Long story short

I’ve been editing conversations in my head since childhood. I’m Gen-X. We were not distracted or entertained by screens and devices – we had to sit through long sermons, speeches, and adult conversations over dinner. Quietly. And I did. But I was not just quiet, I was quietly judging. 

“To make a long story short,” they would often begin, but revert to the long version right away. Honestly, I’d rather have the extended edition and be prepared for it than agree to the short option and get trapped in the long one. Maybe everything in “short form” today is a consequence of my generation, who had to sit through our neighbour’s holiday slideshows (if you know, you know) and birthday speeches before we could get cake and play outside. All the time we wasted waiting for things to end… The world needs a framework, I thought to myself, that people can use to organise their communication. Just kidding, I only thought about the cake. 

But I believe that my subconscious mind collected data all along and eventually figured out that length was not the real issue. Structure was. So, when I had enough experience and education, I began working on ways to optimise communication and clarity. 

During my career, I saw clients lose money, deals, and opportunities due to poor communication. I also saw clients prosper, expand, and thrive due to clear communication, and that is how the One Minute Message began to take shape. I wanted a framework that worked equally well for writing a text message and a PhD thesis – a formula that was easy to learn, simple to apply, and flexible enough to work at either extreme. The One Minute Message helps you to organise the information in your mind, so that you can reproduce it in any format required. 

Like many things, the first version was clumsy. But as I started using it to unpack client requests, it began taking shape. In its simplest form, you only need to answer three questions:
-    What is it about?
-    Why does it matter?
-    What must happen?

Think about the last email you rewrote four times. The meeting where everyone left with a slightly different understanding of what had been decided. The proposal that contained everything except a compelling reason to say yes. Or the difficult conversation you kept postponing because you weren't quite sure where to begin. These are not always communication problems. Often, they are clarity problems. The One Minute Message framework helps you to formulate your own understanding in a practical way. If you get the foundational message right, you can apply it to a variety of platforms and message lengths. 

You can reduce a surprising amount of friction in your private and professional life by learning to communicate with clarity in three simple steps. Long story short: know what you mean before you try to make someone else understand it.