I just finished this dinky little book by Giles Turnbull. It’s called the Agile Comms Handbook. It is, unsurprisingly, a really easy read and you can finish it in about 1-2 sittings, if you are so inclined. (It’s good, be inclined).

So much of this book is common sense, but that special category of common sense that have to make an effort to re-learn.

What is ‘agile comms’ though? Sounds fancy!

Turnbull defines it as:

“a set of techniques to help teams communicate clearly and creatively about work in progress.”

It means being as snappy, jargon-free, and as honest/transparent as you can be. You can still do detail, just make sure it’s in the right place.

Organisations of all stripes are probably guilty of baggy comms to some degree, probably to a very great degree.

For example, I would argue that libraries (generally speaking, don’t @ me!) are not so hot at communicating their worth to library users and prospective library users. In short, we don’t sell ourselves very well. I think this is because, as librarians, we know how wonderful the library is, and how bloody essential, actually. So, we produce A LOT of text, telling users all the things we do. 8-page newsletters, I’m looking at you!

But why does it even matter? Just read our long comms, they’re great!

Well, it matters because you could be super busy (Turnbull argues everyone, is all the time) or neurodivergent (personally, I really need to be interested and/or be certain of a good return of investment, to read the really long boring things).

If you are either or both of the above, then chances are you won’t read all the things. You’ll probably skim. One thing is certain though, unless you have some excellent and pretty cavalier email rules in place, you will, at some point, likely be feeling way busier, swamped, stressed, burnt out, and/or defeated by word count.

The Agile Comms Handbook has a bunch of good suggestions from getting all those baggy comms in shape. These include the simple but effective layering of your information into a “lure, context and detail” layers.

For me the main takeaway was the idea that:

“We can communicate in a way that makes the smallest possible demand on busy people’s time and attention”

More of this!

The Agile Comms Handbook is available to buy from Content Design London.