Communicating in layers
Information about your team and its work is best presented in a series of simple layers.
The main reason for this is that everyone is already too busy with their own work to think very much about yours.
You have to make it easier for people in other teams to understand what you do.
That means starting with a summary, something very brief, and adding detail in a series of expanding layers.
How layers work
The first layer, the outermost one, should be simple and brief. It does the bare minimum.
It explains what you do in a sentence, ideally. A paragraph at most.
Because it’s so short, it has to be brief. There’s no room for detail here. The detail comes later.
The first layer is a bit like social media. Brief, to the point.
The second layer, the middle one, provides context.
The middle layer should explain the basics well. It should include enough information for most people to answer to answer the first question with “Yes, I do know enough now.”
It helps people decide: “Do I know enough now? Or do I need to know more?”
The second layer is a bit like blog posts. Informative and helpful, but not too long.
The third layer, the bottom one, is where all the detail lives. White papers, strategy documents, data sets, thought pieces — anything that takes more than about 10 minutes to read should live here.
If there’s lots of it, try to make it easy for newcomers to explore. Provide a “Read me” or a “Start here” document, or an index, or make it searchable. All all of those things. Put yourself in your a newcomer’s shoes and imagine what questions they will ask when they first arrive. Better still, find a newcomer to try exploring it for themselves, and watch what they do.
The third layer is a bit like a shared drive, or a website like Wikipedia.
How layers help
Layers give your readers a choice.
Layers help readers decide for themselves when they know enough.
Layers make it possible for readers to understand the basics about your team, quickly. If they want more than the basics, there’s a path they can follow to find out more.
It takes a bit of time to establish and embed your layers, and of course it’s more work for your team to create the content for them. But it’s usually time worth investing.
