A summer reflection on communication and the art of leaving things out

Birte Orth-Freese, CEO, TE Communications Germany

Some holidays are so efficient that you need another break just to recover from them.

You have toured the old town, reached the viewpoint, tried the recommended restaurant and visited the cove supposedly known only to locals – along with three hundred other insiders. You have been everywhere, missed nothing of consequence and have the photographs to prove every item on the itinerary. The only thing you have rarely been is truly present.

Good holidays work differently. They are shaped not by the number of places visited, but by a certain generosity towards time: by hours that have not yet been allocated, by paths that need not lead anywhere in particular, and by a lunch that steadfastly refuses to end on schedule. Perhaps communication has something to learn from this.

Companies, too, are often remarkably adept at squeezing in every last piece of content. Each department contributes one more message, every project wants a mention, every nuance must be covered and every conceivable objection answered in advance. The result is a text that offends no one internally – and interests hardly anyone outside the organisation. A message designed to say everything often says one thing above all: no one here was able to make a choice.

Not every day needs a highlight

Holidays come under pressure as soon as every day is expected to be unforgettable. Sunrise on the mountain, breakfast at the hidden-gem cafe, a dose of culture, a boat trip and, in the evening, the restaurant with the view – after all, you may never be here again. Travel like this for long enough and you stop experiencing the place; what you experience instead is your own logistics.

Communication is driven by much the same ambition. Every post is expected to be relevant, surprising, emotional, strategic, topical and, if at all possible, viral too. Every press release marks a milestone, every product launch is a turning point and every appointment sends a powerful signal for the future.

The problem is not merely the exaggeration, but the uniformity it creates. If everything is significant, nothing is particularly significant in the end. By declaring every occasion an event, organisations diminish the very moments when something genuinely is at stake.

Good communication therefore needs a hierarchy. It must be able to distinguish between what could be said and what should be said. That sounds self-evident, yet in practice it is almost revolutionary, because leaving things out requires more judgement than adding them.

Adding something is easy: another figure, another argument, another paragraph of context. The harder question is what remains once everything that is accurate but not essential has been removed. Audiences can tell very quickly whether a text is pursuing an idea or merely transporting material. They are not, after all, a luggage rack.

Good planning leaves room for the unplanned

Naturally, a good holiday requires a degree of preparation. No one wants to exercise their precious spontaneity in front of a fully booked hotel, or spend the afternoon outside a closed museum reflecting on the virtues of having no plan. But planning succeeds when you do not constantly notice it. It offers direction without prescribing every step, and provides reassurance without turning the journey into an implementation schedule.

The same is true of communication strategies. A good strategy does not determine every sentence months in advance. Instead, it clarifies what an organisation wants to stand for, which issues belong naturally to it and which positions it can credibly defend. This may be less spectacular than an editorial calendar with eighteen columns, but it is considerably more useful. The true quality of a strategy is revealed not when everything goes according to plan, but when an organisation remains able to act when something unexpected happens.

A media enquiry arrives, a debate unexpectedly gathers momentum, or an issue that was peripheral only yesterday suddenly moves centre stage. An organisation that knows its position can respond without frantically searching for an opinion. You do not need to have anticipated every possible turning, provided you know the general direction in which you are travelling. Strategy is therefore less a minute-by-minute itinerary than a reliable inner compass.

Memory is a poor keeper of minutes

After a holiday, we rarely remember the complete sequence of events. Memory does not produce an activity report or archive an exhaustive list of sights. It preserves scenes: the smell of rain on hot tarmac, an absurdly strong coffee, a conversation on a terrace, or the moment you took a wrong turn and, for the first time, truly knew where you were.

Communication, by contrast, is often treated as though it will later be subjected to a completeness audit. Every fact must be included, everyone involved must appear, every qualification must be mentioned and every possible objection answered pre-emptively. The result may be unassailable. Unfortunately, it is also almost impossible to remember.

People do not retain quantities of information; they remember images, ideas, tensions and precise turns of phrase. They remember something that suddenly makes a familiar subject look different, an observation they had not yet made themselves, or a sentence that renders a complicated matter unexpectedly clear. A good story need not contain everything. It must contain the right things.

This is not a rejection of complexity. Quite the opposite: taking complexity seriously does not mean passing it on to the audience unfiltered. It means understanding it well enough to separate what matters from the surrounding noise. A good chef does not bring the entire contents of the refrigerator to the table as a precaution. The chef makes a selection – and, in doing so, takes responsibility for the result.

A common thread is not a loop

Good holidays have a rhythm of their own. The same thing does not happen every day, yet the journey as a whole feels coherent. Perhaps that is because, deep down, you know what you were looking for: peace, space, movement, good food, or simply a few days in which no one asks whether you have ‚a quick minute‘.

Organisations also need this kind of inner coherence. But a common thread does not mean forcing the same three messages into every piece of communication. That is not consistency; it is verbal recycling. Recognition does not come from constant repetition, but from a recognisable perspective. What questions does a company ask? Which contradictions does it notice? Which developments does it consider important? And what can it contribute to the conversation beyond talking about itself?

An organisation with convincing answers to these questions need not constantly declare itself innovative, responsible or customer-centric. These qualities become apparent in the way it speaks, decides and acts. A point of view is what remains once the adjectives have been removed.

Such a point of view also allows for variety. Not every text needs to sound the same, nor must every subject adopt the same tone. What matters is that the individual contributions reveal a way of thinking that connects them.

Over time, this creates more than a series of isolated publications. It creates a narrative in which each contribution can stand on its own while also forming part of a larger whole.

Not every empty space is a problem

The defining quality of a good holiday is not that nothing happens. It is that not everything has to happen. This distinction matters in communication too. Empty spaces quickly make organisations nervous. A channel has not been updated for several days, there is still no post for next week, and other companies have already commented on a current issue. Should we not say something as well?

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Not every pause means invisibility, not every silence is a failure, and not every public debate becomes more intelligent when another company joins in to announce that it is following developments with great interest.

Presence is not the same as a constant stream of noise. Communicate incessantly and, above all, you train your audience to stop listening closely. Impact needs contrast: an alternation between speaking and listening, topicality and depth, visibility and deliberate restraint.

Music, too, is not made of notes alone. Without pauses, it would merely be noise with a sense of rhythm. The courage to leave a gap is therefore not a sign of inactivity. It can be an expression of confidence: we speak when we genuinely have something to contribute. And we trust that a good idea does not become more valuable simply because it has been broken into five formats and published three times a week.

The real luxury: choosing

In the end, good holidays and good communication have something in common: both depend on choice. You cannot walk down every street, try every restaurant or photograph every sunset. Nor can a company give equal weight to every message, claim every subject or remain relevant on every channel at all times. It does not need to.

The true luxury lies not in fitting in as much as possible. It lies in being able to choose – and in making peace with what was not chosen. Only by leaving things out do the things we select acquire weight.

Perhaps communication plans should therefore occasionally begin not with the question, ‚What do we want to say?‘, but with another: ‚What should someone still know once they have long forgotten the text?‘

The answer is rarely a list. More often, it is an idea, an image, a clear point of view – something that stays in the mind even as the details begin to fade.

Just like a good holiday: you do not remember the itinerary.

You remember what made it worth departing from.