When you think about the different ways you could communicate your research findings to nonresearchers, you probably think about the “communication products” or “outputs” you could create.
Such terms can be misleading because they imply that communication is a manufacturing process. In fact, it’s a design process.
As someone engaged in research or science communication, your task isn’t simply to churn out so many social posts, slide decks, reports, videos, etc. Your job is to design different communication methods, each of these tailored to the intended audience and your strategic communication goal.
An effective design process requires a certain amount of planning—but how much is enough? That can be a tricky question to answer.
The Risks of Underplanning Your Communications
Many of the clients I’ve worked with over the past 25 years have been underplanners. Doers by nature, they’ve tended to rush into communication activities without pausing to ask critical design questions, such as:
- Who is our audience, really? How can we get to know them intimately and embrace their perspective on the world?
- How will the audience interact with what we’re creating? Where and how will they encounter it? What else is going on in that space? What do we want the audience to think and feel as they engage with our content or event?
- How should what we’re creating serve the audience? What should it enable them to do? How will it empower them to shift their perspective or take the next step toward a wise, research-informed decision?
- How will we know the communication method has achieved its goals? What will signal that the design is working? How will we observe or measure the degree of success?
The biggest risk of underplanning is getting caught in the Busy Trap. When this happens (I’ve been there!), you fixate on details and what’s right in front of you but overlook the big picture.
You might be underplanning your communications if any of the following situations sound familiar:
- You find yourself to scrambling to produce communication products at the last minute.
- You know what you’ll be doing next Tuesday, but you can’t identify the concrete outcomes you need to achieve in the next three months.
- It feels like the dial of your work life is set to Reactive, not Proactive.
- You have trouble articulating exactly what you want your audience to think, feel, and do after interacting with a specific communication product.
The Risks of Overplanning
At the other extreme, I’ve also seen clients overplan their communication activities, and that tendency invites just as much risk as its opposite.
As a deep thinker I can relate. If I don’t keep my eye on the target outcomes and the timeline, I can so get caught up the conceptualizing stage of a project that I forget to shift into operational gear.
You’ll know you’re overplanning if you find yourself asking doom-and-gloom “What If?” questions. For example:
- What if we’re not sure how our intended audience will receive the communication campaign?
- What if the first phase of our strategy doesn’t work? Do we have a backup plan? What’s the backup to the backup?
- What if we can’t find an animator who can work within our budget? Should we be planning to learn how to do the animation ourselves?
- What if we invest time and effort in producing a beautiful impact report, and then no one reads it?
No one can predict the future, but while you sit calculating and recalculating the odds of success, you’ll miss your window to act and make a meaningful impact.
Finding Your Goldilocks Approach
Only you and your team can determine how much planning is too much and how much is too little. Like Goldilocks in the cottage of the bear family, you have to experiment to discover your “just right” approach.
Here are three tips to help you do that:
- Focus on outcomes
Go all-in on your goals before you start to do any planning. If you’re an underplanner, avoid the temptation to skip over the vital step of defining what success will look like. If you’re an overplanner, you probably love visioning exercises, but make sure you fully commit to the picture you’ve painted in such detail.
Only once you’re clear on your destination can you determine the amount of structure needed to guide the team there. The vision should shape the plan, not vice versa.
If the vision is explicit and your team is highly skilled, you may find that you can get away with identifying a few milestones and arranging a weekly check-in. On the other hand, if the vision is still emerging and you’ll be shading in some of the elements as you start to act, then you may need a more detailed work plan. If the team is tackling new or complex tasks, a step-by-step plan could also be the most effective way forward.
- Budget your planning time
Decide at the beginning of your project how much time you’ll invest in upfront planning and how much planning you’ll weave into the development process. If you know you tend to underplan, that means consciously including “planning time” in your overall time estimate for the project. If you typically overplan, that means setting a cap on the amount of time you’ll spend discussing before you launch into doing.
Your planning time doesn’t have to take place in one chunk at the beginning of a project. Insisting on that traditional approach can lead both underplanners and overplanners into trouble. If you find it challenging to plan your communication activities, or find that planning kills the team’s momentum, you might want to consider a more integrated, flexible approach.
I’m a big fan of agile project management methods, having experienced them when I worked hand-in-hand with software developers as an eLearning designer. When you take an agile approach, you do minimal planning at the beginning of a project and iterative rounds of reflection and planning in response to audience feedback.
- Start with reflection
Begin any planning process by reflecting on what you’ve learned from your past projects. When I debrief a project with a client, I typically use this short list of questions:
- What worked well?
- What could have worked better?
- What did you learn?
- How can you carry the learning forward?
Reflecting on past communication activities, including the planning you did or didn’t do, helps you and your team develop your own “just right” practices for planning. As a bonus, it also helps you recognize your ability to adapt and pivot, boosting your confidence to try new things and reach for ambitious goals.
As you, like Goldilocks, try out different planning approaches, watch for signs that you could be either underplanning or overplanning. With vigilance and practice, you’ll arrive at the method that’s custom-made to accomplish your vision for transforming research into impact.
Want help finding your Goldilocks approach to planning? Book a free 30-minute consult. Together, we’ll examine your current planning process and look for opportunities to improve it.
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