Unless you actually have run 50 miles to say something, it's time to think a little more deeply, argues Matt Guarente in our latest blog.
Pheidippides collapses to one knee, exhausted, on the marble of the Acropolis in front of the assembled leaders. He alone knows the fate of the Athenian army at the battle of Marathon against the superior force of the Persians.
'We have won,' he utters, and dies of his exertions.
Now, that's a message.
True or not - and it seems to be a construct and merging of different stories - the point of retelling this legend is that we do seem to have become somewhat in thrall to the idea of the 'message'.
Sometimes it really is about the message.
But in my work, I often get people saying to me 'we have to get to the key messages'. And it makes me flinch a bit. Because it's push-only; it suggests a kind of command-control form of comms where the audience will just damn well take what you have to say.
To mangle Marshall McLuhan (whose edict 'the medium is the message' I never understood, and I've got a pretty good degree in unpicking oblique musings), the message is not the outcome. It's part of it.
Pretty much every session I do with senior leaders starts with 'What do you want to happen?'. Funnily enough, the answer (especially when they think about it) is never 'deliver three key messages'.
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