A Broad Audience Is Not a Generic Audience
Broad communication is not generic communication. Treating everyone the same is the fastest way to ensure no one understands.
Editor’s Note: This piece sits within Cultivated’s communication canon — exploring how clarity emerges not from broadcasting, but from designing attention. Communication is not transmission; it is curation.
A Broad Audience Is Not a Generic Audience
In every organisation, there is a moment when someone realises they need to speak to everyone at once.
A large change programme, for instance, asks people to move — into new roles, new expectations, new ways of working. It requires communication that is clear, targeted, and humane.
This is where many leaders stumble.
They confuse broad with generic.
A broad audience is not a single audience.
It is many audiences, layered together.
Treat them as one, and the message dissolves before it lands.
From PAC to PAVCC
In the Communication Superpower course we frame written communication around the guiding principles of:
Purpose — What are you trying to achieve?
Audience — Who is this for, really?
Context — What moment are they in? What medium?
Value — Why should they care?
Content — Is this actually useful, or merely complete?
This is less a framework than a discipline of attention.
It forces you to respect the reader.
The Sunday Broadsheet
When I was a child, I delivered Sunday newspapers.
They were enormous — swollen with supplements.
Politics, culture, finance, food, travel, sport — each folded into its own world.
No one read everything.
Everyone read something.
That is the genius of the broadsheet.
It assumes diversity, not uniformity.
Workplace communication rarely does.
Leaders often compress everything into a single artefact:
a dense deck, a sprawling wiki, a bloated playbook.
Efficient for the sender.
Exhausting for the reader.
A newspaper editor would never mix recipes, geopolitics, and football on the same page.
Yet organisations do this daily.
Attention Is Not Evenly Distributed
People will read deeply when something matters to them.
They will ignore ruthlessly when it does not.
The problem is rarely apathy.
The problem is design.
If critical information is buried in irrelevant material, it might as well not exist. Clarity is not about saying more.
It is about making it easy to find what matters.
Think like an editor.
Create supplements.
Design pathways.
Let people self-select what is relevant.
A Broad Audience Is Not a Generic Audience
In times of change, communication is not about broadcasting.
It is about curating meaning for different communities.
When you respect diversity of attention, you increase the odds of understanding. When you ignore it, you produce artefacts that look impressive and do nothing.
Clarity is not a volume problem.
It is an editorial problem.
A broad audience is not a generic audience, it is diverse. Cater for the diversity.
This piece forms part of Cultivated’s wider body of work on how ideas become valuable, and how better work is built.
To explore further:
→ Library — a curated collection of long-form essays
→ Ideas — developing thoughts and shorter writing
→ Learn — practical guides and tools from across the work
→ Work with us — thoughtful partnership for teams and organisations
