You have something important to tell customers or colleagues, but they just won t listen. Could you be making the Bucket Error?

What are you doing to lose people s attention when you have something important to tell them?

Listen to this episode if

• You ve every tried to communicate with colleagues and customers who won t pay enough attention
• You want to know what the bucket error is
• You want to be a better communicator

The bucket error

You re elbow-deep in something important. You need to get the word out to customers and colleagues, but they just don t seem to be paying attention. They don t read your emails, look at your posters, watch your videos.

The chances are the problem lies with you, not them. You re probably making the bucket error.

Thanks this week to Peter Haas of Train Smart Digital, who helped come up with the great name for this episode.

 

Podcast transcript

Steven Lewis: 

A few years ago I was asked to meet with a change manager in a bank.

He was frustrated no one was reading the project information his team was putting on the company s intranet. He wanted me to make a video.

I asked what he wanted in the video.

Just what s on the intranet, he told me.

It was then that I made what often felt like my signature mistake. I asked why.

He looked at me as if wondering whether where the limitation was. Was it my mental capacity or just my hearing.

Because, he said slowly, no one is reading what we ve written.

In his mind apparently no one had been reading what he was writing because they were waiting for the movie.

That s something I call the Bucket Error. What s the bucket error? Let s talk about that now.

Welcome back to Talemaking, a podcast about getting your message out . I m Steven Lewis, director of Taleist, a content marketing agency specialising in using the skills of journalism and the art of storytelling to make our clients stand out.

This episode of Talemaking is brought to you by Taleist s new PR course. If you re a marketing consultant looking for an additional revenue stream, the course will teach you how to offer PR to your clients. It s 10 times easier to get more work from existing clients than to find new clients.

And this way you have a new skill to offer, and your clients don t have to miss out on PR or find a high-priced PR agency to do it for them. Everybody wins.

It s also a great course for anyone looking to grow their own brand with free media.

Make sure you re invited to the launch by signing up for our mailing list at Taleist.com.

It s been some months since our last podcast. There s a reason for that.

[SX BABY CRIES]

That was Charlotte s first cry about 30 fairly tense seconds after she was born. And what self-respecting podcaster wouldn t be taping the whole time?

As communication goes, is there anything simpler than that first cry? Hello, I m here. I m not sure I like it. I certainly didn t enjoy the last few hours. I need you to do something about it. Immediately.

It s not nice to listen to but it gets the message across.

Since Charlotte was born in October I ve gone back to work helping clients get their message out. That s meant macheteing my way through the usual guff about leveraging expertise and proactively monitoring , replacing it with plain English.

It got me thinking, what wrong turns in life might Charlotte take to go from the clarity of this

[SX CHARLOTTE CRIES]

to talking about strategic human capital management , share of mindspace or whatever inflated nonsense people are talking when she hits employable? And how can I stop that happening?

That s why I ve decided to include in Talemaking some of what I ve learned over the years as a journalist and writer.

I ll be talking about easy ways you start thinking like a writer so you get your message out there better. That will be true whether it s in an email, a presentation, a blog post, a video script or whatever.

I m going to show you simple ways you can use immediately to be a better communicator, whether you re running a small business or rolling out a company-wide change from an HR department.

I mentioned the Bucket Error at the beginning of the show. It s the first tip I want to give you.

Right now in your company or your business someone is working on a project they consider to be vital to the enterprise. I ve worked with people in human resources working on projects that were about changing the culture of an organisation with thousands of employees. Without this work, the whole company was doomed, they would tell you.

I ve worked with people in public relations working on strategies that would be rolled out if the company s reputation came suddenly under attack. If they didn t get it right, they would argue, the enterprise would be doomed if one of their scenarios came to life.

I ve worked with small businesses that have spent days putting together an awards submission. Winning this business award began to feel to them like a matter of life and death.

We ve all worked in places where people have their heads down, concentrating on something so hard it feels like the world.

And we ve all had emails from that reads as if they re announcing splitting the atom but, when we scan it, we can t find anything important in it.

In my inbox right now there s an email from a restaurant telling me it s been included in some list of the best restaurants in Australia. Good for them, but a whole email in my inbox? We re not that close. They re also in another state. I d have to get on a plane to eat there.

People have a finite and small appetite for information that doesn t hit them right where they live. If the building is on fire, their appetite for information about that is vast. How big is the fire? Where is the fire? How fast is it moving? Where do we go? How much time do we have? How much damage will there be? Can I just go home after we exit the building or will I have to go back to work?

If you re re-wording the IT security policy, forget about it. You can send out an email if the lawyers say it ticks a box we notified everybody. But getting people to read it? No way. Not unless your email leads with the fact you re blocking Facebook.

I think of the appetite for information as like a bucket. People have different sized buckets depending on the topic. They ll take in no more than the amount of information that fills that bucket. You can cry salty tearws about it, but if my bucket is already full, your tears are splashing over the edge with all the other excess information you re trying to pour in.

The bucket error happens when you forget it s quite likely almost certain that not everyone cares about something as much as you do. I ve got my own stuff going on, but I ll give you a minute, two minutes, 20 minutes. Depends what you re talking about.

Try to take more than that and you re kidding yourself. I ve stopped listening. I m scanning the room for someone more interesting. I m typing an email. I m flicking through Facebook. I ve closed your webpage.

I don t care that you had more to say than I cared to take in. And I m probably going to stop opening your emails or coming to your meetings, so you don t get a second chance.

So now I know something of what you were trying to tell me. I know what you said before my bucket was full. If you led wit the most important stuff, at least I know that. If you started by telling me that you ve been working on this for 18 months and you were delighted when Diane came on board in March, I know that, but I ve no idea what you really wanted to tell me. My bucket filled up before you got any to anything useful.

Your first choice is to demand everyone root around for bigger buckets. It won t work, but no one will be able to accuse you of not trying.

The smart choice is to accept that the bucket is what it is It won t be hard to work out how big it really is. Start by asking yourself how much _you_ would care if this were someone else s information? Ask someone you trust to be straight with you. Ask whether they d want an email telling them one of your guys was just made regional sales rep of the year or that your dealership now had platinum status.

And when you know the size of the bucket you re dealing with, life gets easier. You ll arrange your information so the most important information gets out.

Better you do that than you leave people with whatever random information they retained after you tried to fill a thimble with a firehose.

I ve talked to a lot of people about the Bucket Error over the years. I know many of them have found buckets a helpful way to think about how easy it is to forget that it s always the audience that decides how much attention they re willing to give us.

What do you think? I d really like to hear back from you about the direction of the podcast. You can always reach me through Taleist.com. That s Steven Lewis and you can find me through Taleist.com Tale as in telling tales TALEist.com.

I promise you the next episode isn t four months away, so please visit the site and subscribe. And you get your invite to the launch of our new PR course.

People have a finite and small appetite for information that doesn t hit them right where they live. If the building is on fire, their appetite for information about that is vast. How big is the fire? Where is the fire? How fast is it moving? Where do we go? How much time do we have? How much damage will there be? Can I just go home after we exit the building or will I have to go back to work?

If you re re-wording the IT security policy, forget about it. You can send out an email if the lawyers say it ticks a box we notified everybody. But getting people to read it? No way. Not unless your email leads with the fact you re blocking Facebook.

I think of the appetite for information as like a bucket. People have different sized buckets depending on the topic. They ll take in no more than the amount of information that fills that bucket. You can cry salty tears about it, but if my bucket is already full, your tears are splashing over the edge with all the other excess information you re trying to pour in.

The smart choice is to accept that the bucket is what it is And when you know the size of the bucket you re dealing with, life gets easier. You ll arrange your information so the most important information gets out.

The post Why people tune out when you want them to tune in appeared first on Taleist.