Informing and persuading decision-makers

Research shows several things we can do to help decision-makers take action. The most important one: focus a document on setting out and memorably illustrating its most important messages. By David Walker.

When it comes to communications, decision-makers mostly like the same things as everyone else. But they differ from the rest of the population in two important ways.

First, even more than most people, decision-makers have many demands on their time and attention.

Second, decision-makers have to make a lot more decisions than most other people.

The sheer volume of demands on organisation leaders and top managers is sometimes hard for outsiders to understand. The best decision-makers manage this load in part by cutting down the time they devote to each decision. They rely on staff to deliver them clear alternatives and concise background information.

And whether they are good or bad, fast or slow, decision-makers feel the weight of the demands they are being asked to make.

All that means decision-makers have a set of particular communications needs. In particular, they want to understand what to do, with the least possible time and effort, for the greatest possible advantage. Your document should help them do that.

Help decision-makers decide right away

Because top decision-makers have so many decisions to make, they love documents that set out clearly what they need to know to make a decision right away. This is what authors of reports and other long documents most need to remember. Decision-makers typically like information sources which implicitly say: "This is complete and authoritative; read this and you'll be ready to make the best possible decision". Most of the time, decision-makers do not like more information; they like recommendations for choices, often with information about alternative options. And decision-makers particularly like "sticky ideas" – stuff that they can remember and talk about once they've chosen an option, and that other people will remember and talk about after the decision-maker says it.

You may at one time have thought that what decision-makers really liked would have more nuance and depth. But over time you'll likely interact more with people like government ministers and departmental chiefs and business CEOs and board members and strategists of every kind. You may present to boards or steering groups. You'll make more business decisions of your own. And you'll probably find that in a crunch moment, few good decision-makers wants all that much data. They just want the right data – the relatively few pieces of information that will make the biggest difference.

Decision-makers want documents and reports that point to those key pieces of information and explain why they matter. Many of them want to hear short stories – and the shorter and more dramatic, the better. Many like clear and memorable messages; if there's a complex message, they like a narrative that condenses it to understandable dimensions. They generally prefer messages with one point to messages with 12. They like pithy titles that everyone can remember. They like it when a report is so well written that whole slabs of it are quoted by other people. They like stuff they can talk about easily in presentations, without feeling like they are reciting the dinner menu. If you can take a housing policy and boil it down to "build more homes where people want to live", and it's a reasonable representation of a 50-page policy document ... well then, to a first approximation, decision-makers will be happy. And they'll be happy because you've given them a rule they can use both to make a decision and to communicate it to everyone else.

To the extent you provide analysis, break it down into bite-sized pieces that they can absorb easily. As former Commonwealth Productivity Commissioner Gary Banks puts it: "You cannot expect ... the ultimate decision-maker about a policy or a strategy to be wading through hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff. So you've got to break it down."

This decision-making reality is one reason we always stress the importance of working on clear and persuasive key messages from early in a report's creation.

Brief, timely, pragmatic: The science on decision-maker messaging

Much of this analysis is supported by research. Some of the best work we've seen in this area is from public policy specialist Professor Paul Cairney and organisational psychologist Professor Richard Kwiatkowski. In 2017 they combined their skills to write a paper called "How to communicate effectively with policymakers: combine insights from psychology and policy studies". Its findings have relevance outside the narrow world of political decision-making.

They have one overall message for communication with political decision-makers: See the world from the decision-maker's perspective. They start out by describing an often overlooked reality: "Policymakers cannot pay attention to all the things for which they are responsible, or process all of the information they could use to make decisions." Or to put it another way: when policymakers make a decision, you will think that they have overlooked various issues, and you may often be right. The trick is to communicate all of the messages that a policymaker most needs to know, and to understand which messages those are in each case.

Cairney and Kwiatkowski make an important point: everyone uses short cuts to help them speed up decision-making. Those short cuts always include both "rational" information-sorting and "irrrational" gut feelings, habits and the like. For people in power, hired (or sometimes elected) to make decisions fast, short cuts are the only alternative that will let them survive with sanity intact. Cairney and Kwiatkowski's paper is worth quoting in detail here:

"We use the term ‘irrational’ provocatively, to criticise an often-expressed sense that ‘fast thinking’ hinders the use of evidence in policy: the fairytale that heroic scientists are thwarted by villainous politicians drawing on their emotions and deeply held beliefs in a ‘post truth’ world. Rather, policymakers face unusually strong and constant pressures on their cognition and emotion. They need to gather information quickly and effectively, often in highly charged political atmospheres, so they develop heuristics to allow them to make what they believe to be good choices. Perhaps their solutions seem to be driven more by their values and emotions than a ‘rational’ analysis of the evidence, often because we hold them to an information processing standard that no human being can reach. If so, and if they have high confidence in their heuristics, they may dismiss criticism of their decision-making process as biased and naïve. Under those circumstances, repeatedly stating the need for ‘rational’ and ‘evidence-based policymaking’ is pointless, and naively ‘speaking truth to power’ counterproductive."

And Cairney and Kwiatkowski's solution? The people who advise decision-makers should stop feeling sorry that decision-makers use some crude short cuts to make decisions, and accept that these imperfect techniques arise from universal limitations and biases. And they should frame their advice so that the people who need to absorb it can actually do so.

The two academics have a three-step recipe for their readers:

Understand you should not bombard policymakers with information.
Find the right time to intervene – in windows when a problem moves suddenly into focus and policymakers are ready to receive new information.
Engage with real-world policymaking rather than waiting for an orderly policy process (which in many cases will never show up).

Know your decision-maker

The know-your-audience rule applies throughout communications, and it applies when your primary audience is a small group of decision-makers or even an individual.

Understanding decision-makers takes more work than understanding many other audiences. But success is far more likely when you:

Understand that small audience on a personal level. Think about what their working days look like and the issues they face.
Understand their approaches and motives. Why are they going to look at your document? Do they like the challenge of solving this problem, or see it as work they must do? How deeply will they dive? What will they focus on? What stands the best chance of capturing their attention?
- If possible, identify what keeps them up at night, and empathise.
- Also if possible – and it's hard, though very worthwhile – find out what sorts of approaches and solutions they like and don't like, and adjust your presentation accordingly.
- Try to check whether they have ever been pitched a similar idea before, and what they liked and disliked in it.
Structure your analysis to be logical, concise and comprehensive.
Offer a solution that will satisfy their needs.
Spell out the clear actions for your audience to take. If your document is a report, these will be the report's relevant recommendations.
Identify points of resistance to your proposed actions, and address them.
Be ready for tough and challenging questioning.

Cater to different communication styles

Different decision-makers also famously have different communication styles.

Cairney and Kwiatkowski have specific recommendations on the communications style you should adopt. People seeking to influence policymakers should "adapt framing strategies specifically to the cognitive biases we think are at play":

"If policymakers are combining cognitive and emotive processes, combine facts with emotional appeals."
"If policymakers are reflecting a group emotion, frame new evidence to be consistent with the ‘lens’ through which actors in those groups or coalitions understand the world."
"If policymakers are making quick choices based on their values and moral judgements, tell simple stories with a hero and a clear moral."

And of course, show some respect for these decision-makers. The job's usually not as easy as it looks.

Talking with other people who have worked with your decision-makers will help you to identify their communications styles. It will likely also boost your understanding of their communication preferences:

The one-pager is the most popular form of briefing for people facing a single difficult decision. Include the elements from your key messages that drive towards action. You may be able to omit some of the context.
Some will thrive on written documents: their direct reports will tell you "She reads everything". Make sure the body of your document is crystal-clear. Devote plenty of time to your key messages and the executive summary; they will still drive perceptions of the rest of your document.
Some like to talk a problem through. They'll need plenty of information that can be structured as a conversation. They are more likely to listen to stories, and use them well. The former Australian prime minister Paul Keating is one famous example of a talk-oriented learner; many politicians can absorb unusual amounts of information in verbal briefings.
Many like presentations that include strong visuals. For these people, make sure you know your document's strongest visuals and best dot-points. The best of them should be in your key messages, ready to drop into Powerpoint.
An increasing number of leaders have learnt that they are more likely to get a succinct summary if they ask to get messages by email or even text. Make sure your key messages can be adapted for such people.

Decision-makers who take verbal briefings or slide presentations will often interrupt with questions. This can be unnerving, but prepare to roll with it if it happens. They're usually seeking the fastest way to fiill in blanks in a picture they're built up over years. Make sure you're ready to dive into some detail if needed. Hyperlinks in your report (and to your report body from a presentation) can help you here, though nothing beats sheer mastery of your document's details.

Store ammunition to support your case

However your arguments eventually get in front of decision-makers, you will need to be ready to present detail. Some leaders like to drill down on key points, or have an aide do it. Leaders will often question key conclusions when they present practical difficulties: for instance, when a key governance figure, partner, audience group or individual is expected to push back on some conclusion. Media may leap on a finding they expect will be controversial.

For these times, you have your detailed reasoning in the body of the report. Like the key messages, this should be clear and readable. If your key messages are identified and clear, you'll find it easier to enforce clarity in most of the report's main body.

If the reasoning in the body of the report threatens to get complex, prepare to shunt technical details to an appendix. Appendices also give you greater freedom to use technical language designed for experts.

The rework challenge

If your report aims to get a decision but doesn't have a clear message about what decision-makers should decide, you may want to rework it to add that message. Similarly, if your report recommends using scarce resources on an issue that is not likely to cause anyone problems, you'll have trouble getting attention. If your report recommends further study to maybe come up with a solution later, you'll need to highlight why the gap in knowledge is big and will likely cause trouble down the track. In all of these cases, you need an overarching story about why your issue matters – aboiut why people should bother.

A huge number of documents and reports get delivered without a clear overarching story about why they matter. Face it: if someone gave you 200 pages of evidence about some problem that you didn't care about and none of your friends and family did either, would you read it? No, you wouldn't. Decision-makers are no different.

So if the work you've done looks like coming up with a report that will go on the don't-bother list, you need to rework it so that some pieces of its contents can be picked up and used. That may mean putting most of what you've done in an appendix, or even cutting it entirely.