Chapter 2: Knowing your Audience
The morning after the board meeting, Marcus sat with two versions of the same finding. The capability heat map: technically excellent, ten minutes of explanation, no traction. Diane's sentence: "Only one of our five faculties has structured employer partnerships, and our entire strategy depends on industry-connected graduates." Same insight. The sentence did in ten seconds what the heat map had failed to do in ten minutes. Marcus then listed the audiences who needed this finding: the board, Sandra's academic team, Tom Beaulieu, Priya's international recruitment team, frontline advisors, three employer associations. Identical evidence. Six fundamentally different conversations. This chapter gives you the tool for managing that complexity: the stakeholder communication map, which tells you who needs what, in what register, in what format, and at what moment in the Design4 cycle.
What You'll Be Able To Do
By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to:
- Build a stakeholder communication map before you prepare a single slide or document, knowing who needs what, in what register, and at what point.
- Take one architecture finding and express it in the terms used by at least three different audiences, without losing the core insight.
- Predict the questions a specific stakeholder will ask, and design the communication to answer them before they are asked.
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