Blah, blah, blah.

We’ve all grown accustomed to hearing lots of noise. Another meeting (blah, blah, blah). Getting a safety briefing (blah, blah, blah). Checking for more e-mails (blah, blah, delete).

As the words pile on, it’s hard not to ignore most of it.

What if we could be consistently clear and concise? The value of receiving communication that’s brief is golden. An infamous writer, known for his brevity, once shared his secret by saying that he intentionally would leave out words people would probably skip.

Be brilliant, be brief, and be gone. Imagine what our world might look like.

• What if the meeting started with a clearly stated objective and agenda? It would save precious time and improve productivity.
• What if the airline safety briefing clearly stated the risks? It would ensure passengers were ready to respond in an unexpected emergency.
• What if the subject line of an e-mail provided a point up front? We’d confidently open it, quickly grasp the message, and know how to reply.

Frustration is a term I’ve heard defined simply as an unfulfilled expectation. When it comes to our communication, people around us anticipate brevity but get irritated and annoyed when they have to sift through long, complicated messages. They constantly struggle to find the main points as they drown in useless and inessential information.

They expect brevity as a lifeline and drown when it isn’t thrown to them.

When So Many Words Become Worthless

We hear jargon so frequently we don’t even realize how our brains treat it as static.

• Strategically leverage platforms to scale growth. Turnkey solutions to optimize enterprise impact. Initiate cross-selling opportunities to improve share of wallet.

It sure sounds important—but it’s worthless.

Does it help people understand what they need to know? Working with professionals and executives, I see buzzwords pile up all the time. When people use “corporate-speak,” they’re trying to project knowledge and authority. It’s also a kind of shorthand suggesting, “I’m an insider.” They don’t even realize how they’re training others to ignore them.

Yet too often, these words don’t give listeners what they crave: a clear message with real meaning. Instead, they’re dished out like verbal junk food—empty calories with no nutrition.

The Wall Street Journal made light of this when they launched their Business Buzzwords Generator. Basically, the generator randomizes words. It’s scary how much some of these suggested phrases sound like real stuff we hear from people every day:

• “We need to vertically taper our optics.”
• “We need to strategically empower our wheelhouse.”
• “We need to literally silo our value add.”
• “We need to horizontally unpack our incubator.”¹

I dare you to drop one of these in your next meeting. I bet no one would even notice. Maybe that’s part of why we like jargon. Because we can say stuff with relative certainty that no one will take issue. But the real risk is that our audience will just ignore us and move on. We’re training them to tune us out.

Losing the Meaning

I was in Phoenix, Arizona, for a national sales meeting where The BRIEF Lab ran a boot camp for a company that was undergoing some big changes. When we asked the salespeople to put their company’s story into their own words, something interesting happened: they kept reverting back to standard buzzwords to express their ideas.

Throughout the workshop, we challenged them to tell us an authentic story about where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re headed next as a company. We wanted them to briefly and genuinely answer a simple question from their customers, “Hey, what’s new with the business?”

Once they adjusted, their stories got real and started to stick.

With attention spans on the decline and information consumption on the rise, we need to communicate concisely to be absolutely sure people will hear and understand us. Buzzwords may seem to telegraph competence, but it just leads to more confusion.

Speaking and writing in clear and simple terms is rare.

You Can Change It

What can we do to stop ourselves and others from becoming human generators of “custom-built meaningless business phrases” like that Wall Street Journal randomizer? I recommend two things:

1. Be more aware: Jargon has become a bad habit. Notice your word choices. Make an effort to be more conscious of the words you use. Encourage others to do the same. You’ll be amazed at how often you and the people around you reach for these junk-food phrases. Eliminate them.
2. Keep it simple: This is a trick that we teach in our courses: when you notice yourself saying something needlessly complex, just add “in other words” and rephrase it using more ordinary words. What comes out is much simpler and clearer—it’s what you were actually trying to say.

• “Corporate behavioral attitudes and values” might become “the way we work around here.” “Employee empowerment” could become “give people authority to make decisions.”

When words lose their value, we end up with volumes of communication running through organizations that fail to move anything. There’s lots of noise but little traction. Nobody wants that.

Message Lost in Translation

There’s a risk when we communicate in such chaotic, info-laden tech traps. Our message can easily get drowned out. Parents with teens, teachers with students, managers with teams, and doctors with patients create more noise if they don’t practice brevity.

What are people actually hearing?

A few years back, Indiana University’s Tom Crean led the men’s basketball team to a Big 10 season title. A camera crew caught his euphoria in the locker room afterwards. His pride for his players was powerful and contagious because they were not expected to win the championship that year.

As the players were celebrating, Coach Crean huddled them together to give them some final words to congratulate them.

“Guys, you’ve earned this memory,” he said to get them to appreciate their huge accomplishment. Then he proceeded to talk for more than two minutes about a variety of things to make them value it even more. About a minute later, you could see his players start to lose interest; some of them even started clapping to signal him to wrap up his speech.

It didn’t work. He kept talking, and his strong opening words got watered down in a meandering stream of comments and insights, most of which the players didn’t even hear.

Why did he lose them in his passionate speech? He failed to keep it brief. A few words was all he needed to get the party started; it felt more like a class, or another pep talk.

Winston Churchill’s Brevity Memorandum

In 1940, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill was knee-deep in leading the defense of his country against a German attack. One could only imagine the number of daily meetings, discussions, and conversations he had to formulate the right battle plans.

At one point, he reached a boiling point and issued a one-page memo to his war cabinet with a one-word title: Brevity.

“To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points,” he wrote, challenging them to keep their reports shorter and clearer. He concluded by saying, “the saving in time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.”²

Years later, Churchill’s memo remains a challenge for most of us. Our role as a focus manager is critical: help people save time and zero in on what’s most essential.

Concise Communication: A Necessary Curriculum Requirement

When I embarked on the journey to write my first book, BRIEF: Make a bigger impact by saying less, I was surprised at people’s immediate response to its message. People started telling me how much they needed to learn this valuable skill, especially given how interrupted, inattentive, and impatient everyone is becoming.

My conversations revealed an education gap in the area of lean communication. If everyone is so buried and busy, how can they learn the basic skills of grabbing and holding others’ attentions? As our focus erodes, the need to know how to master this skill set is crucial.

These skills and strategies need to be a direct and purposeful part of the curriculum at all levels of education and in the workplace. Whether one is writing an essay or an e-mail, talking with others in an informal or formal discussion, or participating in a college admissions or work interview, training and practice in implementing these skills may be the tipping point. Think of the positive outcomes: a higher grade, a successful sale, a promotion, a positive networking experience, or admittance into a top college.

I received an e-mail from a retired military member, Tamar, who was going to law school. She wrote to thank us for teaching her these BRIEF skills. “When I wrote my first paper for my legal writing course, I was very concerned because it did not match the elevated prose of my fellow students,” she shared. “Well, I got feedback from the professor that my brevity and simple language was quite refreshing. He also added that the latest trend in lawyering is to write simply, especially in contracts, so the average user doesn’t struggle to understand.”

Like Tamar, increasing your “toolbox” of purposeful and concise language will positively affect those around you and make their lives better. That’s what it means to be a focus manager.

I started The BRIEF Lab to help create an elite standard in concise communication. For both military and business leaders, our workshops, webinars, and keynote speeches not only help motivate them to embrace brevity but also arm them with practical tools to develop and deliver a message that is shorter and more impactful.

My vision has been to have the BRIEF methodology become an adaptive strategy and a gold standard that people can embrace to achieve greater results. They discover how to play a pivotal role in helping others around them consistently focus better.

Whether it’s business people trying to sell a product, teachers struggling to keep students engaged, lawyers penning contracts, or friends having good conversations with each other, they all have something they need to do differently. By cutting, reorganizing, and delivering more concise information, they create better, stronger connections.

BRIEF Basics

To be an effective BRIEF communicator and an effective focus manager, you need to recognize a few common tendencies that distract and detract others from understanding what you’re communicating.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Headlining:
   1. What it is: leading with your most important idea first.
   2. What it avoids: the tendency to bury the point or miss it entirely.
   3. What it does: gets people’s attention right away.
2. Trimming:
   1. What it is: removing burdensome information that weighs people down.
   2. What it avoids: making people struggle to weed through layers of detail.
   3. What it does: simplifies a message and lightens people’s load.
3. Mind mapping:
   1. What it is: creating a visual outline that organizes your ideas logically.
   2. What it avoids: having your communication seem disjointed and rambling.
   3. What it does: creates a smooth, logical flow.

Simplifying is one of the most valuable skills you can possess in a complex world like ours. The BRIEF approach is a powerful way to organize and structure information to make it much easier to consume. When trying to inform, explain, update, and convince, simplicity goes a long way.

Clarity Is Your Number 1 Priority

As Churchill’s memo concluded, clarity is the payoff. When you receive static all day, you stop and notice when you suddenly hear a clear signal. Imagine going down the radio dial and finding a song that resonates. It stands out.

Focus management is handling people’s inattention (their Elusive 600) and helping them zero in on what matters most.

The rarity is clarity.

In each of these situations, imagine how valuable BRIEF is:

• A parent justifies the importance of an unwanted punishment to their child.
• An entrepreneur captures the financial upside to an investor.
• A pharmacist describes the harmful side effects of a drug.
• A mechanic explains preventative maintenance.
• A minister consoles family members who have lost a parent.
• A spouse shares what causes friction in the relationship.
• A jumpmaster instructs procedures in case a parachute fails to open.

In all of these moments, brevity drives clarity.

Be better. Be brief.