Knowledge Street :: Messages

What’s the Story?

Communications is a process, not an event. It happens over time, and within a context that on some level is unique to each person involved. Each individual communication is a transaction, which can be used to carry something new, or reinforce something old. Sometimes both.

In a business context, messages are often complex. The company wants its employees to understand their roles, focus on their jobs and recognize new sales opportunities. It wants employees to believe in and genuinely participate in their work. The ideal is to have all hands working out ways to do things better, actively engaged in pursuit of the common good. That only happens with a good communications backbone.

The story has to be more than “we make widgets.” In fact, the Message (with a capital “M”) will actually consist of lots of little messages, delivered at different times and in different ways. There’s a structure in there, and it’s a structure that can be understood and defined. You can get it down on paper.

The result is a message “architecture” that takes several things into account. For one thing, messages have to be broken up into digestible chunks. They also have to be encoded in a manner appropriate to the channel over which they’ll be delivered. Getting the message across in a memo calls for one approach, where a slide presentation requires another. That’s true even when the message is exactly the same.

Thinking about the message and breaking it into its logical components is only one part of the process. But it’s a good place to start. It’s also essential to the design of a feedback loop, without which, communication is never more than partially successful.