How to Communicate Complexity

Some of you may be thinking, okay, tj, I've been listening to you for weeks and you're always talking about simplify, simplify, fewer points. All well and good, but what happens if you have to actually communicate something that is complex? Not just teachers, professors, but you could be in the technology arena, high finance. The world is complex, there's no doubt about it. Sometimes you have to communicate complex ideas. Fine, I understand that. Let me give you a few tips. You're going to still have to put your ideas into priority. Not all ideas are of equal importance. No matter how complex the idea, you can still create a hierarchy of ideas. You need to start from the top. Start by communicating the most important idea and work your way down. Just because something is complex, it doesn't give you the luxury of quickly listing five ideas. To build to five more ideas, you have to go one at a time. Your audience is listening, but they're not necessarily doing advanced reading, writing everything you down and going home and studying it. So you still have to go step by step and explain. Here's the approach I like to try with complex subjects. So, for example, in my own mind, public speaking is wildly complex. There are issues of how to deal with teleprompters, there's how to speak to the media, there's crisis, there's how to do virtual reality tours. There's a lot of complexity to it. I don't try to cover all that in one speech. I focus on what's most important and then I make available to my audience. I make available a short book, a long book, a 100 video series online course. I might even make available to them, depending on the organization, the group, the audience, up to a hundred different online courses. So if you want more, you can go deeper and you can go deeper into this book, deeper into this course, you can go into this advanced course. So there are varying levels of complexity, but I deliver it in a way where you get to decide how deep you want to go. Because if I just put it all out there at once, you run the risk. I would run the risk of confusing people, having them tune out and they remember nothing. So use all your tools, use books, use PDFs, use online videos, and use all the tools available, but focus on one at a time to convey complex thoughts.