If I had to sum up 25 years of studying, teaching, and practicing message design into one big lesson—one idea I repeat to myself every time I create a new message—it would be this:
Fluent Familiarity.
What do I mean by that? Let’s break it down.
First: Fluency
By fluency, I mean cognitive fluency—how easy it is for someone else’s brain to follow along and process what you’re saying.
When your message flows smoothly, it feels effortless for your audience to understand. But too often, we unintentionally create friction. For example:
- Jumping from one point to another without clear transitions.
- Using empty connectors like “This brings me to my next point” or “Let’s go to the next slide.”
These create information gaps—tiny moments of disfluency that break the flow and make it harder for people to stay with you (Alter et al., 2007).
The antidote? Build in connectivity. Make sure each point leads naturally to the next. The goal is to create a message that feels seamless to your audience, because the smoother it feels, the more likely they are to absorb it.
Second: Familiarity
Familiarity works in two powerful ways:
- The more familiar something is, the more understandable it becomes. People draw on what they already know to make sense of new information (Fischer & Bidell, 2007).
- The more familiar something feels, the more right and true it feels (Kahneman, 2011; Reber & Schwarz, 1999).
That’s why one of the core principles of my Communicative Reasoning Model—and the approach we teach at the Message Design Institute—is building belief-based arguments. We anchor our ideas in familiar structures, beliefs, and principles.
This isn’t about recycling old ideas. It’s about combining familiar elements in new ways to create something that feels both fresh and reliable.
A Quick Example
One of my favorite examples—one I mention in Say What They Can’t Unhear—is the origin of the movie Alien. The pitch that sold it? “Jaws in space.”
In other words, they took two familiar concepts—a terrifying creature (like the one in Jaws) and a remote, inescapable setting (i.e., space, as in Star Wars)—and combined them in a new way. That fusion created something original and instantly understandable. It also helped that the two movies inspired by the pitch line were the two highest-grossing films of all time up to that point.
That’s the power of fluent familiarity: not just saying something new, but saying it in a way that feels like something we’ve always known.
Likewise, in the Red Thread framework, I use the familiar brain-friendly structure of the story (see Haven, 2007, especially chapter 9). With the Core Case structure, I lean on causality, one of the, if not the, most fundamental ways we make meaning (Kahneman, 2011; Sloman, 2005): IF this… THEN that… BECAUSE…AND….
These familiar patterns give your audience mental handholds. Even when your content is new, the structure feels known—and that’s the magic of fluent familiarity.
What can you do to add fluent familiarity to your messages and content?