I had never really appreciated how important it is to boil down each discussion, each decision, each diagram to suit the moment you are in. I hated (and rebelled against) the “elevator pitch” concept for many years – it was ridiculous that you had to compact a brilliant idea down to a sentence.

However, reality is different – the people you need, to bring an idea to life, hear dozens of ideas a day. They haven’t been adsorbed by your world view for months or years. They won’t have the context or experience to see the nuances you’ve overcome to deliver such a brilliant product.

You have to start with something small and encapsulated and is where the elevator pitch fits in, have one ready. If asked, you can then expand on each point, but each chunk of information has to be digestible.

Where messages are easy to pass onto colleagues, they are more likely to repeat it. That simplicity allows it to be passed all the way to the top. Ideally you want a unique word or phrase they can mentally grab, as anything more than a single sentence will get mangled.  What I try and do is always sift through the many aspects of a situation and pull out the most pertinent terms, in that very specific context. This means I sometimes have to have a different version of the email / PPT / diagram for different stakeholders.