The Communication Index^TM

By: Burkey Belser |  6/1/2006

Communication is hard. And there is ample evidence that this is so, war being the best example. But on the less dangerous ground of business-to-business or business-to-consumer communications, the results are little better.

Recently, I was asked to keynote at the National Institutes of Health Plain Language Awards Ceremony. They invited me because of my experience as the designer of Nutrition Facts, Drug Facts and many, many years ago, the EnergyGuide, I seized the opportunity to share my thoughts about communication on a wider scale. It is obvious to me that plain language is only one of the issues that contributes to communication—or the lack of it.

Readability Is One Factor
If you’re interested in the plain-language movement, you may have run into Robert Gunning’s Fog Index. Gunning developed a way to measure the readability of any piece of writing. His formula factors average sentence length and the number of polysyllabic words to calculate what he cleverly named the Fog Index—how difficult the writing is to read.

Material with a Fog Index of 12 or above reads at a college level and beyond. With a Fog Index of 7, People Magazine has the same readability as material read easily by seventh graders in school. Interestingly, according to Gunning’s research, adults normally buy and read material with a Fog Index four grade levels below their last year in school. Which partially explains the success of The Wall Street Journal, a paper that consistently presents complex subjects at a relatively low Fog Index of 12.

But readability is only one factor in effective communication. My goal was to identify the remaining components of communication and to learn whether we could create a Communication Index.

What Other Factors Affect Communication?
I am convinced there are only four:

1. The difficulty of the subject
2. The difficulty of the presentation (readability is part of this one)
3. The motivation of the audience
4. The relative expertise of the audience concerning the subject.

I believe these all submit to some sort of rough measure.

1. Difficulty of the subject. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is “easy” and 10 is “difficult,” you can imagine that “Dick And Jane” hovers close to 1 and String Theory backs up towards 10.

It doesn’t matter that you personally find String Theory a snap and give it a 2. What matters is that reasonable people agree that some subjects are easy and some are difficult. The Communication Index is not about you, personally. It’s about all of us. The process of designing Nutrition Facts was revelatory. I discovered that, as a designer, I was assuming levels of literacy that simply did not exist across the board. More on this later.

2. Difficulty of the presentation. Forget subject matter for a moment. How would you compare the presentation style and format of Peanuts with the look and feel of the IRS Tax Code? Most people, I think, would go like this:

3. Motivation of the audience. Some things I have to read, listen to or watch. Some things are discretionary. By analogy, if my car needs a wash, and I am not completely obsessive, then washing the car falls far down on my To-Do List. However, if I get a flat tire when I’m on the road, my motivation to fix it becomes very high. Imagine getting your teeth cleaned versus dealing with a serious illness.

4. Expertise of the audience. I call knowledge towards the low end of the scale “common knowledge.” These are things we have a modicum of familiarity with or could get up to speed on quickly. Toward the high end of the scale is knowledge held only by experts.

The four factors combine to predict the success of any act of communication like this:
Multiply the difficulty of the subject matter by the difficulty of the presentation then divide it by the motivation of the reader times the expertise of the audience. The result can be plotted along the Communication Index.

Why Millions Read Peanuts
Peanuts: Simple subject matter, simple presentation, highly motivated readers. And, if the audience is made up of living, breathing human beings, they are experts in the subject matter:

That’s as good as you can do on the Communication Index. I particularly like that the formula, stripped of numerical values, reads like this:

What I want sellers to recognize is that the motivation of the audience and its expertise are central to success in communicating—yet the seller has no control over either the audience’s interest in the subject as they approach the communication or in the audience’s knowledge of the subject. Forget this at your peril.

Why Technical Journals Aren’t on the Newsstand
Let’s try the Journal of Market Research. Tough subject matter presented without a care in the world for lay readers who are certainly not motivated to delve into the book because they know nothing about the science of market research.

In other words, the Journal of Market Research (and admittedly so) is Greek to all but subject-matter experts.

You Are What You Eat (and Read)
Let’s take one more example so you can see that even rough measures provide an accurate CI. The Nutrition
Facts label contains science that most people don’t understand. Unless you are in the medical profession, you probably don’t know how fat is metabolized or how carbohydrates exactly work.

Thus, for the Nutrition Label, subject difficulty (S) is fairly high. And since people generally care about their diets, motivation (M) is also high. But their expertise is low. To complete the formula, let’s modestly give the presentation quality (P) a low score. Call it a 1.

That’s a good score on the Communication Index. But let’s say you disagree with my value assignments. Suppose the general public was more knowledgeable about the nutrition science:

That is, Nutrition Facts has greater communications value for a more expert audience.

The Problem With Experts
I learned recently, by way of Charles Tilly’s nifty book Why? about the work of Russell Hardin. Hardin’s research suggests that a communication gap occurs whenever “super-knowers” address audiences who possess only “common knowledge.”

Super-knowers speak in jargon or, more aptly, code. Why do they speak in code? Because the effect of an expert pronunciation is law. In other words, experts are lawgivers.

Once an expert code is established, it creates a barrier to non-experts. For lawgivers, that’s the way things should be: “This is the way it’s done,” or “I understand, but you can’t,” or, perhaps, “I’ve spent a lifetime learning to understand this stuff, and you’re not going to make it so simple that any Tom, Jane or Harry can challenge my livelihood and professional stature.”

The reaction of non-experts receiving the code is just the opposite. “I don’t understand, but I think I can and should.” And “Why can’t this be simplified? Has it always been this way?” Or:

“I’ve had to listen to this stuff for a lifetime. I’m sick and tired of it and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

It’s not that experts are bad people. They may not even be aware they’re creating a communication gap. Indeed, for the expert, communication flows because of the code! Every profession has this blind spot. The result is immense. Speaking only in code limits communication of important ideas that affect the health and safety of others. But only the experts understand the message. The communication gap becomes dangerous to everyone in a pandemic, for example.

On an everyday scale, the gap becomes dangerous to health and future of a business when the value of its products or services are not understood by the people they could help.

Why Should Designers and Their Clients Use the Communication Index?
The first reason is sneaky. But we must fight fire with fire. We will fight the code givers with code. Code givers respect only code. They are cowed by the laws of other experts.

Are you an expert in communication? Damn right, you are. Do you have an advanced degree in communicationology? Not important. The Communication Index gives you the equivalent of a Ph. D. — the ammunition you need to defend your efforts to improve communication.

The second reason is that design is important. With poor communications about important matters,

(1) you may die
(2) your customers and friends may die
(3) your children may die
(4) your mother may die
(5) your pets may die
(6) your customers, friends, children, mother and pets may be seriously injured.

That’s the equivalent of “war” that I mentioned at the start of this paper. But there are other reasons to use the Communication Index. With poor communications about your firm’s goals,

(1) your initiatives will fail
(2) your revenues will fall
(3) your job will be in jeopardy
(4) your career will suffer
(5) your spouse will probably divorce you.

Well maybe not that last one, but I saw no other way to end except humor.