How to talk to non experts – Tip 8: Simplify your message with summaries

Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts tip series. Let's dive in and take a look at tip number 8: simplify your message with summaries. So when you're communicating with a non-expert audience, summaries are much better than detail. Why? Well, summaries are clear and simple. They save you time. They help you stay on topic and they can help you get to the point. All of these things lead to much better, clearer, more effective communication, particularly when you're talking to an audience who's not an expert in your topic. So what happens if you don't simplify your message with summaries? Well, you're going to waste time. You'll stand a pretty good chance of getting bogged down in the detail, and there's a really good chance you're going to overwhelm the audience. Now, what do I mean by each one of these? Well, summaries are short versions of all the detail that you're trying to explain. So if you can deliver the same message in a summary, you're going to save time and avoid wasting it. And when we try and explain things in detail, it's very hard to lay things out logically in a way the audience understands. And the more detail there is, the more we have to lay out. The more the audience has to keep in their heads and stay, you know, on track with what it is we're trying to tell them and join all those pieces together. That leads to confusion. It leads to questions. When there are questions, you end up talking about that particular detail rather than the whole topic. And that's how you get bogged down. And finally, when you have so much detail and information, it's very easy to overwhelm an audience. A non-expert audience doesn't need the detail. And if we give them too much on a topic they don't know or understand in depth, it can quickly become overwhelming. So this is what happens if you don't use summaries. So it's all very well to say use a summary, but how do you do it? Well, there are a few options. First of all, use frameworks. There are some frameworks that can make summaries easier. McKinsey's has one which is Situation, Complication, Resolution. You can go and have a look and see how that can help you summarize and organize data, organize a large amount of information. I have my own method called GPS, which is Goal, Problem, Solution. Tells a neat story and enables you to summarize pretty much anything in as little as 3 lines. So you can pick a framework to create a summary, but using frameworks really helps. The second thing you can do is leave out all the history. Everything that happened before doesn't matter or matters a lot less than what's going to happen in the future. So when you're talking about your topic to a non-expert audience, leave out the history, leave out all of the what happened and the steps that led up to it. What matters is what is happening now and what's going to happen in the future. And the third item is use headlines only. Now, when you're creating a summary, if you start with just the headlines for the topic, you can add more detail in. If you start with the detail, it's very hard to then get back to the headlines. So when creating a summary, start with the headlines, then you can add just a little bit more information and pad out that summary so it makes more sense. But only do it if you're not including any history or background, and An easier way to do this is to use a framework. Let's take a quick look at some examples. We'll use my own framework, the GPS, the Goal Problem Solution framework. And without teaching you the framework, I'm going to give you some summaries in different situations based on this. So if I was a software developer describing an opportunity to build a new piece of code for my company, I might say, we want to reduce the running cost of our servers. The problem is our current software doesn't scale. We can't, we can't increase the number of servers and increase the number of customers without it being very, very expensive. I think I have a solution. I think I can write a piece of software that will enable us to do twice as much on the same servers we've got at the moment. So that's the goal, the problem, and the solution. Well, let's take a completely different field. Let's take medicine. And there are doctors trying to deal with big, long waiting lists. And they might say to a hospital administrator, well, our goal is to reduce waiting lists and serve our patients better. The problem is we have a backlog of 3 months worth of this particular surgery and procedure, and we can't do it faster because our machine that we use for this particular process takes 3 hours per time. Now, the solution is if we spend $1 million, we can buy a machine that cuts that 3 hours down to 15 minutes. That means we can process people much, much faster and we can cut that 3-month waiting list down to about a week. So summarising a big topic about a medical procedure and there's all sorts of things in there about waiting lists and costs and so on, but it's been summarised in what we're trying to achieve, why it's difficult, and what we propose to do about it. That summary told a story and hopefully enabled you as a non-expert to understand what it was that I was talking about. You can do this in your own communication, no matter what the topic, what the industry, or your expertise. So when you are talking to non-experts, make sure that you simplify your message using summaries.