In this short instructional video, the presenter explains why complex diagrams hinder communication with non‑expert audiences and offers a clear, three‑step approach to creating simple visual aids. He argues that while a picture can convey a lot, an overly detailed diagram forces the audience to spend excessive time decoding it, leading to confusion, distraction, and wasted time. The core guidance is to limit a diagram to three‑to‑five main blocks, collapse ancillary details into those blocks, and use progressive expansion—starting with a high‑level view and then drilling down as needed. A concrete example shows a dense “technology impacts” diagram being reduced to four key areas (IoT, AI, VR, robots), illustrating how the simplified version is easier to present and understand. The video emphasizes that simple diagrams keep the audience’s attention, speed comprehension, and support the speaker’s message.
Chapters
Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts Tip Course. This is tip number 13, and this tip is use diagrams but keep them simple. Whenever we're communicating, particularly an expert topic, there's usually some complexity. It's usually a broad topic. Whatever we're talking about may need to fit into a bigger picture, but We're trying to convey a lot of information to an audience that doesn't really know much about our expertise or about the topic, and there are some simple ways to do that. A common phrase is a picture is worth a thousand words. So instead of describing something in a lot of detail, why don't we show them? The problem is, while a picture is worth a thousand words, a complicated picture is worth. Much less, because it would take 10,000 words to explain it. This picture is not a simple picture. I bet you're— if you're looking at it right now, you're probably trying to work out, well, what's the writing, and what does this box mean compared to the box over here, and how do these things interrelate? There's a lot of lines on it. Your brain is already going in all sorts of different directions. The complicated picture would take at least 1,000 words to explain for you to understand it, whereas a simple picture would be understandable very quickly. So use simple diagrams. Use diagrams, yes, but make sure they are simple. Now, what happens if you don't do this? What happens if you put complicated diagrams up? Well, you're going to waste time, cause confusion, and you're going to distract the audience. If you're giving a presentation, talking about a document, doing a screen share, however you're delivering information, If you put a complicated picture up on the screen, you're going to need to explain it, which takes time and actually defeats the object of putting a diagram up to simplify things. People will get confused by it if they don't understand it, and it's a distraction, particularly if you only want to talk about one small piece of that complex picture. People are going to be trying to take it all in and you won't have their attention. They're going to be distracted. So, how do you use simple diagrams, particularly if your job requires complex ones? Well, if you want to know how to do it, here are 3 tips. Use only 3 to 5 blocks or pieces in a diagram. If there's lots of things that need to fit together, summarize the details into 3 to 5 pieces and only use the key things. If there's extra ancillary information, Leave it out or put it inside one of those big blocks. Now, this is a little bit abstract, so I want to show you what this means. I'm going to bring up the diagram you saw just a few moments ago. This diagram can be simplified. This is an example of how technology impacts our lives today, and there's all sorts of different areas, and I'm not going to explain them to you. What I'm going to do is show you a simplified version of this diagram. How technology appears in our lives. And there are 4 key areas: the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and robots. Everything from that previous diagram is somewhere in here. This is simple. It's easier to talk about. If we— if I was going to give you a presentation on it, I could guide you through each one of these boxes and then expand it. Maybe show another diagram that just expanded the Internet of Things. It's a much simpler diagram. The audience is not distracted by the detail. They're not confused or overwhelmed. They can very quickly take this in and then focus back on what I'm saying. The same would happen for you and your expertise. So when you are talking to non-experts, use diagrams, but please keep them simple.
