Turning Gold into Straw
A communications officer we know at the World Bank gave us some insight as to how good ideas get degraded. He told us about a typical exchange with his boss. The boss, after reviewing a draft speech written by the communications officer, said: “I want you to add in the word inclusive two or three times.” Inclusive was a hot development buzzword in 2014 – as in, inclusive growth, inclusive consultations, and the boss wanted to come across in his speech as being on the leading edge. The communications officer pointed out that the topic of the speech had nothing to do with inclusiveness. “Just put it in!” his boss said firmly. And so our colleague reluctantly threw in the adjective inclusive twice and vaguely praised the inclusivity of the program the boss was speaking about. So the word ceased to carry any intrinsic meaning and instead became an empty platitude.
Not My Silo
We screen out ideas that don’t immediately strike us as relevant. We have to. Most of the time we’re working to meet deadlines. We don’t have time to think and muse about new ideas unless they are directly relevant. Whole organizations function like this, divided into sealed-off compartments: silos with little day-to-day contact with other parts of the organization. So when you are sharing a new idea, think about it from their point of view, then explain how your idea connects to what your audience already cares about. Relevance is critical.
Memes Trump Truth
Just because an idea is true does not mean it will replace a false meme. Once a meme takes root in a person’s mind, it is difficult to dig it out. People will defend their memes even as the evidence mounts that they are untrue: a flat earth, the Loch Ness Monster, racial supremacy…the list goes on and on. Similarly, a new meme can quickly spread even if it is false. Urban legends, gossip and political smear campaigns are all examples of how well-crafted lies can quickly morph into common knowledge. Think of that most famous phrase from the O.J. Simpson murder trial: “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.” It forged an unforgettable connection in the jurors’ minds between tainted evidence and the verdict. When the glove didn’t fit, even though much evidence pointed to O.J., he was acquitted. The lesson for master communicators is to realize that the truth does not speak for itself. In a world of memes, the truth needs advocates who can speak for it in a clear and compelling manner.
In summary, replicability is the key insight from meme theory for communicators. Thinking about your ideas as memes will help you express them more powerfully and spread them more widely. In the next chapter we will explain practical communications techniques for turning your messages into good memes.
Chapter 2
Crafting Strong Messages
The Four Cs
Let’s turn to the practical application of meme theory and how it can help you craft compelling messages that will stick and spread. A powerful message has a meme at the center of it, with supporting language that helps people better internalize the meme and want to pass it on. Great communicators throughout history have intuitively grasped how to do this. In fact, we can illustrate the Four Cs of crafting powerful messages with just one passage from a master orator: Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill.
Here’s a paragraph from Churchill’s famous speech delivered on 4 June 1940. At this time, many countries had been defeated by Germany, and Britain had suffered major military losses. Indeed, by some accounts, only half the British people expected their country to continue the war. The rest were resigned to defeat. Churchill’s speech rallied the nation:
…Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
Even if you are reading these words for the first time, you can doubtless sense the power in them. The speech was turned into placards and posted in homes and offices throughout the nation. Now let’s examine how this one paragraph encapsulates our four key characteristics of a good meme:
1. Concise
Get to the core of your message using simple, easy-to-grasp words and short sentences.
Churchill’s message of resolve was conveyed perfectly in the short phrases that make up the key sentence of the speech. Delivered aloud, each phrase would sound like a separate sentence:
We shall fight on the beaches,
We shall fight on the landing grounds,
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
We shall fight in the hills;
We shall never surrender…
Although the speech as a whole has a reading comprehension level suitable for a university student, the core message has a reading level that a 10-year-old could easily understand.
One of our favorite examples of the effect of needlessly long sentences and words comes from the UK’s Plain English Campaign:
Before: “High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process.”
After: “Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.” This is not to say that ideas must be oversimplified. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,” as a quote attributed to Albert Einstein puts it. Simplicity eases comprehension, which makes for better memes. There’s a neurological basis for why this is so. Our brains don’t process written words by reading each letter or spoken syllable individually. We recognize words as whole units of meaning. It’s similar to the way Chinese recognize whole written characters. We get the meaning of short, familiar words quickly. Extenuated anomalous verbiage necessitates additional assiduousness. You get the point: longer, less familiar words force our brains to shift gears, slow down and work harder to process the meaning of each combination of letters.
The same holds true with sentences. When we hear or read a sentence, we have to hold all the words in our head until the end in order to make meaning of the sentence. In fact, using MRI imaging, neurologists just recently discovered a distinct and localized region in the brain that lights up when we make sense of a sentence. Short sentences make this easy on our brains. Longer sentences, especially those containing additional clauses (or parenthetical remarks) or insertions of ideas that seem only loosely related – for example if we were to throw in a cooking metaphor about too many ingredients spoiling the stew or something like that – tax the mind, diminish comprehension and make it all too easy for the reader to check out before the sentence winds to its eventual close, a close that becomes downright aggravating should redundancies or secondary ideas be introduced near the end. So don’t do that.
Finally, don’t try to explain everything in your message. This is especially important for scientists and researchers who relish complexity, comprehensiveness and the interconnectedness of all things. We once worked with a brilliant, grey-bearded economist who was the lead author of a report called Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World: Transforming Institutions, Growth and Quality of Life. We were coaching him on how to give good media interviews. He told us, “If I can speak to anyone for 4 hours, I can convince them of the importance of this work. But in under an hour, it’s hard to explain anything.” The problem of course is that most broadcast interviews are 5 minutes or less, and even most in-depth print interviews last less than an hour. And we’re talking about reporters who are paid to pay attention because they have to write about it! Most people pay less attention, not more attention, than the media.
2. Concrete
Use strong, concrete words one can visualize. Avoid jargon, technical terms, acronyms and abstract language. In our decades of working with development specialists, we ha
ve come to appreciate that within an organization you do need specialist terms and abbreviations to communicate internally. Inevitably, insiders begin to think in this specialized language. Then they start to speak to outsiders as if it is normal, when in fact it is more like a foreign tongue. We tell them that when communicating publically, specialists should view themselves as translators. A good communicator has to express concepts in concrete language rather than jargon, so the audience can literally “see” what the specialist is talking about.
We say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” When we speak in concrete language, the image of what we are describing springs to life in the listener’s mind; they literally get the picture we are trying to communicate. It also becomes more compelling. We say, “Seeing is believing.” Why is this so? Most people are familiar with right-brain/left-brain theory. You doubtless know that the brain’s left hemisphere processes words, numbers and abstractions while the right hemisphere processes images, emotions, special relationships and a holistic sense of things. When you speak conceptually, you only stimulate the left brain of your listener. When you speak with visual and sensory details, you stimulate both hemispheres. Also, the images created in the right brain tend to leave an imprint that lasts longer and is more easily recalled than a vague, abstract idea.
Churchill’s words paint a clear picture that viscerally evokes the resolve of his besieged fellow citizens: We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills…You read this, and you can see it happening. Imagine how flat the speech would have fallen if Churchill had said, “We have to muster our resolve and prepare ourselves for conflict even on our domestic territory.” Yet exactly this kind of dull, conceptual language is what we most often get when experts speak.
If you find that you have to use a conceptual word as part of your message, you can back it up with concrete language in an example, story, metaphor or analogy. Here’s one example from an Indonesian conservation specialist we worked with. When he first spoke about the importance of his work, he phrased it like this: “Conservation of the Lesan Forest is important due to the many endangered species living there.” With a bit of coaching, he revised this to say, “The Lesan Forest is the only home of the rare black orangutan. We must conserve it.” The picture of the rare black orangutan sticks.
3. Connected
We have already discussed how a good meme must fit with the existing mental landscape of your audience. But more than that is required to create a great meme. Your listeners must be inspired to care. Relevance is crucial to getting an audience to pay attention, remember, and desire to spread an idea. Most communicators are pretty good at explaining why their idea or work matters to them, but not so good at explaining why it should matter to others. Our example from Churchill seems like an easy one when it comes to relevance – of course his audience cared. The Nazis were bombing them and there was the very real possibility of Britain being invaded. Even so, historians have written that many people felt this was not their war, but a war of “the high-up people who use long words and have different feelings.”1 By describing fighting taking place in Britain’s beaches, fields, streets and hills, Churchill literally brought home to his audience what was at stake for them. It’s also important to note how powerfully Churchill uses “We shall” to create the sense of intention shared by all Britons.
To discern how to best connect with your audience, think about these questions:
• Why should the audience care about your message?
• How does it affect your audience’s lives?
• Does this message appeal to their interests, especially higher values such as: national identity, concern for their children, collective future?
• If your audience is not directly involved, are others affected? Why would your audience care about these others?
• What power does this audience have to affect the outcome? (Are we all in this together?)
To conclude, here are two examples of connecting to your audience delivered by Jim Kim, president of the World Bank, in an NPR interview on Climate Change. Notice the difference between the bland first message and the more powerfully connected second one:
“If carbon emissions are not reduced, average global temperaturas will rise between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”
“If we don’t deal with Climate Change now, when my 3-year-old is my age, the coral reefs will all be gone, and the extreme heatwave that killed 50,000 people this summer [in Russia] would happen every year. We can’t let that happen to our children and to our planet.”2
4. Catchy
A meme-like message is made to stick, and our language is filled with lots of tricks that make words memorable. Above, we discussed how good metaphors or arresting visual images do this with our right-brain processing center. We also have sound-processing parts of the brain that respond to alliteration, repetition or rhyme. These turns of phrase add a special kind of ring to our language. Have you ever heard a short burst of a once-popular song, a song you hadn’t heard in decades, and suddenly you found yourself singing along with the lyrics? You probably don’t even know how you can remember all the words! Simple literary devices like rhyming and rhythm help us tune in and retain the words. The “ring” makes them resonate. This is evident in the power of Churchill’s speech, where he repeats the refrain “We shall fight” over and over again.
Here are a few real-life examples of catchy messages that we helped our clients to craft:
“Africa’s growth must be strong, shared and sustainable.”
– African Development Bank
“Giving women access to contraceptives saves lives, saves money, saves the planet.”
– Population Action International
“Polar bears can only hunt on sea ice. If Climate Change melts the Arctic, they starve. No ice, no bears.”
– WWF
And one of our favorite memes, the theme of the TV show Survivor:
“Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.”
Exercise
Here’s a practical methodology you can use whenever you want to turn your message into a meme:
1. Write down your main message.
2. Underline jargon / abstract concepts.
3. Replace those concepts with concrete language.
4. Make it relevant to your target audience.
5. Delete what is not essential.
6. Break it into short sentences.
7. Make it memorable with catchy words and phrases.
In sum, you can use the Four Cs – Concise, Concrete, Connected and Catchy – to make your messages easy to grasp, easy to repeat, and make your listeners want to pass your ideas on to others; in short, to turn your messages into powerful memes.
Chapter 3
Structure
The structure of any talk or speech is like a road map. You are the guide, and your listeners are the travelers on the road. To lead them to your destination, you’ve got to know exactly where you are going and how you are going to get your audience there with you. A bit of strategy is essential. Most people know that a kind of structure is important for presentations, but for a master communicator, a coherent structure is also essential for meeting reports, elevator speeches, individual conversations for a targeted objective, and other forms of strategic communications. Before you start to make notes about what you want to say, answer these three questions:
What’s your main idea? Build your talk around a single compelling idea. Your listeners should come away with this idea firmly planted in their minds.
How do you want to change your audience? What is the goal of this talk? Think about how you want to change the audience, even if that audience is one person. Define where they are at the start of your talk (A), and where you want to move them to by the time you finish (B). Your audience’s journey is the distance from A to B.
Audience
Audience
> A. Where they are at the beginning
B. Where they are at the end
This helps you keep our core principle in mind: Communication is not about output; it’s about impact.
The Building Blocks
Everyone knows there are three classic components to a speech: the introduction, the body and the conclusion. But what most people don’t know is the purpose of each of these three parts and how they work together to help the audience make the journey from A to B. To put it succinctly:
• The purpose of the introduction is to get and keep the audience’s attention.
• The purpose of the body, or content, is to transmit your information so that it sticks.
• The purpose of the conclusion is to move the audience from information to action.
In sum, a good talk should engage, inform and motivate your audience.
The Introduction
The introduction consists of a greeting, if it’s a presentation, a quick outline of the topic, and an attention-getter.
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