How to talk to non experts – Tip 5: Describe the impact using effort and outcomes

Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts tip series. Let's take a look at tip number 5: define the impact using efforts and outcomes. Now, in tip 4, we talked about showing the impact to the audience because they'll pay more attention to it. Now, this is a way that you can define that impact very clearly by focusing on efforts and outcomes. Now, what do I mean by impact? Well, an impact will be the change to the effort someone needs to put in or a change to an outcome that they care about or are interested in. An impact to an individual can be described in either or both of these ways. Now, if you don't describe the impact of your message using efforts and outcomes, you're potentially going to overcomplicate your message, miss important details, and it can take longer to explain it. Efforts and outcomes help summarize impacts. It helps summarize what is happening and what will happen. And without that easy summary, you might go really into the detail and miss some of them. You might give too much detail and overcomplicate and overwhelm and confuse the audience. And all of that takes longer to get your message across. So if you'd like a way to quickly get a complete message in a simple way across to your audience, consider, or not even consider, do explain impacts. Using efforts and outcomes. So how do you do this? Well, for effort, there are 4 categories. Effort can be defined as money, time, resources, and difficulty. The amount of effort an individual or a business or an organization needs to put in is a certain amount of money, a certain amount of time, a certain amount of resources, and it's going to be difficult or not. So if you can define the effort that someone is making in, in these terms or define the change to the effort, because that's where the real impact is, is a change in the amount of money or a change in the amount of time or a change in the resources and difficulty, that's going to be a very clear impact for the audience. Likewise for outcomes, the things we care about are financial outcomes. It's about the money in business and it's about the money for us personally when we're at work. Is our salary going up or down? Is there more or less money for projects? Then speed, is that changing? Efficiency, quality, compliance, safety, reputation, and engagement. Now these could be staff engagement, customer engagement, and there are different ways to interpret these, but if you can define the impact to a client, to a user, to a system, to the business, you should be able to define whatever is changing in one of these categories, and that will make sense to a non-expert. Audience. So let's take a, take a look at an example. It's a very generic example, but it should prove the point. In this example, you've just heard in your company that we're changing the caterer for the staff cafe. Okay, why should you care? Why should anyone care if the caterer is changing? Well, let me tell you why it's important. There is a change in the outcome for you, and that change is you're going to have better quality food and That's useful from a user perspective. We're going to have happier staff. That's you. That's an engagement perspective, an engagement outcome for the business, and we'll have lower running costs. So there's a financial outcome, there's an engagement outcome, and there's a quality outcome relating to the change in this caterer. Now, I could describe it to you from a user perspective. You're going to get better food and shorter queue times, so lunchtime will be better. I can explain it from a business perspective and say, we're going to have happier staff and lower running costs. So this is considering efforts and outcomes and describing a very generic topic in a way that makes immediate sense because it focuses on the impact to the audience. So if you are talking to a non-expert audience about whatever your topic is, define the impact using effort and outcomes.