Be Concise Without Being Too Brief

You need to convey your message succinctly, capturing your audience's attention without boring them, yet providing enough detail to communicate effectively. Sounds simple, right? We wish it were, but finding that sweet spot is challenging from a speaker's perspective. Let's explore why that is and how we can tackle it.

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Concise misunderstanding

Concise does not mean short. Don’t conflate concision with word count. Being concise is about using an economy of words. It’s maximising your ROI of words. It’s about information density, not absolute length. Depending on the goal to be achieved, 10 page report may be concise, where at the same time 4 sentence long Teams message can be fluffy.

Some ideas can’t be reduced further. Art of being concise is to deliver same message shorter, but there are limits. Example:

We’re in elections for Polands Lower House Parliament. We won voting in umber of 232 out of 460 votes. How we can deliver that number?

Basic math allow us to reduce that as a fraction to 58/115. But did that really made it easier to digest? More concise? On the other hand, you can say:

We got around 50% of votes!

But this makes it unclear if you won the election or not! That’s information loss. You reduced the content, but lost the value. It’s the same with ideas. When you try to simplify a topic beyond how much it can be simplified, you get into the territory of misrepresenting an idea.

Conciseness is contextual. Even if the underlying message does not change, the delivery may. When doing a Daily Standup with folks in your team, you can brief anyone on current status in 2-3 sentences. People know more or less what you are currently doing anyway, know the backlog and state of matters. Yet if approached by an indirect manager or colleagues form different teams, you will have to put much more assistive content to create same understanding. It’s not only about what you are saying, but to who/when/where as well.

Why conciseness is difficult

Just “dive straight into it”, “cut to the chase” or “but bottom line up front”, right? How hard it can be? Very hard actually, for a pretty basic reason that we often refuse to acknowledge.

You have to know, where you want to dive, what to cut to or what the bottom line actually is!

Prerequisite to being concise is ability to clarify questions and ideas in your own head. Sort of like being concise for yourself during your inner-talk. It’s a skill of clear thinking. You will not have a chance to keep your talk on target, if it’s unclear for you as well.

Never feel bad for it. In early idea phases it’s completely natural for ideas to not come out too clean. Your skill should aim at refining those will you are able to transfer that idea from your own mind to another one. Be patient with yourself. Find a coworker who you can bounce ideas off of. Write them down and get back to them 2h later if you still think they are clear. Decide if you are looking for approval, opinion, brainstorm or expertise. And be flexible enough to change the original thought if you realise it may actually be pretty bad idea.

How to cut to the point

Work out what really is the point. It’s always much harder than we may think. The higher the stakes, the more effort you may want to put it. Doing a status update on daily meeting may not need notable prep to be good enough. But if we need approval for next-get AI powered IDE trials that you care a lot - it may be worth to sweat a bit. Consider different positions. What your personal game is about? Any team win here? Company or customer goals can take a role as well. Good starter could be:

What should happen after you deliver your message to consider that as success?

State the point. People don’t know what’s your point is. Don’t make them guess that. Of course some problems are complex, but most complex issues are series of simple challenges that just got tangled together. You must be able to state your main point in maximum 3 sentences. Really - no longer. This is length people can remember instantly and keep in memory while we dive into details, recall after meeting or note down.

Historical contexts are rarely relevant. Most of issue we deal with exist today. As justification why current code is a mess, infrastructure flaky or resource usage high - we tend to feel urge to explain how we got there. (Psst, that’s true for both devs and managers) From my own experience, this is very rarely useful info.

❌ We had this stuff a few years back. But then this other thing happened and the guy who’s not working here anymore did a thing but later on they discovered that stuff causes stuff. So we fixed it with this, but this causes issues today as you have different version. Can you upgrade it so we are aligned?

✅ Seems we’re running different versions. What can be done to have us aligned?

When you say your punchline upfront, you will instantly seem more competent and organised. Try to keep the backstory optional or at least short when necessary, and skip the play-by-play of what you did at each step.

Slow the f**k down. People who speak in never ending run-on sentences seem more junior. Imagine a leader or manager you admire for their communication skills - they probably don’t sound rushed.

It’s hard to stop when you’re just rolling down there hill, but try to give people an opportunity to jump in.

• Notice if people are starting to lose interest. Don’t ignore those clues and continue powering through. Your talk makes no point if no-one listens.

• Pause sooner than you think and give the other person a chance to respond, so you can evaluate if they’re following along. My line is “Are we good so far, any comments?” - choose your own.

• Slowing down allows you to rethink if direction you’re heading is one you wanted. And if you are concise. It’s tough to control while shooting words out.

Look for a stopping point to wrap up or handover decision. You need to think about how to end gracefully, so you can pass the mic to the next person in the mood you expect

❌ [..] Last time we tried it, it ended up in quite a messy way, but I hope we can try again this time. What do you think?

✅ [..] Learning on the past experiences I feel it’s our best shot ever to finally do it. Would you agree?

TLDR; method. In a written communication you are able to give your reader a choice. Decision power. Is he interested into hearing only the main bullet or would like to read a story with a context details? That’s one of the most neatest tricks in being concise while also keeping the details in, as in the US Army framework BLUF.

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Alternatively to TLDR, in spoken matters you can offer to elaborate. But there is a good away a bad way to do it. Bad way is to just shoot a generic line and putting a pressure on listeners to come up with valid questions. Most likely, you know what topic may be relevant to the matter you just presented and could guide them what may be worth to talk thru as well.

❌ Any questions? Let me know what you guys want to know

✅ That’s it, but if you want I can elaborate more on impact for another systems, alternatives we tried out in meantime or the long term development plan

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In conclusion, mastering the art of being concise without being too brief is a valuable skill that requires practice and mindfulness. It's about striking a balance between delivering enough information to be clear and informative, while avoiding unnecessary details that can dilute your message. Remember, conciseness is not about reducing word count but about maximizing the impact of your words. By understanding your audience, clarifying your thoughts, and focusing on the core message, you can communicate more effectively and leave a lasting impression.