Communicating Ideas
Getting the picture in your head into someone else’s with its shape intact.
The behaviour, in one line: I lead with the point and tailor my explanations so people reliably get what I mean the first time.
Tap a well-known tune on a table and you will badly overestimate how many people can name it, because you can hear the music and they can hear knocking. Every explanation you give has that shape. Communicating well is mostly compensating for a gap you cannot feel.
An idea that cannot be transferred does not do anything. Whatever you are doing — pitching, explaining, writing it down, asking for help — what you can achieve is capped by how much of your picture arrives in someone else’s head. The difficulty is that your own idea always looks obvious from the inside, and there is no way to hear it as a stranger would. Most transfer now happens in writing, to someone who is not in the room and cannot ask what you meant. A message, a doc, a ticket, a prompt — each has to carry the whole picture on its own, and it is read at speed by someone with forty other things open.
| What it is | What it isn’t |
|---|---|
| Starting from what they know | Starting from where you got to |
| The point in the first two lines | The point after the background |
| One concrete example | Three careful abstractions |
| Checked by asking them to say it back | Checked by how clear it felt to write |
What it looks like. You send the document to one person first and ask them what it is asking for. They get it slightly wrong. You fix that sentence before the other forty people read it.
- Anything needing a decision from someone else. They will give you two minutes. Whatever is in those two minutes is your whole case.
- Explaining your own specialism. The better you know it, the further you are from the person you are explaining it to, and the less able you are to feel that distance.
- Handover and documentation. Written for someone who does not have your context — and increasingly for a model that has none at all — by someone who cannot switch theirs off.
- Put the conclusion first and the support after it. People decide whether to keep reading in the first two lines, and they should be deciding with the point in hand.
- Start from something they already have. A new idea can only be attached to an old one; there is nowhere else to put it.
- Cut until it hurts. If you cannot say it simply, you usually do not yet have it clearly.
- Give one concrete example. Abstractions get agreed with and forgotten; examples get remembered and argued with, which is better.
- Break it into parts
Four parts: leading with the point, starting from what the audience already knows, cutting, and making it concrete.
- The part that carries it
Leading with the conclusion. Fix only this and most of your communication problems go.
- The order to learn it in
- Put the point first in every message and document until it stops feeling abrupt.
- Then work on the bridge — starting from something your audience already understands.
- Then cut hard, and add the one concrete example that makes it stick.
- Put something at stake
Ask a colleague to tell you the point of your next document after reading only its first two lines. If they cannot, rewrite it.
- Compress it
Point first. Start on their side of the bridge. Cut hard. One concrete example.
- The smallest useful dose
One message a day rewritten point-first before you send it.
- Anchor it to something you know
A news story. The headline carries the whole thing, and the detail is there for whoever wants it.
“The great enemy of communication is the illusion of it.”
— William H. Whyte, 1950
The interactive version is in the course. The diagram, the simulation and the four-question check for Communicating Ideas run in the free course, where your progress across all 24 skills is kept.
Open Communicating Ideas in the course →
Not sure where you stand? Take the twelve-minute self-assessment, or see the 30-day course that turns these skills into a roadmap.