"Step 4: Develop key messages"
featuring Dr. Vincent Covello
The fourth step in message mapping is to develop our key messages, and I would argue this is really the core of message mapping. I would argue, even, it's the most intellectually exciting of the different parts of message mapping.
Typically, as part of developing our key messages, we use a system based on templates. Templates are organizing frameworks for putting our messages together. I’d like to concentrate on three particular templates because they’re so fundamental to message mapping. The three are:
1) is called the CCO template,
2) is called the 27/9/3 template, and
3) is called the 1N=3 template.
The first template, CCO, stands for compassion, conviction, optimism. These three messages, in turn, are based on the fundamental observation about human psychology that people under stress want to know that we care before they care what we know. And, therefore, the first message is one of compassion. It’s a message of listening. It’s a message of empathy toward the concerns of others, followed by a message of conviction or commitment, followed by, in turn, a message of optimism and hope. Key to this particular template is the notion that people often want to know that you’re listening to them before they want to listen to you. It’s fundamental to building trust and credibility; therefore, the CCO template is one of the most basic of all templates for organizing information and message mapping.
The second principle is called the 27/9/3 (Rule of 3) template. It’s based on the observation that people under stress have difficulty hearing, understanding, and remembering information. This notion goes back nearly 2,000 years to Aristotle. But more research indicates that not only do people stop processing information after “X” number of messages, but they also stop processing information after “Y” number of words and “Z” number of seconds. More specifically, we know that people on average stop processing information that’s shared to them in high-stress situations after three messages. So this is fundamental to message mapping that we organize our messages around the Rule of 3. We also restrict the number of words—discipline ourselves to have no more than approximately 27 words in 9 seconds of material.
This particular principle is fundamental to risk communication as well as to message mapping. If you look at the actual research literature itself, you find that it has its origins in attention span research, such as the classic article by Professor George Miller from Princeton University way back in 1956 when he wrote an article called “The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information in Low-Stress Situations.” He was primarily focused on numbers, such as how many numbers can people hold in their brain in their short-term memory. He found the number seven was fundamental. But in high stress, the added dimension is mental noise, the emotional upset. Something is being threatened that we value, and the number goes from seven to three—a fundamental shift in risk communication. The second part of this Rule of 3 is that not only we keep our messages to three but we have three supporting pieces of information. And, we might report our messages back three times.
The last template I’d like to share very briefly here is called the negative dominance principle, 1N=3P: that in high-stress situations, people tend to focus more on the negative than the positive, often in a ratio of three to one. This means if we have a negative message to share, sometimes this is, maybe, that piece of bad news that we have to compensate or overcompensate for the negative with at least three to four positive pieces of information. This is critical to effectiveness in communication. It often means that we, among other things, have to have positive, constructive, solution-oriented messages when we offer up a negative message. It also means we want to always look to see if, in fact, we need the negative message. Do we need the words “no,” “not,” “never,” “nothing,” “none”? Particularly, words such as “never” and “always” become highly consequential in high-stress situations because it only takes one counter message to offset an absolute.
As part of this template application, we have to brainstorm our key messages; decide which among the many different templates that we want to use. There’s the IDK template, for example, which refers to “I Don’t Know.” We have the AGL Minus 4 template, which refers to the grade level. All of these require a high level of discipline for the purposes of developing effective messages.