once again, this is necessary to focus the plan.

In the case of my communication to the politicians, I enter who these folks are—legislators and those in-volved in the legislative process and budget appro-priations—under Item #2. This is necessary to calibrate what I’ll say about the topic to the sophistication level, views, interests, beliefs, needs, or aspirations of the peo-ple who will see and/or hear my message. After all, these folks don’t know what I know, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. They have their expertise; I have mine. Moreover, they have a very particular set of responsi-bilities and a very particular point of view. They aren’t a group of truck drivers, venture capitalists, construction workers, medical professionals, corporate executives, or even other scientists (at least these aren’t their day jobs). They’re politicians and political wonks, so that needs to inform my thinking as I build the plan. Accurately iden-tifying the audience serves to better delineate the gap between our knowledge.

Professional communicators call this group the ad-dressable audience, the total available audience, or simply the available audience. It’s the broad umbrella that covers everyone who will actually be exposed to the communication.

Planner Item #3: Define the Target Audience

Item #2 certainly helps to narrow the field from ev-eryone in the universe to just the folks I’ll actually be communicating to and with, but it really isn’t specific enough–yet–to be strategically actionable. To really fo-cus my communication, I need to zoom in even more and describe those members of the available audience that I most want or need to connect with and influence through my communication. In other words, I need to make some hard choices. I need to decide who, among all of the individuals represented by the total available audience, are most important for me to influence. This doesn’t make everyone else unimportant. It simply sets a priority by defining those I believe to be most important to my goals and my success.

We do this because audiences—even audiences that share common occupations (like politicians) or interests (like community groups) are decidedly heterogenous. Even the most seemingly homogenous audiences gen-erally are made up of all kinds of individuals—older, younger, male, female, experts, neophytes, and so on. For example, in communicating about the value of ba-sic scientific research, some in the audience might be extremely literate about the contributions basic research has made to contemporary life. Others might be clue-less. Some might fully grasp how physics contributes

to medicine, or materials engineering contributes to technology, or biology contributes to agriculture. Some wouldn’t know where to begin.

More importantly, all of these various and sundry sub-groups in the audience have different interests, different goals, and seek different outcomes. Some might be in-terested in education. Others might be interested in sus-tainability. Still others might hold economic development as their number one priority.


Developing communications that try to appeal across every possible perspective and viewpoint represented in the audience, dilutes your focus and muddies the message. It turns your communication into a poorly constructed infomercial that throws out as many facts, claims, ideas, and assertions as time permits in the hope that some of it might stick. The greatest odds of success, however, lie in deciding who among the audience you most want to influence—who you can or want to con-vince to see things your way—and then concentrating all of your communications firepower on them. Who are they? Why are they here? How would I describe them? What do they want? What motivates them?

Returning to the Planner and my example communi-cation for a political audience, in Item #3 I’m going to describe the people I really want or need to win over to my point of view—the people I really want to talk to and resonate with. This helps focus my planning and ulti-mately my communication itself. Communication pros call this group the target audience.

Here’s what I come up with: Scientifically-literate, well-educated politicians and government profes-sionals, especially those involved in budgeting and budget allocations, who generally appreciate that science and technology impact our lives, but do not necessarily understand how, or how basic scientific research led to these benefits.

Planner Item #4: Establish the Communication Objective

Having determined what I’m going to talk about, and who in the audience I most want to reach, it’s time now to decide—and clearly state—exactly what result I want my communication to produce. What do I expect the tar-get audience to know, think, or do after receiving my communication? Do I expect them to accept my ideas? Write a check? Go to a web site? Change their attitudes or behaviors? Contact me for more information, or take some other action?

This is called the communication objective, and it is the facet of effective communication that professionals—even accomplished professionals—most often overlook. And that usually spells disaster, because absent a clear sense of where you want the target to go means you won’t have a clear sense of how to argue for the out-come you seek. In other words, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, “If you don’t care where you’re going, any road will you take you there.”

Moreover, by putting forward an objective, I affirm and remind myself that I’m communicating purposefully. I want to achieve one or more of three basic goals:

1. The first is to INFORM—to transfer some intellec-tual bytes from my mental flash drive to yours and set you thinking in a particular way. Communi-cating to inform is about knowledge transfer. We don’t necessarily expect someone to act on the communication. Rather, we’re adding arrows to their quiver of knowledge.

2. Second is to INFLUENCE or PERSUADE—to affect thought or behavior in some intended direction. This might be a point of view, a plan of action, or even a change in behavior. Keep in mind though, that communications intended to persuade repre-sent a far greater challenge than those designed merely to inform. For one thing, you must accu-rately gauge any audience bias—pro, neutral, or con—so that your communication ultimately effectively reinforces existing (pro), establishes new (neutral), or modifies current (con) attitudes and behaviors. For another, as every trial attorney knows, it’s far easier to disprove something than it is to prove something. Showing how even the most compelling argument fails to meet a single criterion invalidates the whole case.

3. And finally, we might communicate to INSPIRE—to appeal on an emotional level to lift spirits or encourage achievement. Inspirational communi-cations may free you from conventional presenta-tional approaches, but they’re ticklish. To be truly inspirational, you have to connect with the audi-ence not only intellectually, but also emotionally.

Going back to the Planner, under Item #4 I’m going to state what result I expect—how I expect the receiver(s) to respond—after exposure to my communication. Quite


simply, I want the target audience to accept and support the premise that: Basic scientific research deserves continued and increased funding.

Planner Items #5, #6, #7: Assess the Audience’s Disposition

Next up, having set my objective and identified my audience target, I need to assess the audience’s dispo-sition—their opinions, their demeanor, and their atti-tudes—relative to my topic. If you carry away only one or two things from this guide, make sure this is one of them. Why? Because understanding your target audi-ence’s disposition toward your topic dictates everything that follows.

To understand why that’s so, think of communicat-ing influentially as analo-gous to a GPS device. You want to take the audience from where they are now to where you want them to be. If you’ve ever given someone directions, you’ve undoubtedly already picked up my point, but for the sake of clarity, here’s an example. Let’s say you’re waiting for me in your office one day, and I call to say, “I’m lost! How the heck do I get to your office?”

What’s the very first question you’re going to ask me? Exactly! “Where are you right now?”

The same is true for a communication intended to in-fluence or persuade. For you to lead the audience to the destination you desire, you first need to know, or make an educated guess about, where they are right now. What do you think the audience knows? What do you think they believe? What can you conclude about they’re attitudes by examining what they’ve said or done?

Making this assessment as part of the plan for my com-munication with politicians requires some due diligence on my part. I check news reports (newsfeeds, news outlet web sites, and so on) to see what my targeted audience has been saying. I look up their voting records and their statements during budget hearings. I talk with my pub-lic affairs and public information professionals to gath-

er any insights they can provide. I search Google and Lexis-Nexis. The goal is to compile relevant intelligence about the target audience’s thinking, attitudes, and pos-ture on my topic. Yes, it takes effort, but in the end, the payback far exceeds the investment.

Based on my research, here’s what I conclude about my legislative audience’s disposition toward public fund-ing of basic scientific research: The target audience questions why public money should be used to fund basic scientific research. I enter this information in Item #5.

Once again though, this isn’t very nuanced. Yes, I know that my legislative audience is skeptical about us-ing public money for basic scientific research, but that’s about it. I don’t know what motivates them to reach this conclusion, and how this disposition stacks up against the outcome or end-state I seek. Is this a philosophical objection, or a practical one? Do they disdain the idea of using tax dollars under any circumstance to support scientific research, or do they think something else is more important or more deserving? Is it a budget issue or a matter of priorities? In other words, having con-cluded my target audience questions the value of public support, I now need to dig a little deeper and figure out why.

More than likely, this is going to require a little educat-ed guesswork on my part using the intelligence I’ve al-ready gathered. By examining what the target has been saying (e.g., during debate on legislation or budget ap-propriations) or doing (e.g., voting records), I discover that they’re not so much opposed to basic scientific re-search as they are unconvinced of its relative value given the urgency of other pressing demands.

This is an important distinction because it shows that I needn’t overcome staunch, philosophical opposition to my objective. Instead, it points to the strategy I can de-ploy to win the support I need. It shows that, by aligning my assertions and arguments with their economic pri-orities and interests, I can influence this audience to be more accepting of the outcome I seek.

I enter this shaded understanding of the target audi-ence’s attitude in Item #6: The target audience be-lieves basic scientific research is useful in the long run; however, in the current atmosphere of high un-employment, a sagging economy, and huge deficits, hard choices must be made, and using tax dollars to support basic research just isn’t a priority.


Finally, I shorthand the audience’s resistance by checking the “Resistant” box in Item #7. This serves as a ready reminder of my audience’s demeanor while I continue developing my communication plan.

Planner Item #8: Frame the Message

A moment ago, I noted that my audience is resistant, but not opposed, to my desired outcome. I also point-ed out that this represents a crucial distinction when it comes to persuasive communications because it points to a strategy for effectively influencing the audience to think or act as I desire.

To understand why that’s so, we need to probe a little deeper into the dimensions of resistance and opposition. Think of it this way, “resisters” are sitting on the fence. They’re easier to bring around to a particular point of view, but they still need to know how I help them achieve their goals. “Opposers,” on the other hand, have re-jected (think back to the linear spectrum and critical judgment) a specific argument or point of view. They’ve slammed shut a particular doorway into their minds that might allow them to accept an alternative perspective.

Still, if you want to take the audience where you want them to go, then it’s incumbent on you, the communi-cator, to outflank this resistance, or find a new doorway into the minds of opposers, so that your audience can see things your way.

To accomplish this, you need to do two things. First, you need to accurately gauge and understand the at-titudes, beliefs and motives of your target audience, as you just did in Item #6. Second, you need to change the context in which your message is interpreted (remember I said earlier there is more to say about “context?” Well, here it comes). You’re still giving the target audience di-rections to where you want them to go, but you’re going to change the route that takes them there.

Let’s use a contentious topic to illustrate. In argu-ing the case for evolution with evolution deniers, one might point out that our ability to combat pandemics and drug-resistant bacteria results from an understand-ing of how bacteria change over generations of repro-duction—which, of course, is just another way of saying how they evolve. It still makes the case for evolution, but makes it in the context of medicine. A resistant (or opposed) target audience may have closed the biolog-ical route into their minds on the topic of evolution, but maybe the medical route is still open or can be opened.

This incredibly effective maneuver is called “framing.” It’s so essential to your effectiveness as a communicator that we need to briefly sidetrack here to explore it further.

Think of framing like composing a photograph through a camera viewfinder. When you compose a photo, you first must decide what kind of picture it will be—a por-trait, a landscape, a still life, an action scene, and so on. Once you decide that, then you have to choose what will be in the shot, and what won’t. What will be in the foreground, and what will be in the background. What the centerpiece of your picture will be, and what will be off to the side, or not included at all. If you’re creating a portrait, for example, you don’t make a bowl of fruit the focus of your picture. You focus on a person. If you’re taking a sports action shot, you don’t make spectators in the stands the central element. You focus on what’s happening on the field.

Framing your communication works the same way. On any given topic, there are likely dozens of important ideas that you could put forward, but not all of them will reflect the audience attitudes and interests that you identified in Planner Items #5 and 6. Consequently, you need to choose only those statements, facts, ideas, or assertions that belong inside the frame of this particular communication’s photo. This doesn’t make these omit-ted arguments unimportant. Rather, it means they’re simply not as important to successfully influencing this particular audience as the ones chosen. Why? Because they don’t align with this specific target’s interests, needs, desires, or goals.

Framing is a potent ally because it reduces, or even eliminates, resistance and opposition. In essence, when you frame, you definitively show how the GPS route your


communication lays out will lead the target audience to where it already wants to go. And, it combats ambiguity by making clear the context the target audience should use in decoding and interpreting your meaning.

Let’s see framing in action by examining another con-tentious topic—climate change. We’ll look at four differ-ent ways the objective of mitigating climate change has been framed. Keep in mind that in each instance the desired outcome is to prompt action on the threat posed by climate change, but the reasons for going there are framed in four different ways, each of which presents different claims and evidence, and engages different kinds of audiences.

1. First up is the SCIENTIFIC frame, as represented by Michael Mann’s so-called hockey stick study. Here, the message relies on scientific research, measurements and statistics to make the case for addressing climate change. Obviously, this frame

is going to resonate with audiences whose deci-sion-making is guided by hard evidence, logic, research and facts. But, thinking back to what we said earlier about how audiences aren’t homoge-nous, we know that arguing the scientific dimen-sions of climate change isn’t going to sway every-one. What about people who reject the science or see the economy as a vastly more urgent problem than climate change?

2. Well, here’s a frame for them—the ECONOMIC frame. Once again, the message makes the case for dealing with climate change, but this time, rather than talking about how global surface tem-peratures have been rising or how much polar ice has disappeared, the message talks about how addressing climate change will benefit the nation economically, for example, by establishing new “green industries” in solar and wind power, cre-ating new “green jobs,” adding to the tax base, and so on.

3. Here’s a frame that might surprise you. It’s geared to evangelical conservatives. It still makes the case for taking action on climate change. However, in this instance, the organizing principle is RELIGIOUS. It argues that people of faith have a responsibility to address climate change because of their obligation to be stewards of God’s Cre-ation. Once again, the objective hasn’t wavered.

The outcome desired is to persuade people to act in reversing climate change. But in this case, be-cause of the audience and the DISPOSITION of the audience, the route taken to get there—the frame—rather than being scientific or economic, is religious.

4. And finally, here’s the climate change issue framed as a matter of NATIONAL SECURITY. Same communication objective—motivate the au-


dience to act on climate change—but this time the case is put forward in the context of national se-curity, rather than science, economics, or religion. It points up how climate change could threaten American interests should rising sea levels end up flooding a low-lying country like Bangladesh and bring about area wide instability, regional conflict, and catastrophic displacement of large popula-tions.

With that as prologue, let’s return to framing my ad-dress to politicians on public funding of basic scientific research. What context or frame can I use that will cause the target audience to care about my topic and respond positively to my message? I could choose among sev-eral different frames—politics, economics, quality of life, personal interest, public safety, etc.—but based on my audience’s disposition that jobs, resolving the debt, and stimulating the economy hold higher priority than fund-ing scientific research (cited in Item #6), I conclude that the best way to get my message across is to cast my communication in an economic frame, so I enter Eco-nomics in Item #8.

Planner Item #9: Make Compelling Claims

With the objective set out in Item #4 clearly in mind, you’re now ready to set about determining how to make your message’s case. You need to decide how best to ar-gue for the outcome you desire by deploying assertions, statements, ideas, facts, and concepts that align with the frame delineated in Item #8. Going back to the analogy of giving someone directions, it’s time to pick the specific roads you’ll use to carry the audience from where they are now to where you want them to go.

Item #9 calls for you to enter three key points, claims or assertions that you’ll use to make the case for your communication objective.

Now, before you ask, let me address a question that typically pops up right about now: Why just three points? Why not six, or seven, or ten? What if I have a whole slew of really good points to make? Shouldn’t I make all of them?

Well, from my perspective the short answer is “No, you shouldn’t,” and the reason has to do with how human memory works. It’s an oversimplification, but viewed from a high level, there are basically two types of hu-man memory: working memory and long-term memory. If you’re familiar with computers, human working mem-

ory is like your computer’s random access memory or RAM, while long-term memory is like your computer’s hard drive.

In a computer, when you author a document, write an email, manipulate numbers in a spreadsheet, or devel-op a presentation, the information you enter is held tem-porarily in RAM while you work with it. Then, when you save your work (or your computer automatically saves it for you), the computer transfers the contents of working memory to the hard drive for long-term storage.

That’s a pretty good analogy for what happens in our brains. Like computer RAM, working memory is used as a temporary holding and processing center for mental tasks, such as language comprehension (for example, retaining ideas from early in a sentence to be combined with ideas later on), problem solving (like figuring out the tip amount on a restaurant bill) and planning (deter-mining the best order in which to visit the bank, library, and grocery). Once we’ve finished processing informa-tion in our working memory, we discard it if we don’t need it any more, or transfer it to long-term memory for later recall and further manipulation if we do.

But here’s the trick. Studies show that human working memory—just like computer RAM—has a finite capac-ity. Research by psychologist Dr. Nelson Cowan of the University of Missouri indicates that there’s a practical limit to working memory. And while there are no hard and fast rules as to what that limit is (it can vary with age, for example), the evidence suggests that our ability to efficiently handle information degrades significantly if we have to cope with more than three or four fairly short chunks.

The evidence suggest that working memory capaci-ty may be improved if the information is presented in


logical progression, is split into smaller chunks, or is as-sisted by mnemonics (for example, can you name all of the Great Lakes? Just think “HOMES”—Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). For the most part, though, it seems to me that going beyond three crucial points in a communication that seeks to be influential risks over-crowding the audience’s working memory. If that hap-pens, new information replaces older information, and the information replaced can be extremely difficult to recall. This thwarts the audience’s ability to process your assertions, perform critical judgment, and jeopardizes achievement of your communication objective. So why risk it? By limiting your ultimate message to three com-pelling points, you ensure that the target audience uses its working memory effectively and efficiently to process the information coming its way, and you minimize the possibility that the audience will be unable to recall ear-lier, essential components needed to make your commu-nication fully effective.

You have at your disposal a number of effective con-structs for deploying your key points. For example, you could identify a PROBLEM, provide a SOLUTION, and then enumerate the resulting BENEFITS. Or, you could present a syllogism, i.e., set forth a MAJOR PREMISE, a MINOR PREMISE, and a CONCLUSION. Or, you might dispel three common myths about the topic; or reveal three things the audience should know but may not; or you might put yourself in the audience’s shoes and an-swer three crucial questions they probably have.

In the case of my presentation on public funding for basic scientific research, I’m going to construct a syllo-gism:

1. First, innovation fuels the economy (Item #9a).

2. Second, basic scientific research re-sults in innovation (Item #9b).

3. Therefore, increased investments in ba-sic scientific research will fuel the inno-vation that produces economic benefits (Item #9c).

Planner Item #10: Substantiate the Claims

The last item remaining to be completed in the Plan-ner, Item #10, calls for you to provide convincing evi-dence that will substantiate each of your three key points and give the audience compelling reasons to believe what you’re conveying.

It’s no mystery that people are more likely to accede to a request when they have good reason to do so, and the same holds true when people are asked to believe what they’re told. Consequently, to make your messages optimally convincing and persuasive, you need to pro-vide at least one proof point that substantiates each of your claims.

What proof is the right proof depends on multiple fac-tors, including the audience, the frame, and the claims being made. Even so, convincing evidence comes in all shapes and sizes. Research results, demonstrations, sta-tistics, anecdotes, testimonials, and even analogies, can all be effective authenticating strategies. The key is to have at least one proof point for each claim that causes target audience members to say to themselves, “I can believe this BECAUSE there’s good reason to do so.”

Indeed, when it comes to being persuasive, that word “because” has some very special mojo. Psychologists tell us our brains do something truly interesting when we hear it. According to Harvard social psychologist Dr. El-len Langer, the word “because” triggers something akin to the behavioral patterns exhibited in the animal world. Behavioral patterns, or behavioral acts as they’re some-times referred to, are like tapes that play automatically in response to certain external stimuli, called “sign stimuli,” or “releasers.” In the animal world, things like mating dances, attack behaviors, and defense mechanisms of-ten are examples of behavioral patterns. For we humans, the urge to reciprocate when someone says something nice to us or does something nice for us, for example, may indicate culturally imprinted behavioral patterns.

In the case of the word “because,” hearing it seems to trigger a human behavioral pattern that increases com-pliancy. Dr. Langer demonstrated this through a series of experiments that she ran in–of all places–a public library.

First, she created a queue waiting to use the photo-copier. Once there were several people in line, she had


an assistant rush up and ask to “cut” in line by saying, “Excuse me. May I use the Xerox machine before you BECAUSE I’m in a rush. I have only 5 pages.” After running the experiment multiple times she computed an average compliancy rate of 94%.

She then repeated the experiment several more times, except for this series she had her assistant say, “Excuse me. May I use the Xerox machine before you. I have only 5 pages.” Note that for these experiments, no “be-cause”—no reason—was given. As you might imagine, average compliancy dropped precipitously…to 69%.

Now you or I might think that the phrase “because I’m in a rush” from the first series of experiments made all of the difference, but Dr. Langer wasn’t so sure, so she ran the experiment through a third cycle. This time, she had her assistant say, “Excuse me. May I use the Xerox machine before you BECAUSE I NEED TO MAKE SOME COPIES. I have only 5 pages.”

Despite the DUH! factor of giving no more reason than the obvious one of needing to make some copies, com-pliancy bounced right back to 93% seemingly as a result of the mere presence of the magic word “because.”

So going back to the Planner and my communication to politicians, I need to add some “BECAUSE’s” for the three key assertions entered back under Item #9.

To validate my first claim, I might assert that innova-tion drives the economy BECAUSE for more than a century, a vibrant U.S. economy has been built on a bedrock of innovation—Whitney’s cotton gin, Ful-ton’s steam engine, Ford’s production line, NASA’s breakthroughs in going to the moon, Cerf’s Inter-net—to name only a few.

To prove my second claim, I might say that basic scientific research drives innovation BECAUSE public-ly-funded, basic scientific research has led to break-throughs that have fueled, and continue to fuel, our economy, e.g.:

• Government funding that led to the Internet;

• Government grants to two Stanford University students that led to Google;

• Government grants to SUNY chemist Paul Lau-terbur that led to the MRI and an entire medi-cal diagnostics industry;

• Government grants to engineers and materi-als scientists that led to the development of

touch screens and “gorilla glass” that gave rise to functional, durable smartphones; and

• Government grants to biologists studying arc-tic and Antarctic sea life that led to improved cold weather tolerances for crops.

And finally, for my third claim, I might argue that if we want to realize economic benefits, then we need to invest more not less in basic research BECAUSE more than a century of history clearly shows some of the most economically advantageous innovations are the offspring of basic scientific research. Where would the economy be without them? The question is NOT whether we can afford to fund basic research, but rather can we afford NOT TO, if we are to maintain the trajectory of innovation that produces economic growth and creates jobs.

The Strategic Message Triangle

The Planner is a great reference to keep by your side as you develop your communication (e.g., creating a presentation, developing a proposal, scripting a video, or authoring an article or blog), because it contains your comprehensive thinking on all of the crucial factors af-fecting your communication. But the tool that will help you focus in on the essence of your plan and develop crisp, concise messages (and then remember them!) is the Strategic Message Triangle.

The Triangle:

1. Helps you distill the detailed entries in your plan into the essential components needed to create a compelling, memorable message, and


2. Provides a visual framework that can help you re-member your message in extemporaneous com-munication situations, like a media interview, or a meeting with a potential funder.

(NOTE: As with the Planner, a copy of the Triangle accompanies this guide. I urge you to print it out or open it in a separate window for easy reference during the following discussion.)

As you develop into an increasingly skilled communi-cator, the Triangle will become your very best friend. It’s the Cliffs Notes version of your objective, frame, claims and evidence that brings into sharp focus exactly what you want to achieve, how you’ll argue for and prove the wisdom of your desired outcome, and the frame in which you’ll make your case when you sit down to craft your finished message.

Just as importantly, it’s a self-contained, single-page, visual crib sheet for your message’s key components. You can carry it around in your hip pocket and in your mind to help you confidently deliver a compelling mes-sage at a moment’s notice. And the best part is that, once you’ve completed the Planner, you’ve done most of the heavy lifting required. All that remains is to refine your Planner entries into short, concise PROMPTS that capture the essence of key Planner elements and remind you of the more comprehensive information each Plan-ner entry contains.

For example, the heart of your message, the informa-tion you entered in Item #4 on the Planner—the Com-munication Objective, or what you expect your commu-nication to achieve—goes in the heart of the triangle. But don’t simply copy over, word-for-word, what you put in the Planner. Reduce what you say in the Planner to its absolute core. Devise the most efficient, economical way to state the Objective, both as the distillate you’ll use to concoct your message and as a succinct cue that will remind you of what the Planner says. Then repeat this process for each of the Triangle’s entries.

Here’s how I might condense, for example, my com-munication objective for the address to politicians and legislators: Basic research deserves continued, in-creased public funding. I enter this in the center of the triangle.

Planner Item #8—the frame—goes in the box in the upper left hand corner as a constant reminder of the context in which you are making the case for your de-

sired outcome. For my politicians’ communication, the frame is Economics, so I enter that in the box.

The core ideas behind the high-level claims and asser-tions that appear in Items #9a, #9b, and #9c, in turn, are placed at the three vertices of the Triangle. For the sake of consistency, I always put the first key point at the top vertex of the triangle and then work clockwise to add the second and third key points at the remaining verti-ces, but that’s just me. Organize your triangle in what-ever way makes the most sense to you and is easiest for you to picture in your mind and recall.

For my legislative communication, the three key points stack up like this:

1. Innovation drives the economy.

2. Scientific research produces innovation.

3. It’s not can we afford to fund scientific re-search–it’s can we afford NOT TO?

And finally, the crux of the evidence, the proof that’s entered in Items #10a, #10b, and #10c to substantiate my assertions and claims, go immediately under the tri-angle’s vertices in the spaces indicated.

The evidence I’ll use to substantiate my key points for the politicians boils down like this:

1. 100+ yrs. economy built on innovation—Whit-ney’s cotton gin, Fulton’s steam engine, Ford’s production line, NASA’s moon landing, Cerf’s Internet

2. Publicly-funded, basic research lifeblood of innovation: Internet; Google; MRI (Lauterbur); touch screens/gorilla glass; cold resistant crops.

3. History proves basic research fuels economic growth and creates jobs.

Build Masterful Messages to Create Effective Communications

This guide, and the tools that accompany it, will help you create the strategy-driven, compelling messages that are the soul of truly effective communications. And while it all may seem a bit overwhelming right now, I urge you to stick with it. The more you use the discipline and tech-niques this guide contains, the more familiar they’ll be-come; they’ll become easier to apply, and you’ll become increasingly masterful at creating effective messages.

There is one last, important point to make, though. The information and strategies this guide conveys are entirely portable. By calibrating your approach to reflect the beliefs, needs, and sophistication of the audience you want or need to influence, you can apply these tech-niques with equal effect to virtually any communication: public presentations, classroom lectures, media inter-views, proposals, articles, blogs, videos, professional meetings, and even job interviews.

About the author

Dan Agan is a highly-regarded business leader, marketer, commu-

nications counselor, video consultant, and speaker. He is president

of Panthera Group LLC, a branding, marketing and media firm that

develops strategies for organizations intent on effectively captur-

ing and influencing success-critical audiences, and a principal in the

communication solutions firm, Ninja Communications LLC. He is a

co-creator of the Emmy-winning series The Science Of... Dan also

served as senior vice president of Marketing and National Program-

ming for the PBS television network, and as senior vice president

and Chief Marketing Officer for publicly-traded software com-

panies Convera Corporation and Excalibur Technologies. He has

created and delivered hundreds of speeches and presentations,

including board briefings; conference addresses; investor, analyst

and venture capital pitches; new product introductions; training

workshops; and symposia keynotes. He has helped thousands

(yes, thousands!) of professionals communicate more strategically

and effectively through his consulting engagements and commu-

nications workshops. He also has lectured in branding, commu-

nications, entrepreneurship, and marketing at leading universities,

including the Harvard Graduate School of Business, the M.I.T. En-

terprise Forum, the George Washington University, the University of

Florida, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For more information about Ninja Communications’ workshops,

trainings, consulting services, or communication solutions, send an

email to [email protected], or call 202-350-0725.

©2014-2015 Daniel C. Agan & Ninja Communications LLCAll rights reserved

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