In soccer, one of the most frustrating things is to work hard to get an easy goal-scoring opportunity, only for the striker to shoot wide with just the goalkeeper to beat. All that work, time and energy invested in getting the opportunity . . . totally wasted by a needless mistake when it mattered.

Similarly, with communication, you don’t want to invest lots of work, time and energy into creating persuasive content, only to “shoot wide” by choosing the wrong channel to communicate it. For instance:

• One-way information downloads on a conference call would often have been better as an email.
• Lengthy emails would often have been better as a conversation.
• Formal presentations to many would often have been better as a conversation with the main decision maker.

One way to choose the best channel is to “Good Grief” your options. This means giving each possible channel two scores out of 10, to show:

• Good – how likely that channel is to produce best results (where 10 is best); and
• Grief – how much grief this channel is likely to bring you in terms of cost, time, hassle and your hatred of it (where 10 is worst, because it’s maximum grief).

Both are important. If it isn’t good, it won’t work. If there’s too much grief, you won’t want to do it.

For example, let’s assume you have an unpopular message to communicate. A conference call might score (3, 4):

• 3 out of 10 for “good”, because it’s unlikely to produce the desired impact: delivering an unpopular message in this impersonal way won’t engage; and
• 4 out of 10 for “grief”, in that it’s not much grief for you: you sit in your office, deliver the message, put the phone down and get on with your day.

So, given that a conference call is unlikely to work, let’s look at alternatives by “Good Grief-ing” other channels. The following table shows scores you might allocate. (There’s no “right or wrong”. You decide what’s right for you. These scores are just an illustration).

You want the closest to (10, 1), in that this option is most likely to work, whilst bringing you minimal grief. Here, the round-table option is clearly best (not surprisingly, verbal will usually beat written) though, if you hadn’t applied “Good Grief”, you might have delivered the message during your weekly conference call.

And, of course, you don’t have to choose just one option. For instance, in this example, you might:

And, because no business book is complete without a two-by-two matrix, here’s how it looks visually:

You can see how your best options are bunched top left. Sometimes, depend­ing on its importance, it might be worth the extra grief involved and going top right.

Equally importantly, bottom right instantly shows what you shouldn’t be doing.

Two final points:

Firstly, whatever channel(s) you use, make sure you get your title right or you won’t engage them. Call anything “update” and it’s not going to draw the crowds (this is really important; the next chapter shows how to do it).

And secondly, you’ll find “Good Grief” is also useful when choosing between alternatives. For example, once salespeople see that cold-calling often scores (1, 10) and that word-of-mouth scores (10, 1), they never cold-call again. A blessing for everyone!

Without “Good Grief”, it’s all too easy to use the channel you’re in the habit of using. But that might be a big mistake for certain messages; a bit like shooting wide with just the goalkeeper to beat.