Complete vs. Interesting
Photo by bayasaa
You can be complete or you can be interesting, but you can’t be both. And in the world of strategic communications that I move in, you’d rather be the latter. Interesting gets the sale, puts butts in seats, attracts more votes, lands above the fold, and generates more likes/shares/comments.
Complete is just what it sounds like: it’s everything, every available fact, from soup to nuts, kitchen sink, A to Z. The world needs complete—in places like legal briefs, peer-reviewed journal articles, and legislation. But as communicators competing with the thousands of other messages that reaches our audiences every day, complete doesn’t work. Of course we want it to. If there was any justice, it would. Our issues are critical: climate change, environmental justice, species extinction, etc. It pains us to think that we might leave something out and lose because of it. But our audiences live in a world of unread emails, algorithmic scrolls, and 30-second ads. They sadly don’t have time for complete.
People know this to be true, and yet they still can’t help but ask: Doesn’t it increase my chances of being interesting if I add more information? Isn’t it better to just bury the bad guys in an avalanche of facts? If I share all my data and examples, isn’t it more likely that my audience will latch onto one of them?
My answer is maybe sometimes, but still almost always no. In my experience, if I’ve got 25 facts about something and the top three don’t move someone to act, the bottom 22 aren’t going to either. Moreover, if I dump 25 facts on someone, I increase the chance that they won’t recognize the ones that are important. More likely, they’ll space out halfway through my list. Furthermore, if I share 25 facts, I increase the chance that they won’t agree with one of them, and that will invalidate all the rest—because people.
This is basically the rule behind the concept of talking points, the idea that we must narrow our story down to a handful of our best, simple, easy-to-remember elements. And it’s the reason I get nervous anytime I see more than three main talking points in a document. It always seems easy to add another bullet, but then you’ve got five, and then you’ve got 10 (see above paragraph).
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably already thought up several exceptions to my rule, and that’s fine. But understand that most effective communications—from political campaigns to TV commercials to press releases to elevator pitches—are all built on its foundation.