How to talk to non experts – Tip 4: Show how the topic impacts the audience

Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts tip series. Let's take a look at tip number 4: show how the topic impacts the audience. And the keyword here is impact. This is what we're looking at. Now, when you are talking to a non-expert audience, the key question, or one of the key questions you need to answer for them, is why does this matter to the audience? Now, the reason this is important is we pay attention to things that impact us. If something doesn't impact us, we don't really care that much. And when you start communicating to a non-expert audience, there's already a barrier if they think, well, you're an expert and you might go into too much detail. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why they might not listen to you. So right at the start, if you focus on the impact they're going to pay more attention. And if you don't do this, well, less impact means less important. And the real outcome of that is you end up with an audience that says, I don't care. So if I don't know why it impacts me, why should I care? Why should I pay attention? So now that you know you need to show impact, how do you do it? How do you actually show that a topic impacts an audience? Well, there are a few ways you can do this. You can show how it relates to their work. How does it relate to the things that they do every day? How does it relate to things they want? We pay attention to and care about the things that we want. The next 2 are not usual, but they are very simple ways to describe impact. What's the impact of the effort I need to put in? If you tell me I need to put in more effort into something, I'm going to care more about that. I'm going to pay more attention. That impacts me. And likewise, an outcome that people care about, whether it's their goals, their objectives, a personal outcome, the use of something. If you can describe things in an outcome basis, people are going to pay attention and care. Now, this works whatever perspective you're using, right? Back in tip 1, we talked about user perspective, business perspective, and expert perspective. You can consider these things in each of those different categories. What is the effort for the individual or the user? What is the effort for the business? These things will work in whatever perspective you're needing to consider. Let's take a look at an example. Let's say I'm the CFO, I'm the Chief Financial Officer in the organization, and I need to tell a manager how the quarterly financials are going to impact employees. I could give a whole bunch of data, I could go into lots of detail about what happened in the last quarter, or I can focus on how it actually impacts employees, and here are some examples of that. Well, it might impact pay rises next year. Now, if the quarterly financials from last time were good, pay rises might go up. If they were bad, no pay rises. That impacts employees, and the same with bonuses. Now, from a manager's perspective, maybe there's an impact to the funding for projects. The manager is thinking about the work for next year, and I need to tell them that funding for projects is going up, down, or staying the same. Money for extra staff and hiring? Will there be staff cuts? If I describe the financials in these kinds of terms, these are things that directly impact the manager and things the manager cares about. So by focusing on the impact to things the manager cares about, they're going to pay more attention to the message and understand it better. So when you are talking to non-experts, make sure you show how your topic impacts the audience.