The Cure for Incomprehensibility: Frame It, Then Fill It

It sounds kind of obvious that if you want to make sure that people get your idea, that they need to be able to get your idea, by which I mean they need to understand it. And yet so often that is a step we skip entirely. I've talked before about how there are 3 entirely avoidable errors getting in between your idea and the impact it can have: irrelevance, incomprehensibility, and indefensibility. All three of those roll up to something I'm gonna call idea coherence. It's coherent to them. They can understand it and coherent with them, what they know to be true, what they already believe, with what they care about right now. If we wanna solve for incomprehensibility, it can help to understand what does comprehensible mean? What does comprehend mean? And if we go into the etymology, the history of that word, we'll see that it's about grasping, gripping the whole of something. It's being able to hold onto it mentally. And make sense of it. And as soon as we start to talk about making sense of something, then we can talk about one of my favorite theories, which is known as sensemaking theory. And sensemaking theory is exactly what you think it's about. It's about how people make sense of something. One of the points that sensemaking folks make is that we can't actually understand, interpret, be persuaded about something that we cannot make sense of. That we cannot even answer a starting aspect of what is this thing? Sensemaking is all about two big things, frames and cues. Frames meaning what is the lens I'm bringing to this? Or you can also think about it like what is the bucket that this thing seems to fit into? And cues can operate in a couple different ways. One is a cue to pay attention in the first place. Another is a cue to explore further in another direction or a cue to what something might mean. As you may know from my work, I like to make sure that it makes sense really quickly because we don't have a lot of time for people's processing before their brain goes, "Yeah, sorry, not interested, moving on." Now that we know what comprehensibility requires, that somebody has enough information through a lens or a cue as to what something actually is and why we need something to be comprehensible because We have to have that understanding, that sense-making, before someone can interpret, be persuaded, decide, etc. What gets in the way? 3 big things that I see all the time. The first is they literally don't understand. For this, there are 2 big things that are in play. Number 1 is the words that you are using to explain your idea literally don't make sense to the people that you're talking to. Why could that be? Number 1, they just don't know the words. They don't have exposure to them. Number 2, the word means something to them, but it doesn't make sense to them in this context. To give an example from my own life, I know 2 different organizations called the NSA. One is the National Security Administration and the other one is the National Speakers Association. It's important to be clear about which one I'm talking about if I'm trying to share information with one group or the other. The 3rd thing that can happen is you've just made up the word. People think that this is a great idea from a curiosity-building standpoint. Let me brand this concept in a way and be clever as I introduce it to you. But that isn't how people's brains work. It's not how they process information. It's not how they process new ideas. If they cannot make sense of it, if they don't even have the beginning clue to be able to say, I can use this frame or some indication about what you might mean, boom, they cannot process it. It's not that they don't choose to, they cannot. So this is where I'm gonna put a stake in the ground and say, those folks who say, hey, you know what, lead with your branded name— no, do not. Make sure that coherence, that comprehensibility is there by making sure that you've explained it using actual words that people understand. An extra tip here: the physicist Richard Feynman was known for what has later been called the Feynman technique, which involves imagining you were explaining you're explaining your idea to a 10 to 12-year-old child. Not because the people you're talking to aren't more developed than a 10 to 12-year-old child, mostly because of something called working memory, which I'll get to in just a minute. But when you think of your idea that way, all of a sudden you start to use different concepts, different words. You will find that you start using words and concepts that just simply more people will understand because you're explaining using much more basic, much more accessible terms and concepts. If you want a quick and easy way to remember this, never sacrifice clarity for cleverness, especially when you don't have a lot of time. Start by explaining your idea using actual words that most people would understand and support it with concepts that most people would understand. I mentioned working memory before, and you might have said, that I don't understand. Working memory, two words you probably know even if you haven't put them together. Working means what's the labor that I'm doing, the things that I'm working with, and memory, what thinking about what information is being retained for some length of time. Working memory is distinct from what's known as long-term memory. Now you already have a cue as to what working memory is. We often think of it as short-term memory, but it's where your brain deals with the information as it first comes in. And really important here, it wears out really quickly. It's what deals with information when it first comes in. You can think of it like a triage nurse in a hospital. This information, do I need to pay attention to it? Yes, no. How critical is this information? High, low. And that triage nurse also is looking for, who do I need to call in my long-term memory to make this make even more sense? What else does this remind me of? What frame can I use? What concept does this look like? What is my past experience that I can bring to bear to understand this even better and even more quickly? The challenge with working memory is that it's very limited, which means it gets overwhelmed really quickly, which is another reason why using accessible words and accessible concepts helps your idea transfer more easily and effectively. Working memory doesn't have to work so hard. But there's another thing here, and maybe this sounds familiar. I've had people say to me, and I've experienced this myself, I've done this myself, oh, give me a half an hour, give me an hour, and I can totally get this across. But ask me to do it in a sentence or a minute, ugh, can't. Yeah. Why does that work? Because over the course of 45 minutes to an hour, your audience has enough time to make sense, get enough frames and cues from all of the things that you're saying to slowly take whatever you're putting into their working memory, attach it to whatever they already know, and build from there. But again, when you don't have a lot of time or when you're not there to provide a follow-up, think, email, application, grant, abstract. You have to be able to transfer that idea within the limits not only of the word count or of your time constraint, but within the limits of somebody's working memory. The challenge is, even when you do have that much time with somebody, even when you do use all of those explanations and all of those details to make your idea come to life for somebody, you still are running a pretty big risk as people are processing your idea over time and taking various pieces and parts of it from their working memory and putting it into long-term memory and continuing to connect and triage, et cetera, what is more likely to happen is those pieces and parts don't go back together in their head in quite the right way. So the more that you can give someone the whole of something and then give them the detail, the more likely they're going to be able to move that whole frame of the idea into their long-term memory. And any additional information now has that complete picture to hang on to. Now, you know I love to nerd out about stuff, so this snapshot, this whole picture of the idea, has a word that we can layer onto that idea that comes from the Germans and a movement that was called— wait for it— Gestalt. Don't worry, I'll put it in the notes. I know my high school German teacher, Frau Holmes, would be very excited. And essentially all it means is the whole thing. It's like the Overview map you get in GPS. I think I've used this analogy before, but I'm going to use it again because it's a good one. It shows you where to start, where you're going to end, and it shows you but doesn't tell you at the beginning what way you're going to go. Once you can say, yep, that's the route I want to go, then it proceeds to give you turn-by-turn directions. It's the whole picture of something and the idea that that whole picture has to fit together. And I'll talk more about this in the next part of the series. But this is one other level of comprehensibility is making sure The idea has all of the parts that make that picture, that make that frame complete. My working theory on this is that includes a claim, an if-then. If we want this, then this happens, or when this happens, this is the result, and a support for it. That if-then is a basic building block of understanding. Babies understand it, dogs understand it, and they don't need words to understand it. If I Throw a ball up in the air, it's going to go up and then it's going to come down. Why? Because gravity. And that because gravity is the other piece that I believe needs to be in that frame, that Gestalt, that core case for your idea. The what is it? That's the then. The what does it do? That's the if. And then the because that supports, that justifies why those two things are connected. Now, again, I'm going to talk about that much more in The Cure for Indefensibility, But here's what all of this means together. If you want your idea to be comprehensible, then we need to give people a graspable whole, and even better, a whole that even if it's a new combination of parts, is built off of parts they've seen or understood or experienced before. So how do we do that? 3 things. Number 1, give them a frame. Locate your idea. That was what I talked about last week within a frame they are already somewhat or very familiar with. Say, this is a new way to do marketing, or this is a new way to understand energy. I don't know, whatever it might be. Give them that bucket so they can start to bring the right kinds of information into their working memory to help you out. Only once they've got a general category, that general frame for something, can you introduce that nickname, that branded term that may be beyond their current expertise or awareness, to layer on top of it, to give them a shorthand, a way to lighten lighten the cognitive load that they can then use and you can use going forward as you continue to explain your idea. Second, that portable whole. That's where I'm talking about that Gestalt, that overview map, that whole picture of the idea. So you've given them the frame, this general category, and then you say it does X. You want to give a compact structural overview of the idea, a very quick story, a metaphor to help them understand how it works. Again, at the high accessible level. Third, both of those things will help lighten the load of that working memory, that triage nurse in your audience's brains. But you can still do a little bit more to help them. Strip out unnecessary words, unnecessary details, words they don't understand unless you've explained them first. The more you can do that, the more you can ensure that your idea is graspable and familiar enough that they can get the general idea, the gist, the essence of the idea, the overview of the idea, and have that serve as a structure or a frame or a skeleton onto which they can add, and you can add, additional complexity, nuance, detail. Now, how does this fit with everything else? Irrelevance gets in the way of why someone would even start making sense of something in the first place, and incomprehensibility gets in the way of there being able to make sense of something. And what we'll talk about next in the series is, yeah, I can make sense of what you're trying to say, but I can't support it. And neither can you. When you have an idea that could make a big impact in someone's world or the world, we need to make sure that it succeeds right from the start. And that success depends on your ability to help somebody else make sense of it, making sure that idea is coherent, comprehensible to them. By giving them a familiar hook, the overall view, and then reducing the work of thinking about it, the better and more likely it is that your idea will not only survive but strike a chord and stick.