Message of the Day - Too Much Information Too Little Words to Express It All

Good Morning,

 

A great point pulled from ‘Make It Stick’ is that we often have a lot of information in our heads about many different subjects. Some folks have so much information that they are said to have forgotten more about a subject than most people know. That is a lot of information.

 

If we want to share this information with the uninitiated, then we have to decide what information in our arsenal (our mind) that we feel would best explain the topic at hand.

 

The challenge is that often the amount of words needed to give a subject justice, so that our audience gets it, may be more than we have the time to give. Or, more likely, if we are giving an ad hoc lesson to someone, we will often leave out bits and pieces that slip when we think through the steps of what we are sharing. This happens because in our attempt to formulate what to say, we think through the steps faster than we can say them, and in recounting each step, one or more gets overlooked.

 

To our audience, this information is flawed and confusing. Add to this that when we remember a step that we missed and throw it back into the mix, it can make a confusing conversation even more confusing.

 

The larger or more complex a concept we are trying to share, the greater the difficulty we will have in getting it across in its entirety.

 

One way to help bridge this gap between what is in our head and what we share with others is to either write it out, use training aides like PowerPoint or hand-outs or have our audience take notes and review those notes after you have finished, or have the audience repeat back to you what you have shared. Using prepared training aides also ensures that if you give this information multiple times, you will give close to the same if not the exact same message.

 

Like the telephone game where information gets all bollixed up, sharing information with others can be equally confusing if we try to just do a brain dump to our audience.

 

Too bad we cannot just save everything in our brain onto a thumb-drive and plug it into our audience. Then again, it’s probably better that we can’t.

 

Enjoy!

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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