Communicate Ideas Effectively in Three Steps

Are you finding it difficult to get creative ideas across to your team or clients? Are they not understanding what you’re trying to say? If so, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Learning to communicate ideas effectively can be a challenge for many people. In this blog post, we will discuss three steps that will help you communicate your novel ideas in a more succinct and effective manner!

Ideas are frequently rejected not because they are bad, but because they are misinterpreted or viewed the wrong way. Innovative ideas will not make sense to most people as they live outside the current reality. Many people will feel uncomfortable that the communicated idea violates their assumptions and undermines the status quo.

Therefore, you must help others release their present reality to envision the world that your innovative idea lives in. Use this three-step pitch to help you communicate your ideas effectively.

Introduce the Context for Your Idea in a Positive Way

The first step is to spend five seconds introducing the context of your innovative idea in a positive and interesting way. You want to briefly provide pertinent background information for why this idea is important. The context should set up how it can help solve a problem. When introducing the background, make sure to include some relatable examples.

For example: Suppose, you have an idea to fundamentally change the marketing plan for the company to include social media marketing. However, the company was founded a long time ago by founders that were bad with technology. First, you should introduce the context positively:

“In today’s world, social media is an omnipresent part of all of our lives as over 3 Billion people use it on one of many platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc.”

Identify the Problem or Challenge within the Context

The second step is to take five seconds to identify the problem or challenge that exists within the context you introduced. This will help people understand what needs to be fixed. It’s important to be as specific as possible when identifying the problem.

For example: Now that you have hooked your audience with an interesting context of living in an omnipresent social media world. Now, you can briefly communicate the problem being faced that the company is losing market share to competitors as you are not reaching customers on social media:

“In the past three years, we have lost 30% of market share to our two main competitors, because we are not reaching customers online.”

Communicate Your Idea Effectively as the Answer to the Problem

The third and final step is to briefly propose a solution to the problem or challenge you identified. Finally, you can effectively communicate your idea. This step is where you’ll share your innovative idea, which should create an aha moment for your audience. Your people should have a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, or insight that your solution will provide the solution to the problem you identified.

For example: You have provided the necessary context and the problem. Lastly, you will briefly provide the answer to your company’s leadership team to reallocate funds to social media marketing:

“I believe that we can fix this problem by spending 25% of our marketing budget on targeting our ideal customer on social media platforms, specifically Facebook and Instagram.”

What happens after communicating your idea?

By following these three steps, you will be able to communicate your ideas in a way that is a clear, concise, and effective manner. Your audience should both understand what you are proposing and why is important. This setup will guide your audience into understanding your innovative idea in a logical manner.

If you have delivered your “3-line pitch” well, your audience should be hooked and will want to know more. You can now effectively communicate your ideas in further detail. you can now proceed to talk about your ideas in more detail. Your audience will not only understand what you are proposing but more importantly, why you are proposing it that way. For more on discovering innovative ideas, check out the Innovator’s DNA (book summary).

Tips to Communicate Ideas Effectively:

• Speak clearly and slower than you think you should speak. Your audience will have an easier time following your idea.
• Avoid vague or indecisive terminology, including well, basically, uhm, like, maybe, etc. These terms make you seem incoherent or unconfident in your idea.
• Do not just ramble on with every thought you have had or piece of information you believe is relevant. The three steps are designed for you to get to the point.
• Keep the pitch positive and avoid supplying negative information. Research shows that positivity helps others view you as more cooperative and competent.
• Address everyone in your group not only the key stakeholders. You want your idea to gain traction and everyone has an equal chance of getting on board.
• Avoid putting yourself down because you will seem incompetent in the eyes of your audience and lose credibility for your idea.
• Encourage your audience to ask questions. Use your audience’s questions as opportunities to speak more about your idea and provide support for it.
• “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” No matter how innovative your idea seems, you must deliver it in a manner that resonates with your audience.
• Make the three-step framework a habit. Check out Atomic Habits (book summary) for more on building good habits.

Expanding on the Three-Step Communication Framework

The above structure can be very useful in your future storytelling, as you can expand each section with more detail. In step 1, you can provide several reasons why the context is worth exploring. Next, in step 2, you can describe a number of problems or challenges with more details or subchallenges. Lastly, in step 3, you can illustrate your solution with a plan for execution, processes, and relevant actions. If you have time, you can spend a few minutes on each step.

This post was inspired by a Design talk called, “Sharing an Idea” by Professor Jonathan Chapman from Carnegie Mellon University. For more on how to communicate your ideas effectively, check out the book, Influence (book summary). Or for business marketing communication, check out Building a StoryBrand (book summary).

If you have any further questions or need additional help, feel free to send me an email. Also, if you want more Process Hacker content, you should subscribe to our weekly newsletter on Productivity, Habits, and Resources.