Chris Fenning explains why relating new ideas to what your audience already knows makes explanations faster and clearer. Use their own words, find everyday analogies, and start with the familiar before showing what's different. He compares cloud storage to ATM withdrawals to show how a simple metaphor beats technical jargon.
Chapters
Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts tip series. Let's take a look at tip number 6: relate your message to what the audience already knows. Now, this means when you're talking about your expert topic, you need to be able to present it, frame it, describe it in a way that relates to things that the audience already knows and understands. Now, This helps the audience understand your message. Because when we, when we have, when we can see the connection between things, when we can make comparisons, then we understand things more easily. If someone was describing nuclear physics to you in detail and they only talked about nuclear physics, you might not understand it. Whereas if they compared it to something in your everyday life or they used analogies and comparisons, you'd stand a better chance of understanding it. Because they're relating the information to things that you already know. Now, if you don't do this, what happens? Well, our old friends confusion and frustration come in. That nuclear physics example, someone would be frustrated with someone explaining all of the intricate details of how a nuclear power station works. I don't understand it, so I can't relate to it. So that's annoying. And I, and if I don't understand, I'm confused. It also takes longer and you get worse outcomes. If you explain something in a way that relates to what your audience already knows, you can take shortcuts. You can summarize. They will already know and understand part of what you're trying to explain. Whereas if you just go through the detail, essentially you're trying to educate them to become experts on the topic, and that takes a long time. And in those situations, if people are confused and frustrated and things are taking long, you're going to get a worse outcome. Whatever you're trying to achieve with your message is likely to not be as successful if these top 3 things have happened first. So now that you know you need to relate things to what your audience already knows, how do you actually do it? What are the steps you can take? Well, you should think about how to describe the detail of your message in using their processes. So, or analogies or make comparisons. So if you are a software developer and you're talking to a business audience, don't use the names of the systems from an IT perspective. Use what they call the systems. You might call it the DB135 database. They might call it the sales system. So in which case, talk about their processes. Use the language that they use to describe their processes, tools, and systems. Use analogies and make comparisons to things in work or in life in general. We can all draw on experience from outside work to help make complicated things seem simple and understandable if a good analogy has been used, and likewise making comparisons. If you have a proposal for a great new tool or system, rather than explaining the whole tool from scratch, you could say, well, it's a lot like this other thing, And here's how it's different or better, and it improves things. So you're starting people from a position of saying it's a lot like this thing you already know, and here's how it's different. So making that comparison can be a great shortcut. Now let's take an example, quite a popular one, of what on earth is cloud computing? Trying to explain cloud computing to a non. Expert can be quite challenging. But there's one analogy that most adults are quite familiar with. So for cloud computing, files are not stored on an individual computer, they're stored everywhere. Now, to help make, make that more realistic and more understandable for people, consider your money in the bank. Cloud computing is like ATMs. You can access your money from anywhere. Just like in cloud computing, your files aren't all in one individual place. You can access them anywhere there's an ATM with an internet connection. So in cloud computing, you can access your files anywhere where there's a computer and an internet connection. This analogy probably helps people understand cloud computing better than trying to explain the technology behind it and how all these things interrelate. Very simple analogy that gives people a good starting point to understand. So if you are an expert talking to non-experts, try and relate your topic to things the audience already knows.
