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. This is where many leaders stumble. They confuse broad with generic.
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.
Editor's note — where this sits
This essay sits in the Wiring layer of the Idea to Value system — the layer concerned with how meaning moves between people. It examines what goes wrong when communication is designed for the sender's convenience rather than the reader's attention — and what it looks like to design it the other way around.
The Idea to Value system — five layers
Purpose, audience, context, value, content
In the Communication Superpower workbook, written communication is built around five questions — less a framework than a discipline of attention:
Quick reference — the framework
From the Communication Superpower workbook
PAVCC — a discipline of attention for written communication
Five questions that force the writer to respect the reader. Not a checklist — a way of thinking before you write.
Purpose
What are you trying to achieve?
Not what you want to say — what needs to change as a result of this communication. If you cannot answer that in one sentence, it is not ready to be sent.
Audience
Who is this for, really?
Not the nominal recipient — the actual human being who will encounter this, with their existing knowledge, concerns, and approximately forty-five seconds of available attention.
Value
Why should they care?
Not why the organisation cares — why does this matter to the person reading it, in their role, in their current situation.
Context
What moment are they in?
Are they anxious about a change they didn't choose? Already informed and looking for detail? The same content lands differently depending on where the reader is standing.
Content
Is this actually useful — or merely complete?
Completeness is the enemy of clarity. Most communications are exhausting because someone felt responsible for including everything rather than disciplined enough to include only what matters.
These five questions force the writer to respect the reader. That is harder than it sounds.
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. It does not ask the reader to wade through geopolitics to find the football results. It creates clear sections, signposted pathways, and a structure that allows each reader to navigate to what matters to them — while remaining aware that other sections exist.
Workplace communication rarely operates this way.
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 — and then wonder why critical information fails to land.
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 material that is irrelevant to the person reading it, it might as well not exist. The reader's eye moves to what concerns them and stops. Everything else becomes noise — and critically, the thing you needed them to notice gets lost inside it.
Think like an editor. A change programme affecting five different functions does not need one communication — it needs five distinct communications sharing a common thread, each speaking to the specific concerns, questions, and context of the people in that function. The thread is the vision. The supplements are the substance.
Create pathways. Design for self-selection. Let people navigate to what is relevant rather than demanding they excavate it from what is not.
Clarity is not about saying more. It is about making it easy to find what matters.
Communication as curation
In times of change, communication is not about broadcasting. It is about curating meaning for different communities.
The distinction matters because broadcasting assumes a passive audience — recipients who will absorb what is sent. Curating assumes an active audience — people who will only engage with what is relevant to them, and who will disengage the moment it stops being so.
When you design for diversity of attention, you increase the probability of understanding. When you treat a broad audience as a uniform one, you produce artefacts that look thorough and do nothing.
Clarity is not a volume problem. It is an editorial problem.
A broad audience is not a generic audience. The editor knows this. The communicator who treats it as one has already lost the room.
From the Cultivated library
Communication Superpower
Workbook · Digital PDF
The full system behind this essay — including the PAVCC framework expanded in depth, and the practical tools for designing communication that reaches the people it needs to reach.
£21.99
Get the workbook →Workshops & Keynotes
In-person or virtual · Bespoke
For organisations navigating change who need communication that actually lands — designed for the diversity of their audience, not compressed into a single artefact that serves no one well.
Enquire
Start the conversation →
