In this video, Chris Fenning presents the tenth tip of his "How to Talk to Experts" series, aimed at helping specialists communicate effectively with non‑expert audiences. He argues that non‑experts are interested in the what (benefits, impact, business relevance) rather than the how (technical inner workings). Explaining how something works forces the audience into a learning mode that they don’t need and can cause disengagement. Fenning outlines three practical ways to avoid the "how": (1) a mental shift that requires conscious practice, (2) the "magic box" metaphor—keep the technical details hidden and talk only about the box’s outputs, and (3) focus on effort‑outcome language that emphasizes impacts. He warns that failing to make this shift leads to trying to turn the audience into experts, which is unnecessary and counter‑productive. The tip concludes with a reminder to prioritize what the technology or service does and the value it delivers when speaking to non‑experts.
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Hi, and welcome to the How to Talk to Experts Tips course. This is tip number 10. And tip number 10 is avoid talking about how things work. This here is important. Don't talk about how things work as much as possible. What you should do instead is really only talk to other experts about how things work. If you are a software specialist, You care about how the code works. That is the core of your job. If you're talking to other software developers who speak the, or write, use the same coding language, you can talk about how things work because they are experts. They will understand and they will probably care about the how. But when you are talking to a non-expert audience, they care less about the how because most non-expert audiences care about or have the user and business perspectives. And remember from earlier on in this tips course, the user and business perspectives are, what does this mean for me? What can I do with it? And what does it mean for the whole organization? Or what can the organization or business do with it? That means they care about what it does and the impact. We talked about these in some of the earlier tips. So your non-expert audience They care about what it does and what that means. What is the impact of it? Neither of those things involve needing to know the how of your topic, your expertise, your product, service, data, and so on. Now, what happens if you don't do this? Well, you're going to end up trying to teach the non-expert to be an expert. If you've ever experienced an expert in some other topic, trying to explain to you how their thing works, it ends up being a lesson in their expertise. What they're trying to do is close that knowledge gap to make you more of an expert so you can understand the how. But remember, that's not what most non-experts care about. They care about what does the thing do and what is the impact. So avoid talking about the how. Easy to say, but how do you do it? How do you avoid The how? Well, there are a few techniques that you can use. The first, unfortunately, it just takes practice. It is a mental shift to make a conscious effort to not talk about how when you're engaging with a non-expert audience. So it does take practice. There are some tools and techniques you can use to help, and we've covered some of them in the earlier tips. The magic box. Put all of the how your thing works in the magic box. Keep the lid closed. Just talk about what the box does and the benefits and what it delivers. And the third thing is focus on impacts. When you focus on impacts, particularly using efforts and outcomes, when you describe and talk about your topic in that way, you are naturally avoiding the how and you're focusing more on the what. What is the effort that's required or changing? What are the outcomes that we're going to get? Or what is changing in that field? If you can do these things, you're going to be much better able to communicate with a non-expert audience. Now, usually in these tips, I include an example. Because these are all things you've heard before, I'm not going to repeat the examples. You can jump back to those earlier tips and check them out if you'd like. But I'm going to leave you with a reminder of this particular tip: when you're talking to non-experts, avoid talking about how things work. Focus more on what they do instead.
