5 Tips for Sharing Your Expertise

With laypeople outside your field

Had Dr. Carla Pugh begun her 2022 talk at Stanford with her thesis “data facilitates excellence in patient care,” it’s unlikely the audience would have warmed up to the message she was about to share—the power of surgeons and med students using wearable technology to improve outcomes in the operating room.

Instead, she began by sharing her passion for Star Trek as a child and the desire to be like Dr. McCoy, whom she designates as the earliest practitioner of precision medicine. Her simple yet compelling childhood memory provided all who heard her with a familiar hook to hang the new information she was about to provide.

Image from Stanford University

I’m regularly invited to help physicians, scientists, technologists, and researchers bring their expertise to an audience who don’t share their knowledge. Through my decades of coaching speakers to do just that, I’ve found these five strategies to be helpful.

1. Make your content accessible—it’s absolutely not about “dumbing down the science” but about finding ways to provide access to your world and intriguing them to learn more.

2. Reduce (or translate) the jargon—which not only helps the audience but lets them have a “peak behind the curtain,” empowering them to know more than they did when you began.

3. Design simple yet compelling slides—too often speakers, particularly academics, use text-heavy slides for professional conferences for peers. Reducing the complexity, eliminating citations, and adding simple builds can increase the audience’s comprehension.

4. Develop helpful analogies—compare what you know with examples they know. Veronica Mierzekewski, a talented astrobiology researcher I coached in the BMSIS Young Scientist Program, begins her 2020 talk on biopolymers by comparing the chemical makeup of the planet Earth to a bowl of alphabet soup.

5. Craft and share stories—put a face on your scientific breakthroughs, letting us know how a parent, patient, or provider will benefit from this innovation.

One of the finest resources on this topic is a free publication from 3M, Scientists as Storytellers Guide. It’s packed with excellent advice, including this insight from legendary M*A*S*H surgeon Alan Alda:

The most informative statement isn’t communication.
Communication is when it lands in the other person’s head and sticks there.

Stories let us do just that.

I’m confident that whatever your field of expertise, these tips can help you make the subject more accessible, clear, and compelling. I invite you to try these out and let me know what works and what else I can add to this list.

JD’s Recommendations: what I’m reading, hearing, and seeing:

• Reading: let me point you again to Matt Abrahams’ Think Fast Talk Smart blog on making complex ideas accessible.

• Hearing: my mentor and friend Bronwyn Saglimbeni turned me on to Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things, where they unpack our misuse of the term “guilt.”

• Seeing: what a treat that in my research for this issue, I found an SxSW excerpt of a conversation between astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Apollo 13 author Jeff Kluger. Aldrin’s pithy assessment of NASA today—“we explore or we expire”—captured me fully.

Thanks for reading Communication Matters, and please share this with others and invite them to subscribe. We’re consistently reaching more than 1,000 readers with each issue and would love to see our subscribers top that number too.

As always, jds

P.S. Regular readers know that next week Ken and I travel to Baja to teach our one-week class, The Roadmap to Your Soul’s Expression, for MEA. Watch for an update on our first-ever week-long course together upon my return.