Communications Insight For More Inspiring Leaders How Do You Structure Your Content?

How Do You Structure Your Content?

 7th May 2022
Panic face cartoon
 
When structuring your content for spoken delivery...

How many "sections" do you have?

You'll be familiar, I'm sure, with the Rule of Three.

Whether your structure contains more or less than that, what matters is that it be SIMPLE.

Too complex and you'll lose people.

Or yourself.

Or both.

I'm reminded of a conversation with some PhD engineers a few years back.

"We can't possibly just communicate 2 or 3 things! Our content is complex - there may be 12+ items we need to cover" they said.

A perfectly reasonable challenge.

To which I give this response:

"Treat those 12+ items as ingredients in cooking. Yes, each and every ingredient features in the finished dish. But they are not consumed independent of one another. They form part of the dish. How many ingredients are contained in a 3-course meal?"

What if you were to treat your content as a 3 course meal?

What would be the name/message for each course?

There's your simple structure.

Heaven.
 
ps And for those familiar with Latin proverbs ...
 

The school is at the start of an ambitious and exciting journey. You have helped us set the standard for the remainder of the year and further ahead. I hope you will return to the school in the future and inspire subsequent cohorts of MPP students.

 

Professor Peter Kemp | Associate Director, The Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

Powered by Intergage