Much of the conventional wisdom offered today about how to “engage” audiences, get your content read online, keep attention of conference attendees and not put people to sleep in a class centers around the “fact” that people have short attention spans. A common limit is said to be seven minutes of content, with most advice centering around two to three minutes. We’re supposed to take all the detail out of our slides and show pictures, telling stories, so that we don’t lose our listeners.
There is much to be said about making information more digestible and engaging. Stories do capture our imagination and our interest more than dry theoretical expository. We can take it too far, however.
Recent research is showing the effects of a population becoming decreasingly capable of assimilating complex information and forming memorable comprehension. There is evidence that when we focus attention on reading complex language, for example, brain structures and neural pathways are built to specifically enhance our cognitive abilities. Conversely, when we don’t engage in such complex reading, those neural structures atrophy. In other words, if you want to get intellectually smarter, read a variety of complex content with compound sentence structures and a diverse vocabulary. If you want to get dumber, flip through the picture-book equivalent known as the internet, pulled by provocative headlines and click bait.
In the world of organizational learning, where I live, the “customers”of content within our company have great demands on their time. Efficiency is essential and people understandably get impatient with what they perceive as “wasted” time in reading content. I am no different. If I am reading something and it feels like the writer is duplicating messages or spending too much time with the lead-in, I feel like my life is being sucked away from me. But there are subjects and purposes of communication that simply require more time, more language and more mental effort to comprehend.
Task-oriented communication lends itself well to the efficient, sparse communication style. My team and I often exchange one word or even picture emails that completely convey what we need to, for example. But if the purpose of the communication is to prepare a leadership team for making a decision that will impact the company for the next decade, and the decision-makers need to be as thoroughly educated as possible prior to the decision being made, a twenty-page paper might not be enough.
We must be judicious as we select the content and length of our communications, so that the purpose is matched by the form of the communication. In the realm of developing leadership skills for example, I would recommend that every leader who has accountability for the strategic direction of a business read extensively about the field of strategy and its history, economics and geopolitics. What those leaders will gain is a better foundation from which to make critical decisions that will affect the lives of the company’s employees and their families for many years to come. But those leaders will also actually get smarter in the process, because they will be building the mental muscle that science shows is the result of heavy intellectual lifting.
Why not make your kids read Shakespeare, and while you’re at it, try a little bit yourself? The Bard is the true “smart pill” that you can swallow to kick up your brainpower.