3 Books that Belong on Your Message Design Bookshelf

I end up reading a lot over the course of a year, and not just because I'm in a doctoral program, though that's part of it. Mostly I've been obsessed with one topic for 25 years. I'm Tamsen Webster. I am the founder of the Message Design Institute, an online community dedicated to helping you design your best message in a way that's designed to work for you. While I've talked before about some of the books that I think are required for any message design bookshelf, there are 3 that have really stuck with me in this past year, and I wanted to share them with you. Okay, this is the first one. It's called The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times. It's by Robin Reams. And before I start telling you more about it, I want to give a shout out to the person who recommended it to me, a wonderful gentleman by the name of Owen Fitzpatrick. So follow him wherever you find him. He does amazing work on the psychology of belief life, especially as it comes to change. This book, when I describe it, may sound weird, but I hope that you will see why I think it's so great. It combines a history of rhetoric, a history of how we use words to talk to, influence, and persuade other people, with some of the issues that we are seeing in the world right now. It takes us all the way back to ancient times and where truth comes from and the relationship of truth and words, all the way through the election of 2016, I still think about concepts that I read in this book, for everything from the Sophists to the new rhetoric. And in addition to finding it fascinating, interesting, and a wonderful compilation of other related research, but it also gave me hope. And here's why. It seems that the misuse of language to mislead, misinform, etc. follows a pretty predictable cycle. It's happened at least twice before in this world, and probably more. I'm sure she talked about more, and I just forgot them. The good news is that in response to this misuse of language, there has been a subsequent wave of people focused on making language easier to understand, encouraging critical thinking, encouraging strategic thinking, and helping people understand the tricks and the misuses of language that are all around us. Given my work and research, which is all about how do we create the conditions for rapid changes of mind without coercion or manipulation, you could probably see why this is pretty exciting to me. But it also leads me to my second book. This is the second book. It's by one of my professors at Columbia, Dr. Julia Sloan, and it is the 5th edition of Learning to Think Strategically. I see her book as a beautiful companion, not only to The Art of Thinking for Yourself, but also to the work of message design in general. Dr. Sloan separates 3 things that we often combine unintentionally when we're talking about strategy and strategic thinking. She separates strategic thinking from strategic planning from strategic implementation. Thinking is a distinct stage where we are coming up with ideas, where we are generating new ideas, where we're understanding assumptions, where we are expanding our assumptions. We're questioning the way we've always done things so that we might be able to find something new. Strategic planning takes that open dialogue and starts to turn it into a discussion where we decide what to do now that we have a much better understanding of the situation and of the problem. And then, as you might guess, strategic implementation is about putting those plans into action. What's important about this Sloan Strategic Triangle model that she came up with is that these are not necessarily linear, nor do they always come in that order. Our job is to understand when is the right time for each of them. But from any stage, let's say from implementation, you can either go back into planning or go into strategic thinking. From strategic thinking, you can go straight to implementation or to planning. And from planning, obviously, you can go back up to thinking or straight to implementation. Regardless, it's really helpful, I have found already, to start thinking of these things as 3 different functions which use 3 different parts of our brains. So the next time someone is asking you to go and just do a strategy, clarify what kind of strategy do they mean? Do they want you to think strategically, which is to expand the number of options and the way we're thinking about something? Do they want you to do strategic planning, which is come up with and decide from a set of options which one is the one most likely to produce the outcome that we want, or to actually put that plan into action? I'll finish this one with my favorite definition of strategy. It's not Dr. Sloan's, but I think it's friendly, is that a strategy is a framework for decision-making. Which, if you think about it, you can't get to if you don't understand what your process for decision-making, your underlying process for decision-making, your rationale is. And that's entirely what strategic thinking is all about. Quick note on Dr. Sloan's book, look for that 5th edition because it includes a whole chapter on AI and what AI's influence is on all 3 aspects of strategic thinking and what AI's impact and effects are on all 3 aspects of that strategic triangle. The third book is this one, The Science of Change. It's by Dr. Richard Boyatzis, and its subtitle is Discovering Sustained Desired Change from Individuals to Organizations and Communities. That's important because what he's presenting here is a theory of change that works on every level according to his research. This is the kind of book people who love understanding what the research says love, and those folks who like an easy read probably don't. It's not hard to read. It just reads like a giant academic paper, inclusive of all the citations, all the papers that Dr. Boyatzis is referencing. The reason why it's so exciting is that in this book, which was released in 2024, Boyatzis assembles 50 years of research on transformational change, by which I mean sustained change that lasts durable over time. Now, he makes a very distinct addition to that phrase being sustained desired change, because as the research shows, that desired change is actually a precondition of much sustained change. I'm not even done reading this book, and it's already a book I have recommended multiple times to people mostly, and that's because there are already some just fascinating pieces of information that go against a lot of what people do when they are trying to achieve sustained desired inspire change. Number one is that he's found that over all the research consistently, again and again and again, that the establishment of a positive future vision outperforms closing of capabilities or where we wanna be versus where we are gap every single time. That is huge news because so often where we start and try to inspire people to sustain change is saying, "Hey, we're not where we wanna be, let's go." rather than, here is this vision of where we are trying to go. Classic example that Boyatzis brings up is Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. But I'm also going to give a shout out to one of my very good friends, the tech humanist Kate O'Neill, who has recently set a similar kind of goal for herself, where she has said that she wants to get into 10,000 boardrooms so she can affect 10 billion people. And that kind of vision is the kind of vision that keeps people moving. The second thing that's already in this book is the understanding that the different kinds of change activate different systems in our bodies and our brains. And the ways that our bodies and brains react to information, proposed change, et cetera, fundamentally affects how successful that change is gonna be or the nature of that change. So one of the big distinctions that Boyatzis makes is between positive emotional affect and negative emotional affect. They're fairly self-explanatory, though it's a lot more complicated than that, and I am definitely simplifying and probably too much. Suffice it to say that what Biotzis has found in all the research, including his own, is that change that is based on an activation of that negative response, the threat response, fear, closing a gap, fear of missing out, stress, that kind of thing, the things that are prompted and taken care of mostly in our automatic processing of our brains, leads to unstable forms of change. In other words, change will happen, but it doesn't last. It is susceptible to being overturned. I think that's a cause for hope too. You can also guess what leads to the stable change, which is change that is anchored and activates that positive emotional affect, all of the systems and all of the processes that go with things that are good. So again, these two things combined not only fundamentally change how you may be going about talking about change yourself, But it also, I think, gives us a different perspective on what kinds of changes are possible and where we can start to make them. Those are my 3 best recommendations of books for 2025. What are some of yours? I can't wait to learn from you.