Chris Fenning explains how to gauge what your audience already knows before you explain something to them. Ask whether they've done your job or trained in it, then adjust your explanation so you don't confuse them, overwhelm them, or talk down to them. He contrasts how you'd describe a reporting tool to a developer versus a call center manager.
Chapters
Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts tip series. Let's take a look at tip number 2: Assess the audience expertise level. Now, whenever you are about to talk to a non-expert, you should take a moment and think, what level of expertise do they have on the topic that I'm going to talk about? How does it compare to mine? Or in your case, how does their expertise compare to yours. And it's going to be either more, the same, less, or none whatsoever. And understanding these, the difference between your expertise level and theirs, will help you pitch your information and deliver your information at the right level. You're not going to over-explain or under-explain. Or at least if you consider this, you'll have the chance of thinking about whether you're over-explaining or underexplaining. Now, if you don't compare the audience expertise level to your own, what does this do? What does this mean? Well, just like in tip number 1, confusion and overwhelm. The audience could be confused if you talk to the audience using your same level of expertise and you're using words and phrases and information that is specific to your expertise and they have no expertise at all, you're going to confuse them, and you're also likely to overwhelm them with too much information, too much data. Equally, if you— someone has more expertise than you and you explain things really simply, it may come across as patronizing, and you may end up with a lack of interest from the audience. Now, how you deliver the message is going to be important, but the first step is assessing whether or not your audience is above, the same, below you in terms of expertise level. Now, how do you do that practically in that moment? What is it that you can do to help make that assessment? Well, you can ask yourself 2 questions. The first is, have they done this job? Have they done my job with my expertise before? And 2, are they trained in this topic? And if the answers are no, then you need to adjust your message. And at that point, you're adjusting your message, particularly if they have less experience than you. And less experience means you need to deliver a simpler message. If you deliver a complex message to an audience with less expertise than you, you'll get confusion and overwhelm. So answer these 2 questions: Have they done this job before? And are they trained in this particular topic? And And if the answers are no, make sure that you adjust your message. Let's take a look at an example. So perhaps you're a software developer and the audience is a call center manager, somebody who runs teams that answer the phones to provide service for your organization. Well, there are 2 ways that you could describe a new reporting tool and database. And here are the 2 different ways. You could say it's a database with a webpage to generate reports. Or you could say it's a MongoDB cloud-hosted system with a user query interface. Now, to another expert, this makes a lot of sense. This is the technology, this is how it's hosted, and this is the interface that they use it. It's language that's specific to the developer. But to the call center manager, this makes a lot more sense. There's a database with a webpage and it generates reports. It's language they understand. It's at an expertise level that they that, that is relevant and relatable for them. So if you are an expert and you're talking to a non-expert, make sure that you assess the audience expertise level and then adapt your message to it.
