You can be heard, understood and followed
If you learn how to use these five lenses while speaking or writing
👋 Hey, it’s Andrés. Welcome to Astrolab’s weekly newsletter on how to become a better communicator at work. We write for knowledge workers and business owners.
Today: Five lenses to consider when choosing ideas and words
Read time: The first time like 15 minutes, but I hope you come back tomorrow or next week when preparing for a specific meeting, presentation or keynote
If you want to become better communicating ideas, learn how to use these five dimensions of language:
Character focus: Who are you talking about?
Why vs How: Are you talking about why a topic matters, or are you sharing instructions?
Abstraction: Are you giving context, or are you painting a picture?
Time: Are you talking about the distant past, about today, or about 2025?
Factfulness: Are you sharing something that happened, or are you giving an opinion?
This post is about how you structure what you say.
In this recent post I laid out the five things you can do to get better while communicating with others: aligning to a strategy, defining objectives, selecting ideas, designing a plan and choosing words. So far, I’ve only written about how to be better aligned with your organization’s strategy.
Today, I’m touching a topic that will help you select ideas and choose words. I’ll build everything on top of five real-life scenarios that we’ve come across during this past ten years at Astrolab. Funny enough: the names are just barely changed.
(Btw, I feel like this newsletter is low key shaping up into a book, Y/N?)
Ok, so let’s do this!
Character Focus
Scenario: Denis
You work for a CPG company that has operations in LATAM
You receive an email from Emily, you manager. She is asking you to pitch the program that you’ve been working on to Marie, the Commercial Director next week. Stakes are high!
How do you prepare for this moment?
After panicking, you start working on your presentation.
Almost immediately, you remember that Harvard Business Review post you read about how you should always focus your message in your audience.
Yes, your ideas have to be audience-centric, but you don’t necessarily have to talk about them. It could be about you.
In Say it Well, Terry Szuplat, one of Obama’s screenwriters, explains more about this:
Wether your presentation succeeds, wether you connect and inspire your audience, is about what you bring to the moment (…). Audiences want originality and authenticity. If you’ve been invited to talk somewhere, it’s because someone believes you have something unique to offer.
And it could also definitely be about someone else.
Going back to the loyalty program scenario, you have many options available:
You could talk about the small business owners that sell your products
You could talk about how other companies made mistakes that you’re trying to evade
You could talk about those two customers you talked to
Or it could be about Marie, your boss’ boss!
So, yes, make it about your audience, but be creative on where to put the spotlight.
Why versus How
Scenario: Kathy
You’re part of a global pharmaceutical company
You received the news from your boss that the FDA approved a new indication—the therapeutic use of a drug to treat a specific medical condition— for the treatment you work on
You’re job is to communicate the new indication to the Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs)
How do you prepare for this?
The obvious thing to do is to explain how the sales process will change:
Instead of just visiting pulmonologist, they will now start to visit allergists and immunologists
Their commissions will change in X and Y ways
This new process will start on Q2
Sure, you need to explain all of this.
But humans have the tendency to reject ideas they don’t feel their own. So, how do you make someone feel that they own an idea?
Help them see why is this new idea relevant.
What happened that made this relevant right now?
What problem are you trying to solve?
How will you benefit from this in the future?
There’s a lot of evidence on how these two angles—how and why—have different effects in the brain.
Going back to Aristotle, how appeals to logos (clarity), while why appeals to pathos (relevance).
In general, your audience will want to know the answer to both questions, but each of them will value them differently. So, the safe call is to usually to talk about both.
How are we doing? Three remaining!
Abstraction
Scenario: Henry
You’re in charge of retail banking in a medium-sized bank in Texas
The highest-ranked managers of your division are attending a strategy meeting at the company’s HQ in Dallas
Even though the numbers are looking good, you’ve heard some complaints about how these managers are not necessarily sold on the division’s strategy
You’re working on your opening statement of the week-long meeting
How do you prepare for this?
If you’re reading this post, you know that you can talk about different audiences (character focus), and that you can focus on both the why and the how of the new strategy.
Something is missing though: the abstraction level of your message, a tool to appeal to different parts of your brain’s audience.
In Storycraft, a book on narrative non-fiction by journalist Jack Hart, the author explains a concept called the ladder of abstraction.
The ladder, one of the most useful concepts of any writer, rises from the concrete level of any concept through an increasingly abstract series of categories.
This concept was first described by another journalist, in these words:
Here’s Hart again:
Emotion originates on the ladder’s lower rungs. You gain comprehensiveness as you climb the ladder, but you lose ability to form concrete images.
Think about how this open possibilities: You are now able to not just talk about the why and how, but you can make those concepts abstract or concrete depending on your specific need.
Depending on how much time that bank manager has, he can give enough abstract context about the new strategy, and then go down a couple of rungs to share examples—or, yes, stories—. This specific and concrete anecdotes will help make his ideas much more memorable.
Only two more to go!
Time
Scenario: Violet
You work in the IT department of a retail company
A new ERP is about to be deployed
You’re in charge of making sure HR adopts this new system
Next week there’s a workshop between IT and HR, and you have a spot in the agenda
How do you prepare for this moment?
Let’s think about where we are.
Up to now, we’ve talked about character focus, why versus how, and the different abstraction level of your message.
One thing that is obviously missing is a reference to time: Are you speaking about the past, about something that is going on right now, or about a bet that will have a big payoff (or not) in the future?
Depending on your role, different roles talk about different moments in time. Let’s do a quick review:
middle management tend to focus on the present, as they are responsible for executing strategies and maintaining operational flow;
leadership often look to the future, focusing on innovation, change, growth, and market competitiveness;
compliance and legal may lean heavily on the past for insights to guide the present and future.
Now, if you’re Violet, you’re role looks more like a leadership role: You’re trying to make HR adopt the new system.
Putting your idea in different time frames is a really great way of engaging with your audience. Different parts of the brain are involved in processing ideas set in time—past, present, and future—because they engage distinct cognitive processes—that, don’t worry, I don’t understand and I won’t drag you into it—, so be aware that that’s another tool you have.
Make sure you explain not just the why and the how of the new ERP, but take your audience on a brief journey:
Down to one!
Factfulness
Scenario: Paul
You work at a big food and beverage company
You’re in charge of communicating the new Customer Centricity project to the salesforce
You’ve been working on this for a year, and have achieved little
There’s a sales convention going on next month
Yes, your boss asked you to reinforce the message in a thirty minute session
How do you prepare for this moment?
The last dimension is the distinction between fact and opinion.
Think about it in this way: You can talk about things that happened (facts), or about what those things mean (opinions).
If you’re Paul, I would suggest you to build your ideas with a combination of facts and opinions.
You can use the What, So What, Now What framework we discussed in this awesome post:
What is a fact
So What is an opinion
Now What is also an opinion, if you ask me
Again, mixing facts and opinions can help your audience understood you more clearly.
Quick recap:
Character focus is about who are you going to talk about
Why vs How is a distinction that helps you explain the reasons behind a decision, and the things that need to happen
Abstraction helps you move between context and specificity. Go for both!
Time can help you map an idea in a chronological order, therefore making it more easy for comsumption
Factfulness is about achieving a mix between things that happened and interpretations
You don’t have to use the five lenses in your next email or call, but make sure to use at least one or two.
On the other side, if you’re planning a big presentation or keynote, try using the five of them! Let me know how it goes.
Briefs
New Course: If you’re interested in a cohort-based communication live course we’ll launch next March, let me know! We’ll start selling tickets soon.
Weekly INSPIRAs: Emilio is facilitating three INSPIRAs these past days with a CPG company and a real-estate firm
Astrolab x FI Spain: Yesterday I shared some ideas on how to win others with your pitch with the Founder Institute’s Barcelona present cohort.
Ceramic night: The Mexico team met to create ceramic pottery. Fun!
Help me scale this: Who is missing out from INFLUX 🪐? Resend this to that friend who will benefit from these ideas.
That’s all for today. I’ll see you next Thursday!
Andrés