Unexpected communication violates expectations

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across?

We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. We can use surprise to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

Good communication gets attention (surprise, by breaking patterns) and holds attention (interest, by creating mystery, generating curiosity, highlighting a knowledge gap).

#communication

See also:

• Communicating ideas requires overcoming the curse of knowledge
• Simple communication expresses the core of an idea
• Concrete communication explains in terms of human actions and senses
• Credible communication carries its own credentials
• Emotional communication makes people feel something
• Story-based communication elicits effective responses