Tamsen Webster distills 25 years of message design into fluent familiarity: making information easy to follow by using familiar structures like story and causality. Smooth transitions and known elements recombined create messages that feel true and persuasive.
If I were to sum up my 25 years of message design into one big lesson, one big thing to keep in my mind anytime I'm putting a new message or a new piece of content together, it's this. I repeat to myself, fluent familiarity. All right. What does that mean, Tamsen? Let me break that down. Fluency, by which I mean cognitive fluency, fancy term, ties into how easy it is for someone else's brain to follow along and then process the information you're giving them. There are lots of different ways to do this, but the real thing to pay attention to when you're looking at your own messages and content is whether or not you are actually creating friction. Are you jumping from one point to the other without actually making a transition? For instance, are you just saying, "Let's go to the next slide," or "This brings me to the next point"? Transitions like that don't connect information. They create disfluent information, gaps in how things flow together. So that first key to making sure that people really understand your message so that you can say what they can't unhear comes down to making sure you have built in as much understandability, as much connectivity as you can so that everything flows as smoothly for people as possible. But I said fluent familiarity. So what is that and why? Familiarity comes into play in a couple different ways. Number 1, the more familiar something is, the more understandable it is because people are able to draw in on those preexisting stores of knowledge. But there's also something about familiarity, and that is the more familiar something is to someone, the more that it feels right to them and the more that it feels true. So this is why one of the core aspects of the Message Design Institute approach and my communicative reasoning model, is that we are building belief-based arguments. We are building on familiar structures using familiar beliefs, familiar concepts, familiar principles. What that allows is not only the fluidity of concepts people already know, but the familiarity of how reliable they are. But doesn't this mean that we're just rehashing old stuff? Actually, no, because anytime two familiar things come together in a new way, Then we can create something new. And the key to making even that feel familiar is to use familiar structures. So that's why with The Red Thread, I use the familiar-to-the-brain structure of story. And with the Core Case structure, I use the familiar-to-the-brain structure of causality. If, then, because. No matter what you do, no matter what content you put together, when you use preexisting familiar structures and familiar content put together in a new way, You create that fluent familiarity that makes your ideas, your content, your messages seem fresh and new.
