If you asked me what my favorite type of fruit was, I could tell you in two ways.

Way #1: “Well, I like fruits with seeds. Sometimes they’re sweet; sometimes they’re sour. They have green leaves on the top. They’re pretty small, too.”

You might respond, “you mean a strawberry?”

Then I’d say yes, and you’d know my answer.

Or, I could tell you another way:

Way #2: “It’s a strawberry.”

This is the simple way to explain top-down communication. From the listener’s perspective, it is much easier to know what someone is talking about without having to follow a bunch of small, tiny details. But from the speaker’s perspective, it can feel uncomfortable, especially in work situations. In work situations, we often identify as a "thinker," or "analyst," and spend most of our time in the thought process or analysis before generating the answer. When it comes time to share our findings, it only feels natural to prioritize the details.

Details matter, of course, but people often don’t want to stick around for them unless you’ve laid out a compelling high-level vision for what the reader can expect. Almost all great stories begin with a high-level “hook” that creates suspense, gives context, or creates tension. Consider one of the best books of all time, Tale of Two Cities:

While there’s not much detail in this passage it invites you to go deeper into a story of oppositions (and one that is going to be well written too).

In business communication, the high-level context is the “so what?” – This is the information that tells the audience of your message and why they should pay attention. So don’t say, “Here is the financial information.” Say, “Given the recent challenges on our major product lines, this analysis will show the two major pressures that have put pressure on profitability.” When I give feedback to people on writing and presentations, I often just ask them, “What are you trying to say.” Whatever they tell me I then respond with, “Just say that!”

The tendency to want to share every last detail with your audience is something I like to call book report thinking, the tendency to treat work like a school book report where we are supposed to prove that we actually read the book. In real life, people don’t really care about how much work you’ve done or how you did it at all. They want useful information to enable them to help you or do their own job better.

So remember:

Start from the top.

Tell people why it matters.

If I had to give myself a bit of feedback on this newsletter issue, I probably should have started with: “This is a short reflection on how to communicate more clearly by starting with the most important things first,”

Guess I still have some learning to do.

Go Deeper

Watch the full video here explaining top-down communication:

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