Pass the Telephone Test

Is your message important?

Then you might want to ensure it passes what I call the Telephone Test.

The Telephone Test is inspired by the children’s game Telephone. In the game of Telephone, the first player comes up with a message and whispers it in the ear of the second player, who whispers what they hear into the ear of the third player, and so on and so on all the way to the last player. The last player then announces the message they heard to the entire group. Often, the message the last player hears is quite different from the message the first player shared; the original message gets garbled and mutated as it’s passed from ear to ear.

This miscommunication leads to fun and laughter in the Telephone game, but miscommunication can have dire consequences in real life.

If your message matters—and especially if you’ll be disseminating it with the help of other messengers—craft it in a way that it’s as simple as possible and easy for others to pass it along in its integrity.

As the source of the communication, it’s on you to do the work to ensure your message is designed in a way that it can readily pass the Telephone Test.

HOW TO RUN THE TELEPHONE TEST:

1. Craft your message.

2. Communicate the message to someone, Messenger 1.

3. Ask Messenger 1 to communicate the message to someone else, Messenger 2 (no cheating with email forwards of your original message!).

4. Ask Messenger 2 to share the message they received back with you.

5. If your core message is clearly shared back with you by Messenger 2, then your message passes the Telephone Test – bravo! If your message fails the test, revise it and run the test again with new people in the Messenger roles.