How to Explain Technical Things to A Non-Technical Person

okay I can explain you know stuff could be web development could be engineering could be design but whatever it is to make your project happen you've got to explain it to somebody else who doesn't know it as well as you in a way that makes them want to sign a check for it there's two ways to solve this problem way number one is to make the rest of the world way smarter about what you do and way number two is to get better at explaining things for obvious reasons I'm going to talk about option number two I'm going to explain to you how to explain a technical subject to a non-technical person now if that all sounds a bit meta don't get worried it's really very simple there's a lot of material in here so I've prepared a PDF of notes and templates that you can use when you're trying to explain something there is a link in the description to that step one start with the most important thing you know stuff and you've probably worked very hard to learn it and knowing stuff is awesome but it comes with a curse literally the curse of knowledge and the curse of knowledge is because you're an expert you know what you're trying to explain so it becomes more difficult for you to understand the position of someone who doesn't already know it one way this curse of knowledge will inflict itself on your poor explanation is through the use of jargon or buzzwords or acronyms that everyone that around you knows but the person you're trying to explain it to doesn't know I mean doesn't everybody know what an AMRAP is it's like riprap or a z-pack or a sand pack right right I mean you get all that I mean that's who wouldn't understand that but the thing is that everybody doesn't know in fact most people don't know because otherwise if they knew you you wouldn't be the expert there are a lot of strategies for overcoming the curse of knowledge but my favorite one is starting with the most important thing this is almost always a problem that your audience the person you're trying to explain this to faces and it's always a very fundamental thing the good news is that there aren't that many of these problems to go around survival shelters that is food all that stuff but for business there's only two increasing revenue and decreasing costs if your explanation isn't immediately clear whether you're doing one of those two things and you're talking to somebody who's higher up in a company they're gonna be upset with you because that's the first thing that they want to know what ballpark are we playing in here and why is it important and why is it better than all the other ways that I could do that or at least in the top five so if you start your explanation with something like I've found a way to decrease our cost providing this service by 30% then someone's gonna want to sit through and is going to be have more energy for the technical bits of your explanation because they know what's in it for them but if you start with I want to move all our key instances to a nice III server using an AMRAP riprap jack handle sort algorithm that will decrease our sort time but no no no you've already lost me it could be cool and it's it's cool to a technical person because you focus on the technology all day long but I I'm not grounded in what this explanation is about the harder you make it for somebody to figure out why your thing is a benefit the less they're gonna like you start with one of the most important things and start like this I'm gonna make it easier for people to buy things on our site by cutting our page load speed in half step to pick a lane now pick a form no matter what you're communicating there's only six fundamental forms of communication story argument analogy instructions dialog and summary I've arranged them in the handy acronym SADS so you won't forget if you combine these forms you'll get the structure of everything that's ever been written but for the purposes of explanation we really only have to worry about two a story and an analogy so what's Carmack's well it's like you use car lot without the used car salesman this is really kind of how the human brain and language works we we combine things or we take a thing away to give a word new sense of meaning so netflix an analogy speak would be a video store without the store Amazon Kindle it's a it's an e-reader that even makes less sense than email but it's a book store without the books so your first line of attack should be to try an analogy now you might not think you're very good at coming up with analogies and you would be wrong so I've taught several communications and writing classes well more than several really and in one of those classes I had an analogy exercise and there was this one woman and she said I'm just terrible at coming up with analogies so I stopped and I said how bad are you at coming up with analogies and then she said I'm so bad at coming up with analogies I can't even buy a vowel now is that the world's greatest analogy no but it's funny and it's pretty good and it's a good place to start to be human is to be able to come up with analogies sometimes an analogy isn't the best way to go sometimes the best way to go is a story here's a very simple form you can try for your story I stole this one from Pixar once upon a time there was a blank everyday he/she/it whoever it is did whatever until one day and that blank is where your problem goes because of that something happened and you can keep the something's happening until finally we have a resolution a story can take up a really really tiny amount of space like this if you look at it you'll see that all the elements of the story are there you can get them very quickly from the image and the words once upon a time there was a carpenter every day he used a table saw until one day he wasn't paying attention and the table saw it cut off his finger because of that he was too scared to make a living using his table saw until he finally got a saw stop saw and he never worried about his fingers again you could also tell the story in a problem action result form this is a second person form of story and that gives you flashbacks to eighth grade grammar don't worry about it well all we're saying is that that the person you're talking to is the character in the story it can be very very powerful let me give you an example of how this would work for SawStop if you use a table saw long enough you're gonna make a mistake and you're gonna lose a finger we made a table saw that can sense human flesh and stop immediately so that you can keep your fingers and keep working as a woodworker and the very next question is how is it work now you don't want to put too much technical information in there and if you can make an analogy for how it works more is the better but what we've done is we've explained the benefit of it so clearly that even if you indulge in your technical side a little bit too much people are still going to be in because they we're interested we know what we're going to get out of it there are four forms of analogy and two forms of story that generally work very well for explanations I've included them in templates in the Handy PDF how to explain things to non-technical people that you can find in the description so step three write your explanation as fast as you can don't try to write a great explanation this is like trying to fall asleep right if you're trying to fall asleep it becomes really hard to fall asleep if you're trying to write the world's greatest explanation it's going to be impossible to get through the first draft what you want to do is just get something down on paper as quickly as possible I recommend doing this longhand and as far away from a phone or a computer as possible focus is required here in fact I sometimes use a timer and I'll set a timer for like 15 minutes 20 minutes so I only focus on the thing that I'm trying to do because my mind is squirrel so when you get to the end of your explanation put a period on it and forget about it for at least 24 hours this is because your brain it works like a rock polisher right so the conscious part of your brain doesn't actually do much work it likes to flatter itself and think that it does but most of the work is done by your subconscious this is why when you sleep on something like a problem you can come up with an answer same exact thing so when you come back to it you want to edit it down to the bone you want to cut out everything you don't need so your explanation is as short and powerful and as clear as possible if you want some help with this I will do videos on this at a later date but I have a free course called how to kill a word it's a 5 video course each one takes about 10 minutes that will teach you how to edit any message and clarify it there's also a link to that in the description it's totally free I highly recommend it it will make you instantly a much more powerful writer and communicator step 4 and give it the grandmother test this seems like it's pretty simple but it's immensely powerful go explain it to somebody who doesn't know what you're talking about while you're explaining it I want you to pay attention to two things one where you get tripped up in the explanation and it's not clear in your mind and two if while you're explaining it this happens if they wander at all it might be polite they might stifle aeon but those are indicators that there's still more work to be done or this explanation could be better then you ask them to explain your thing back to you and if you don't like the explanation you get where you get the sense they don't understand it you you need to go back through the steps again it's usually and don't be do too discouraged it usually is usually it's obvious what they didn't get so sometimes you just go back to step three and rewrite the thing sometimes you'll get a whole new fundamental problem and you can ask ask questions like what based on that explanation if they didn't get what's the big problem that you think this is going to solve if you have existing customers if you have something somebody who's already bought into your idea the other thing to do is to go capture a case study from them and ask them what problem you solve for them it's tremendous it's tremendously eye-opening there's a lot of powerful knowledge there and it's it's a great way to get past the curse of knowledge so to recap start with the most important thing see they're increasing revenue or lowering costs step two pick a form analogy or story try both step three write it as fast as you can put it down come back and edit it and step four explain it to somebody who knows nothing about your subject matter like your grandmother all of this information is in a handy PDF that's linked in the description I highly recommend it if you have to explain something all this month I'm going to be talking about this and posting examples of explanation both in video and rewriting in Word form and giving you lots of great stuff so if this is a thing you have to do or you want to get better at subscribing is not a bad idea and you know wherever that button is and you should come back and you should check out some more videos

Channel: Patrick McLean

Views: 5,909

Rating: 4.981132 out of 5

Keywords: Explanation, Technical explanation, how to explain technical things, technical writing, business, communication, career, entrepreneur, technical, technical sales, public speaking, pitch, presentation, proposal, business communication, improve communication skills, presentation skills, public speaking skills, tech presentations, data presentations, tech companies, explaining, expert, how to explain a complicated subject simply, pitching technical ideas, how to kill a word

Id: Q5zaQ6CC134

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020