Sakka LLC

“Skate to where the puck is going.” This insight from hockey star Wayne Gretzky can point us to a new way of thinking about, and connecting with, the audiences we try to reach. This perspective builds on the standard rules we all follow when we stand to speak or sit to write. I assume that in your preparation you have:

1) Discovered who is sitting out there, looked at the list of attendees, even asked your host, “Why are these people here?” Or you’ve found out who reads the publication for which you are writing and inquired about their field and its current frustrations, even asked the editor, “What do your readers want or need?”

2) Accepted the reality that if anyone remembers just one thing you’ve said or written five minutes after it’s over, you’re lucky. And so you’ve identified that one thing and taken pains to point it up, to make it absolutely clear that, “Listen up, folks, this is it.”

My point. My one thing for this piece, I’ll pause to tell you, is that it’s vital to imagine not where your audience is but where its individual members are going. Now, I’ve told you, and let me ask you to remember it: it’s where your reader or listener aspires to be, not where he or she is now, that matters.

3) Remembered that a visual image is more powerful than words. I am not qualified to tell you why that is, but I know that what we see registers more quickly than do words, which, being symbols, require interpretation before the meaning sets in. We instinctively acknowledge this when we say, “Seeing is believing,” or “Show, don’t tell.” And so you’ve come up with that image. Mine, if you haven’t noticed, is the hockey puck, but I’m going to add two more images later – a lower middle class street and a dusty attic.

4) Learned that narrative trumps exposition every time, that the most powerful form of communication we have is story-telling, that in the most important moments of our lives -- the times shared with family and dear friends -- we don’t open the laptop and start up PowerPoint, but, rather, we tell stories. You know that human beings are “hard-wired” for story – by which I mean that we assimilate information in story structure and we see our lives, both in their full sweep and day by day, as stories. And so you’ve got a story, and it illustrates that one critical thing you want to communicate (it’s not random, as humor often is, which is why it is ineffective) and it’s somehow tied into that image you’ve come up with so that they reinforce each other.

Even more important. I assume that because you are reading this you are familiar with the above, and I also assume that you’ve found a technique that will grab and hold attention as long as possible – you can critique mine if you wish. What I want to do now is add to this list what I consider to be even more important than any of these guidelines, and I want to start with a story.

Among the participants in a focus group in one of those midwestern “flyover” cities a few years ago was a woman I’ll call Irene. She was a bookkeeper and the wife of a construction worker. The magazine that had organized this session could identify her by the usual measures companies take of their publics – age, income, zip code, purchase history – and her particulars wouldn’t have set off any bells.

Then Irene started talking about her life. She lived in a neighborhood of small, plain houses. Recently a crack house had opened up on her street. Drug sales were occurring constantly, and one day Irene found a needle on her lawn. This rather quiet woman picked up the needle, stormed up to the crack house and pounded on the door. When a man opened it, she looked him in the eye and said, “If I find one more needle in my yard, I’m going to stick it in your rear end!”

Did any of us sitting behind the one-way mirror at that focus group really know Irene before we heard her? Could any amount of data have told us what motivates her? Statistics are like a bikini: they can be quite revealing, but they hide the most interesting things. Pondering Irene’s zip code and annual income would most likely yield a stereotype and lead to a certain conclusion about her worth. Knowing her as a person reveals something deeper: a gutsy woman with a dream for her neighborhood, an aspiration for her life. Tap into that, and you’ve got something real.

People are people. People like Irene are not data bits to be dropped into demographic or psychographic buckets. They are real, live, breathing beings, filled with passions and dreams, and their lives are often the stuff of drama. They aren’t one-dimensional “consumers” or “customers,” but rather players of multiple roles – as parents, spouses, relatives, employees, neighbors, citizens. No, they are not “your customers” – they may buy something from you now and then, but they’ve got other things to do and they don’t include you in their self-identity.

Most importantly, they don’t think of themselves as numbers would capture them at any one point in time, but instead see themselves as they yearn to be. Irene’s neighborhood may have been marginal, but that’s not what she wanted it to be. This is a cliché, but let’s use it: imagine a 25-year-old man who is in debt, has no income, drives an eight-year-old Chevrolet, seems tired all the time and doesn’t get a haircut often enough. Got that image? Is he of any interest to you? Now, what if I also tell you that he is a third-year medical student at Harvard?

If we who frame words for executives and organizations can learn to see through the eyes of the people we wish to persuade, if we can address their aspirations -- “skate where the puck is going” -- we can discover what motivates them, and nourish it. That may well change what we think of them and what we want to say. It will definitely improve our effectiveness in saying it. We will have become partners in the destiny they imagine. We will have joined with them in the story in which they see their lives.

Telling a story. In a classic short story, the hero experiences some dis-ease that sends him forth through valleys and over mountains to eventually conquer the dragon. The dis-ease is the motivation, and we can’t understand people, fictional or real, without understanding their motivation. Try it the next time you’re interviewing job applicants. I once had one tell me, when I asked why she wanted to work for our company, that, “Well, I only live five minutes away; it’s an easy commute.” Can someone spell passion?

The hero in classic stories wins the day through one of the virtues – courage or persistence or loyalty or selflessness. Let’s tie that to aspiration. A person may not be particularly courageous – but she’d like to be! He may not be persistent – but he knows it and he’s working on it! Cut them a little slack for good intentions (who among us can cast the first stone anyway?) and give them information and inspiration to be what they imagine themselves being. Next time you look out on an audience of blank faces, realize that stories are unfolding in those lives, that quests to slay their personal dragons and stand as kings on the hill are under way. If you address them as what they see themselves becoming, you’ll be speaking up to them. If you address them where they are, you’ll be speaking down, and they will sense it, and you’ll lose them.

Stories play a larger part in our communication than we realize. Think about your last visit to the doctor to deal with some problem. He or she asked you a set of questions: when did it start? how did it develop? is it still bothering you? These frame the beginning, middle and end of a story. Physical problems are episodes in our lives. Or consider the most mysterious and useless communications of our time: the “help” files that come with computer programs. What do we do? We spend an hour trying to decipher this gobbledygook, then call a human being to talk us through it, from problem to resolution. The next time you’re in church, enduring a sermon, watch the congregation as its eyes begin to glaze over; then notice that when the minister launches into a story with some familiar trigger (“I remember the time …” or “A man I once knew …”) the eyes open and attention returns.

In the attic. I have often thought that story-telling is therapeutic. I once told a friend who was in some pickle or another that she was stuck in the middle of her story. A mountain she would have to climb was blocking her view of the end, but, indeed, an end was there, waiting for her to discover it. Our lives unfold as stories, and sometimes they are cliffhangers, sometimes they are thrillers, sometimes they are romances.

The Reader’s Digest, where I worked as an editor for 16 years, became the world’s largest magazine by telling stories – remember “Drama in Real Life?” And it spoke up to its readers. It provided the information and inspiration its readers could use to improve themselves in every role of their lives. It understood that everyone was going somewhere.

That was driven home to me one day when I opened a letter from a reader. It was from a woman in North Carolina. In 1960 she was 14 years old and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. One day her dad, a house painter, was up in an attic and found a box containing hundreds of issues of Reader’s Digest, and he brought them home for his daughter to read. She read every one. “I could never explain why I always knew so much yet studied so little in school,” she wrote in her letter. “I now understand that I received a broad liberal arts education from those magazines.

“I am often asked where I get the mental stamina to try things that appear so difficult,” she continued. “I answer that I started reading The Digest at an early age. It inspires through its stories of courage. I fosters an “I can” attitude that will make its readers believe they can accomplish anything to which they aspire. From the bottom of the heart of that little black girl in North Carolina, I thank you for the black, female attorney I am today.”

I used that story to end many a speech to advertising clients, and it always had a curious effect: people would come up to me afterward and start telling me about their personal lives, their wishes and dreams. It touched something deep within them. Some might have identified with the little girl hoping to achieve something bigger than she could realistically expect. Others may have connected with the father and his tender love for his daughter and his simple attempt to seize an opportunity and do something for her.

Using emotion. The story works because it evokes emotion, and that is the final piece here. Emotion is powerful, but it only works in the service of an idea. By itself, it is cheap sentimentality. Linked to an idea – here, the idea that reading can change a life – emotion causes us to care. And it will cause your reader or listener to remember the idea far longer. Emotion puts the flesh of humanity on the bones of abstract notions. Use it sparingly and carefully, if you can – if you’re discussing the Federal Reserve’s management of the money supply (and God bless you, somebody has to do it) you may not get the chance.

We can now assemble the pieces of our framework. The members of your audience are people, not data points. They are living their lives as stories (as we all are), and they face certain challenges, but they are expecting to prevail. They will do so through one of the virtues. Something motivates them, some dis-ease or aspiration. Give them an idea that will help them in their quests. Illustrate it with an image. Describe it with a story. Touch the emotion inherent in the idea.

Of course you can’t know all of the individual stories that make up your audience, but you can rely on certain universals – the desire for money, power or fame, the longing for purpose and meaning in life, the love of children and spouse, the wish to be courageous or generous or loyal or persistent. To find these, look within yourself, because your audience is no different than you. Its members are on a journey, and their heads are in their destinations. You’ve got to meet them there. Look up and down the street through Irene’s eyes and imagine a safe neighborhood. Kneel down in a dusty attic with that Dad as he discovers a box of magazines and thinks of his little girl.

I once saw scrawled on the metal plates protecting an anti-aircraft gun on a World War II battleship the words “Lead Dammit!” The secret of skeet shooting is to pass the shotgun’s sights along the clay’s trajectory and beyond where it is in the sky, and then fire ahead of it. Skate to where the puck is going. Know where your audience is going, and you can meet them there for an entirely different kind of conversation.