How Will Your Information Be Repeated by Members of the Inner Circle?

Be intentional about how your message is remembered by the inner circle after you leave the meeting.

Your information doesn't stop working once you finish presenting it. It keeps moving through advisors, follow-up meetings, and the version someone else tells the decision maker after you've left the room. The decision maker may have even been sitting right there. That doesn't mean your message survived intact.

The Inner Circle Doesn't Wait for You to Leave the Room

As technical professionals, we tend to view communication as a straight line: you speak, the decision maker hears it, and a decision follows. In practice, the line loops. An advisor who sat in your briefing repeats it later to a colleague, in their own words.

Weeks later, in a follow-up meeting, the same decision maker who heard your original presentation now hears a second-hand version of it. Your presentation didn’t change, but it just stopped being yours.

More Acute with Big Decisions

The problem is even more impactful for big, high-stakes decisions. There is natural change occurring in the data and information because of complexity and uncertainty. The repeat of your presentation adds another dimension.

Synergy Means Presenting for the Retelling

Alignment at the time of your presentation isn't the finish line. The real test is whether your finding still holds together weeks or months later.

Three techniques I use:

• Explicitly state no more than three takeaways at the beginning and end

• Have each participant share their one takeaway on a notecard, then share

• Collectively develop the takeaways before you leave the meeting

The Tip

The tip is to be intentional about how your message is remembered by the inner circle after you leave the meeting.

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JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram^®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method^©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.