The Briefer the Brief

I was reading a tiny book the other night when Dr. Seuss called me out.

Which, to be fair, feels like exactly the sort of thing Dr. Seuss would do.

The book was Seuss-isms, a little collection of the wisdom tucked inside his much bigger body of work. In the introduction, his wife, Audrey Geisel, included a poem Ted had once written about writing.

The point was essentially this:

There are already so many words in the world.

Don’t make people read more than they need.

And then came the line that stopped me:

“The briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader’s relief is.”

Well.

That explains a lot.

Because somewhere along the way, we seem to have decided that important ideas need to sound important.

More words. Bigger words. Longer explanations. More slides. More acronyms. More frameworks explaining the framework.

We take something useful and surround it with so much evidence of our own expertise that the person who actually needs it has to dig their way through.

And I understand the temptation.

When you know a lot about something, you want people to know that you know a lot about something.

When something matters deeply to you, three sentences can feel insufficient. When an idea is complicated, simplifying it can feel dangerously close to oversimplifying it.

But those aren’t the same thing.

Simple isn’t the absence of depth.

Sometimes it’s evidence that somebody did the digging for you.

That might be one of the clearest ways I can explain what we’re trying to do at MoveMaker.

We aren’t interested in making people work harder than necessary to receive something useful.

Health is complicated.

Behavior is complicated.

Relationships are complicated.

Leadership is complicated.

Being a human being is extremely complicated.

The complexity is real.

But that doesn’t mean the experience of learning about it has to be miserable.

We can do the research.

We can read the studies.

We can wrestle with the nuance.

We can sort through seventeen competing explanations and decide what actually matters.

Then we can hand you the part you can use.

Maybe that’s a sentence.

Maybe it’s a story.

Maybe it’s a ridiculous animal who behaves suspiciously like someone you know.

Maybe it’s a song, a movement, a question, a snack or an idea that sticks in your head three days later while you’re standing in the grocery store.

That isn’t dumbing anything down.

It’s designing it well.

And perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to animals and humor and stories in work that is, underneath all of that, quite serious.

Dr. Seuss understood something important about humans.

You can talk about fear without giving a lecture about fear.

You can teach responsibility without announcing that today’s lesson is responsibility.

You can say something profound through a creature wearing a ridiculous hat.

The wrapping doesn’t determine the weight of the idea inside it.

Sometimes the wrapping is exactly what allows us to carry it.

That’s increasingly what I believe good communication—and good human experience design—should do.

Make the important thing easier to receive.

Not less accurate.

Not less intelligent.

Not less meaningful.

Just less unnecessarily difficult.

Because the goal isn’t to demonstrate how much we know.

The goal is for something we know to become useful to someone else.

And if we can accomplish that with fewer words, a better story and perhaps the occasional gorilla?

Even better.

Dr. Seuss would probably approve.

Or at least he’d appreciate that I finally stopped writing.

Move Like It Matters.