Good Communication Is a Selection Exercise (Part 3 of 4)
How to filter your message around what your recipient actually needs
PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
8/25/2026
This article is Part 3 of a four-part series exploring the Communication Judgement Framework.
We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve asked someone for a quick update and ended up receiving a long-winded answer, while we patiently wait for the information we actually wanted… which eventually arrives right at the end of the story.
This may have happened to you at work, or even with a friend or family member. Perhaps you’ve been guilty of this yourself. I know I have.
The problem isn’t necessarily that any of the information is wrong or irrelevant to the wider context.
It’s that not all contextually relevant information is relevant all the time.
This is where selection comes in. And you are the filter.
A quick recap: The Communication Judgement Framework
If you’re new to this series, the Communication Judgement Framework (CJF) is a four-step process I’ve developed to help professionals make better communication decisions:
1. CLARIFY the objective
What am I actually trying to achieve?
2. DIAGNOSE the situation
What are the variables shaping this particular situation?
3. SELECT your message
What should I include, and what should I leave out?
4. DELIVER effectively
How do I communicate it in a way that lands?
Effective communication isn’t only about how you say something or the words you use. It’s also about the decisions you make about what to communicate in the first place.
In the first two articles, we looked at Clarify and Diagnose. Today, we’ll take a deep-dive into Select.
A. What should the communication enable?
Before selecting the information that belongs in your message, establish the intended outcome of the communication.
In most professional situations, you want the recipient to do one or more of four things:
Understand — grasp information, context or a situation.
Evaluate — assess an idea, option, recommendation or problem.
Decide — make a choice, give approval or reach a conclusion.
Act — do something, respond or take a next step.
This is slightly different from your own communication objective (Step 1 of the CJF).
For example:
Your objective might be to gain approval. For that to happen, the recipient may need to understand your proposal, evaluate its merits and risks, and ultimately decide whether to approve it.
So, before selecting your message, consider the intended outcome and work backwards. It gives you a much better starting point.
B. How to select your message
Now let’s move onto the crux of this.
Over the years, one question has been a recurring point of confusion for clients: “But how do I actually decide what to include?”
Four considerations have come up repeatedly in my coaching sessions and now form part of how I approach message selection:
SELECT — What information do they need?
FILTER — What can I leave out or defer?
PRIORITISE — What matters most in this situation?
STRUCTURE — In what order do they need the information?
1. Select: What information do they need?
This is where the recipient and the intended outcome become your starting point.
Ask yourself:
What does this person need from me in order to understand, evaluate, decide or act?
This is also where things become less straightforward.
A question that often comes up is: “How am I supposed to know what my manager needs to make that decision if I’ve never been in their position?”
Sometimes, it may not be obvious.
Recognising what another person needs from you is in itself a judgement skill. It develops through experience, observation and exposure to different professional situations. Over time, you begin to recognise patterns. However, role is only one clue. Individual differences such as communication and decision-making styles can matter too.
When you’re unsure, look at what they’re responsible for, the pressures they’re under and the questions they tend to ask. Frameworks and prompts can help, but no script can anticipate every person or situation.
That’s one reason why communication judgement is a skill rather than a formula.
Now imagine you want your CEO to approve an idea.
✓ Step 1: Your objective = gain approval.
✓ Step 2: You’ve diagnosed the situation = you’re speaking to a senior decision-maker, they already understand the broader context, their time is limited and budgets are currently tight.
→ Next is Step 3: Select your message.
Rather than describing everything about your idea, consider: What does the CEO need in order to approve it?
They might need to:
understand what you’re proposing
evaluate whether the expected outcome justifies the investment
consider risks and trade-offs
decide whether the idea is worth pursuing
That starts to tell you what to include in your message:
your recommendation
the expected outcome
the business rationale
the required investment
relevant evidence
the decision you need from them
Note that if you change the intended outcome, the information requirements change too.
2. Filter: What do they not need?
Selecting information is just as much an act of exclusion as it is of inclusion.
Something can be relevant to the wider topic without being relevant to this particular communication, with this person, at this moment in time.
Coming from a marketing background, I think of this almost like keyword stuffing. Adding more keywords doesn’t necessarily make a piece of content better. At some point, it simply becomes stuffing.
Professional communication has its own version, which I’ve come to think of as “message stuffing.”
Also, there’s sometimes a temptation to demonstrate competence by showing how much work we’ve done or how much we know.
But completeness ≠ usefulness.
Imagine your manager urgently needs to approve one item today. And, there’s another issue that will eventually require their approval too, but it can wait until next week.
Do you need to introduce both? Probably not.
Introducing the second request now could create another discussion or distract from the decision you actually need.
A useful test is:
If I add this information, does it make it harder for the recipient to understand, evaluate, decide or act?
If the answer is yes, consider removing or deferring it.
There is an important caveat: if a risk, cost, limitation or trade-off is material to someone’s decision, it belongs in the conversation even if mentioning it makes your preferred outcome less likely.
Sometimes good judgement means providing more context. Sometimes it means surfacing an inconvenient risk. And sometimes it means leaving out perfectly valid information because the recipient doesn’t need it right now.
A good message = the most useful message for this objective, audience and moment.
3. Prioritise: What matters most?
Once you’ve decided what belongs, the next decision is:
What deserves the most attention?
This is where diagnosing the situation becomes especially important.
Imagine you’ve established that:
Budget is constrained
→ Cost, value and trade-offs become more important.
The situation carries significant risk
→ Evidence, consequences and mitigation deserve greater emphasis.
Your manager has five minutes before another meeting
→ The headline, recommendation and decision required probably need to come first.
The recipient is unfamiliar with the issue
→ Some additional context may be essential.
A client is worried about an outcome
→ Impact, reassurance and next steps may matter more than technical detail.
Another useful way to prioritise is to imagine that your time could run out at any moment. Your manager might suddenly need to leave for another meeting, the conversation might be interrupted, or you may simply have less time than expected.
Ask yourself:
If the conversation ended in 30 seconds, what would they absolutely need to know?
This shows what information deserves to come first and is an indicator of relative importance.
4. Structure: Don’t replay your thinking chronologically
We often explain something in the order in which we experienced or processed it.
A colleague raises a problem. You check the figures, speak to Operations, investigate several alternatives and eventually reach a recommendation.
So when you explain it to your manager, you begin with: “Sarah came to me and said…” and take them through the entire journey.
But that’s the chronology of your thinking.
Chronological recall may be appropriate in an investigation. In many professional situations, however, your audience needs the result of your thinking, not a play-by-play of your thinking.
If your manager already understands the broader situation and primarily needs your recommendation, the useful version might go something like this:
“I recommend we do X. It should achieve Y while keeping us within the existing budget. I looked at three alternatives, and this gives us the strongest outcome with the lowest implementation risk.”
If they ask further questions, you can elaborate.
So, structure it around the order in which the recipient needs to understand it, with the highest-priority information first.
How message structures help
When giving a concise professional update, a structure such as:
Status → Issue → Next Step
works because it reflects what the recipient is likely to need, i.e.:
Where are we?
Is there anything I need to know about?
What happens next?
Similarly, a recommendation might use:
Context → Recommendation → Benefit
when the recipient needs enough context to understand why the recommendation is being made.
Once you understand what the recipient needs, you can use an existing structure, adapt one or create a structure that fits the situation.
Put it into practice
Before your next important email, update or conversation, write down everything you’re thinking of including.
Then run it through four questions:
Select
What does this person actually need from me?Filter
What could I remove or defer without making it harder for them to understand, evaluate, decide or act?Prioritise
What matters most in this particular situation?Structure
What should they hear first?
Then compare the message you started with to the one you’re left with.
The goal isn’t necessarily to make it shorter. It’s to make every part of it earn its place.
Next in this series...
So far we’ve explored the first three steps of the Communication Judgement Framework:
Step 1: Clarify your objective
Step 2: Diagnose the situation
Step 3: Select your message
Next time we’ll look at the final stage:
Step 4: Deliver effectively — How to adapt the way you communicate so your message actually lands.
_ _ _
If this article made you think differently or taught you something new, consider subscribing to my newsletter on Substack.
I write about communication, judgement, and the decisions that shape professional success, sharing practical frameworks, real-world examples, and tools to help you think more clearly so you communicate more effectively.
Connect
natascha@confidentverbalist.com
© 2026 Confident Verbalist, a brand owned by Human Defined LLC. All rights reserved.
Newsletter
Practical communication insights, frameworks, and real-world examples delivered directly to your inbox.