The Importance of Purpose in Professional Messaging and Communication
To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?
Chip Heath
Lesson 1-2 explained that the transmittal
concept of communication is incomplete and unhelpful. A communicator does not simply put out or transmit a message that will be precisely received by the communicatee. Instead, communication is a transactional process. Exchanged messages are encoded, decoded, and modified by both parties. It’s a process made increasingly complex by the powerful impact words, tone, register, and non-verbal signals and perceptions have on an exchange. The ultimate effectiveness of a communication is contingent on the alignment between communicator, communicatee, and audience. There two factors that are paramount to this alignment. These are the concepts of purpose and audience.
Purpose
If you don’t know where you are going you might wind up someplace else.
Yogi Berra
The term purpose can be best understood through a short, three letter question: why?
Purpose is the reason for doing something. In professional and business communication purpose is,
- The goal behind a crafting a message
- The objective of what the message is being communicated to achieve
- The action that the message is intended to instigate and illicit
- The thoughts and questions that the message is attempting to provoke
- The primary intention for the communication
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