Page 91 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

80 TODAY’S BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

who don’t answer our WIIFY question are less likely to get one of those
precious few seats.
To be convincing, we also need to understand what forces will move
our audiences to saying yes to our requests and what forces are holding
them back from saying yes. Anne Grinols once referred to these forces as
driving and restraining forces. Your document is not complete unless you
have addressed your audience’s driving and restraining forces.
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It is also important that you understand how your audience will react
to the message. Their response (positive, neutral, negative), as we learned
in Chapter 3, will go a long way toward determining how you organize
the content of your messages using a direct or indirect approach.
To complicate matters further, in many cases our
messages have more than one audience. We need to
meet the information needs of multiple audiences
simultaneously. Robert Hokunson III works in infor-
mation technology for a large insurance and financial
services organization. One of his current responsibil-
ities is to write application-performance reports, which are designed to
report on problems that occur with the company’s technical applications.
He writes these reports for audiences with differing information needs,
high-level executives and application developers. He explains that when a
technical application fails, “the executives want answers to questions like:
How bad is it, how big of a problem is it, and how are we fixing it? The
developers want answers to questions like: How often does it happen,
what is causing it, where did it start, and what are the technical details?
You have to find the fine line between both audiences. You might need to
produce an extra slide in the deck with the technical details that can be
skimmed by the executives while answering the developers’ questions.”
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F3: Feeling

Once you are satisfied with your message’s format and filling, you can
move to the third step of the four-step process. In this step, you are deter-
mining whether your message strikes the appropriate tone and treats your
audience respectfully. As we learned in Chapter 1, feelings are relevant in
business even though we tend to be misguided by the notion that business
is rational. Think back to our advice in Chapter 4 where we discussed the