Don’t dumb down complex ideas

But do make them accessible to others

Einstein said it best:

When you’ve got a complex idea, technology, or research to share with a less-experienced audience, it’s important to strike a balance between overwhelming and oversimplifying. That’s easy to say but harder to accomplish, so let’s look at an example of how this works and then some strategies to do this with your next communication.

One of my clients is a gifted dermatologist who spent her life’s work focused on research and care for a rare skin disease that affects less than .00000133% of the population (1 in every 750,000 people). She was recognized by her peers and her institution for the breakthroughs she’d helped to foster over two decades of work. She was invited to share about her work in a 15-minute talk for colleagues and donors to the medical school.

While some scientific speakers might have demanded more time or rushed through a 45-minute symposium talk at triple speed, she did neither. Instead, she found a simple analogy to capture the essence of the journey she and her lab had accomplished: three separate, but related, love stories: a mother and child, a physician/researcher and her patients, and her mentors and trainees. Within this simple but effective framework, she was able to aptly cover the key elements of past, present, and future research and care in this little-known area of expertise. She did not dumb down her life’s work but instead found a way to make it accessible to an audience who lacked her credentials and experience.

That’s our goal as communicators, regardless of our field of study,
to make what we know well accessible to others.

Pardon the over-used aphorism: it’s simple but not easy. I can, however, offer three steps as a starting point in this process:

1. Develop an analogy—compare the unknown to something that is known. Steve Jobs was famous for comparing new and unknown products to the familiar (it fits in the tiny pocket on your jeans, it can be hidden behind a number two pencil, it can be delivered in an interoffice mail envelope). Find something familiar, like Romcom love stories, to share that which is completely unfamiliar.

2. Scaffold the information—build a more complex idea from its fundamental parts in front of the audience a by using reveals or animation. When I teach, I can skip slides altogether and build a robust system on a whiteboard, allowing an image to appear slowly before the audience’s eyes like an old-fashioned Polaroid picture (see what I did there).

3. Share a story—when you put a face on the situation, you personalize it and allow it to be more easily understood. Often the story can rely upon and provide archetypes that can later be fleshed out even more fully. When combined with strong data, a story can clarify and amplify your message in a memorable and profound way.

Without question, each of these points could, in and of themselves, be a blog or class. In fact, I was honored to return last week to Stanford and guest speak on this very topic in the Strategic Communication Course I created over fifteen years ago. I’ve included the references I provided to these students in today’s recommendations below:  

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

• Reading: The preeminent thought leader on Storytelling with Data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, gently chides me in her blog, “It’s dreadful, right?,” showing how a NY Times graphic was more effective than I first thought.

• Hearing: Two colleagues and friends Matt Abrahams and Lauren Weinstein go deeper into this topic with this podcast episode: “When knowing too much can hurt your communication.”

• Seeing: Ecologist Eric Berlow’s 4-minute TED Talk, Simplifying Complexity shows examples of ways to embrace, not avoid, complexity in several fields.

Thanks for enjoying my newsletter. I always welcome your feedback and view it as a gift.

As always, jds

P.S. TED has just begun to release talks from the 2023 conference last month in Vancouver. If you have any favorites from this year’s crop of ideas worth spreading, please let me know. I’m always hungry for great items to share with my readers.