Simple Visual Stories Convey Your Message Effectively
Last week’s article talked about crafting marketing message from your customers’ perspectives. This week we will discuss how a simple visual story can simplify a message complicated with symbols and shapes.
Show People How You Can Help Them
What happens when an engineering approach is applied to business communications? An engineering approach might call for deconstructing complex ideas into symbols, then reassembling the elements. Incongruously, technologists often take the same approach when explaining what they do for customers. Have you ever received a chart jammed with squares, circles, globes, arrows, all kinds of shapes connected by lines and arrows?
If so, an engineer was attempting to reduce what he does to its essence in the hope that you—ostensibly the receiving engineer—would reconstitute the message from the symbols. Here is a recent example of what we encountered and how we used a simple visual story instead.
Before there was a flow chart there was a story. Click the above graphic to download the one-pager that shows how we helped one engineering team get back to their story.
Get Away From the Abstract
Getting across the time relationships or relative importance between events assumes that your audience understands your symbolic language. But symbols, like letters of some strange new alphabet, have no intrinsic meaning.
Listen to the Story
Before a technologist could construct the boxes, circles, arrows and lines, he had to assemble a narrative about how, when and why things happened. In short, he created a story first. So, listen for the story.
Everyone Speaks in Stories
Regardless of the technical training of the listener, we all understand and enjoy stories. No need to jump into abstract symbols. Show interaction among characters. Include objects that have intrinsic meaning for your audience. Show benefits being delivered, albeit metaphorically. Organize your story in time or space, and you can show people what you do.
For a deeper understanding of process improvement programs for your organization, attend the next Implementing Lean Thinking or How to Align a System of People and Processes for Results class. If you are eager to learn more about creating more order out of the chaos you are feeling at work, then the How to Create Well-Defined Processes class is right for you.
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January 8th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Interesting article. Very good illustration.
January 31st, 2008 at 3:56 am
excellent article, big plus for effective communication