One of the things I’ve been working on for the last month or so is the design of an effective communication system. Specifically, one that enables people on both sides of a communication stream to effectively separate signal from noise. Marketers and advertisers know this as “cutting through the clutter” — getting the folks who are on the receiving end of what you’re putting out there to perceive your message as signal (worth paying attention to) rather than noise (to be ignored).
The inherent tension — especially in marketing and advertising — is that what’s important to the person who sends a message is not necessarily what’s important to the person who reads it. Failing to take that into account can often result in poorly received communications. I’ve personally experienced a very simple example of this that occurs all the time in corporate email environments. Anyone who spend enough time in large enough companies inevitably spends a fair amount of time in any given day sifting through dozens and perhaps hundreds of emails. For me, it‘s been a time and productivity suck, and like many people, I developed conscious and semi-conscious techniques for prioritizing things on the fly. One of the semi-conscious techniques I adopted was that I tended to gloss over any email with the ubiquitous Very Important flag set. That seems counter-intuitive, but it’s what I did.
Here‘s why. Those emails are typically from some administrative department charged with communicating globally with employees of the company. For example, an employee from finance needs to get the word out about a change to the rules for expense reports for reimbursement. To this person this is a Very Important piece of information, and she flags this message “appropriately” and sends it to the entire company. The first part of the problem is that this kind of behavior is the rule rather than the exception. Since a large percentage of the broadcast emails that get sent out are very important to the departmental person who sends each one out, a correspondingly large percentage of broadcast emails from administrative departments land in employees‘ email boxes marked Very Important.
The second part of the problem is this: people are wired to be good at separating what’s truly important (the signal) from what isn’t (the noise) and to quickly make associations that will help them identify which is which. I’m no exception. For my part, after enough time, two things quickly became obvious. First, administrative emails are seldom even relevant to me, let alone “Very important.” Second, if an email is marked “Very Important” it’s almost certainly a broadcast email from an administrative department. After all, my boss never marks his emails “Very Important.” Most likely (and correctly) he knows I’ll prioritize his emails. And if there was something that was truly very important, he’d call or visit me personally in my office.
And so the “Very Important” flag quickly becomes the corporate near-equivalent of junk mail. Sure, I’ll get to those emails. But they certainly aren’t the ones that I jump to in a list of 40.
I remember a time quite a while ago when I was one of those people in one of those departments. It actually wasn’t a huge company, and the department I was in was Tech Support. Whenever I had to send out an important "tech" notification, say, that the file server would be down for a certain period over the weekend for maintenance, I’d deliberately come up with some entertaining and unique subject line. And in fact, I’d try to make the contents of the announcement somewhat clever as well. I’ll admit, there was a certain element of my personality that wanted attention regardless. But more importantly, I wanted people to actually associate emails from tech support with something that would be entertaining to read regardless. In effect, I was writing those emails (in my own little way) to be more like the kinds of commercials that people enjoy watching.
And I never marked them important.