3. When Knowing Too Much Can Hurt Your Communication: How to Make Complex Ideas Accessible
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We've all been in situations where someone explained something to us that went over our heads or didn't land because it wasn't relevant or meaningful. I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

In this episode, we'll chat with Lauren Weinstein as we explore specific techniques you can use to help your audience understand the complex information that you need them to. In other words, we hope to find the antidote to the curse of knowledge.

Hey, Lauren, how are you doing? Great. Glad to be with you here today. Like me, Lauren is a lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Together for over five years, we've co-taught a class on strategic communication. In addition to this work, she also has a very popular TEDx talk called Don't Believe Everything You Think. So, Lauren, as teachers and coaches, we often have to explain complex ideas so others can understand them. But lots of other folks also have to take complex technical or scientific information and make it accessible.

Can you talk about some of the examples you use in class that you've seen where people need to do this? Yes, I see this all the time. I see it with doctors, scientists, researchers when they need to communicate their content to lay audiences, whether it's at a conference or they're seeking funding.

I see it a lot in business when engineers have to communicate with product managers, when marketing teams need to communicate with customers, and then also when executives and founders need to communicate their strategy, for example, to their org and get everyone on board in an alignment. And then also, of course, with a startup, they are constantly needing to pitch investors and sell to customers and make whatever their product or service is more accessible for them.

It sounds like almost everybody has situations. Yes, across the board. Yeah. In our class, we spend a lot of time talking about being in service of the audience rather than just focusing on the content. Do you want to share a few of your thoughts about being audience-centric and what that means? Yes. Whenever I work with a new client, no matter who they are or what their topic is, the first question I always ask is, who is your audience and what do they care about most?

And I'll give you an example of why this matters. In 2001, Apple and Steve Jobs came out with the original iPod. The engineers were really excited because it was going to be five gigabytes of data. So exciting for them, but if they came out with this message to audiences and customers, less exciting. They didn't know what that means. Is that a lot? So instead, they said, a thousand songs in your pocket. I remember that.

Yes, so they spoke in a way that was aligned with their audience's level of knowledge and what they cared about. They cared about how many songs they could fit. And so it's really important to speak in a way that's aligned with your audience's level of knowledge, but also in terms of what they care about most and translating it to that extent. Absolutely, and I think that example really highlights how people can fixate on the specific information rather than thinking about what's relevant and important to their audience. It's really about what the audience needs.

Beyond that audience-centric approach, I've also found that people tend to provide more information than is needed to help their audience really understand what they're saying.

You know, it reminds me, I know I've shared this with you before. My mother has this wonderful saying. It's tell me the time, don't build me the clock. We really need to help people get to the bottom line earlier. We have to communicate concisely, especially when we're dealing with complex information. You know, I think with this idea of being audience-centric and concise, we can really get into some of the specific tools that folks can use to help make their complex information more accessible.

Can you share with me an example of someone you've worked with who did a really good job explaining something complex to get us started looking at these particular tools people use? Yes, happy to. I worked with a TED speaker a while back. His talk was about a treatment that he developed for age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia. When he first came to me, his first draft talked a lot about mitochondria and prokaryotic cells and cell membranes.

which was really exciting for him and other scientists. But speaking to a lay audience, a TED audience, it was a bit too technical for them and less engaging. So first, we had him start with a story. He told the story of his father who had Alzheimer's disease and what it was like to see that decline. He established a personal connection, and he started sharing his content in a way that the audience could really connect to and relate with.

Then he asked the audience questions. So how many of you, you know someone that's suffered from Alzheimer's or dementia? So again, creating more connection with the audience to the topic. And then finally, we came up with an analogy to explain something that was pretty complex. In our bodies, we have billions of cells, and each of these cells are like tiny little individual cities. And within these cities, we have factories, which are the mitochondria.

and the job of these factories is to take the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat and convert it to energy. The problem is that often our factories face oxidative damage from toxins and environmental stressors and this sets the factory walls on fire and so essentially the fires become much bigger than the

the firefighters in our body can handle. And so the fires become out of control, the factory goes down, and then the entire city goes down. And this is why we see the symptoms of Alzheimer's, for example. What he developed is a supplement that's basically a fireproof brick.

So it comes in and repairs the factory walls with this fireproof brick and makes it more resistant to damage so the factory can be saved as well as even in some cases rebuild itself. So really incredible and my favorite part was right after his talk his daughter-in-law came up to me and she said for four years I had no idea what he did. I get this is amazing. Thank you so much.

Wow. I love the notion of connecting before going into the complexity, helping the audience relate to and understand. And there's an emotional connection that happens. So the taking a poll, the telling a personal story, what a great way to prepare the audience for the complex information. The leveraging of that extended analogy really helps the audience to take

perspective of the overall information and see how those fireproof bricks can really help. Are there other techniques that you've noticed beyond personal story, beyond connecting first and analogies that have

worked for clients or students that you've had? Yes, I'll share two with you. One is I call chunking. And so a lot of times we'll have 10 different things that we want to communicate. And so recently I was working with a speaker. He was a coach for a lot of different sports teams and he's known for helping turn them around. And so he'd go to losing teams and over a year or two, he'd make them winning teams. And so he started taking what he did on the field and

into the business arena. And now he'll speak to companies and share what they can also do to have higher performing teams.

And when we first started working together, it was here are the 10 things you should do, which is a lot. It's a bit overwhelming. And so generally in speaking and communication, we have the rule of three. Audiences are pretty good at digesting three discrete buckets of things. And so what we came up with is a framework that was step number one, you want to get your team into alignment. You want to get them all on the same page, heading toward the same North Star and get buy-in from them. Then step two, you want to have certain processes in place. And

And so he talked about celebrating small wins, and he had a number of other processes that are crucial. And then step three had to do with resilience. So what do you do in the face of setbacks? How do you recover from those? And so by having alignment, process, and resilience, he was able to make it a lot more easily digestible for his audience.

I think that idea of chunking is really, really powerful. In fact, I just worked with somebody in a very similar vein where there, surprisingly, were 10 ideas and we were able to cluster them together in terms of psychological, technological, and ethical. And really thinking about how you can chunk similar ideas together can be helpful.

I often use an analogy to explain that. When you bake, for example, you often take the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients, you do your work with them, and then you combine them together. That's that notion of chunking. You said there was another strategy that you've seen used well. Yes. Great book called Made to Stick, written by a colleague of ours, Chip Heath, as you know. And the example he uses, which I love, has to do with making data more relatable.

The Center for Interest in the Public Health, at one point they realized that movie popcorn had 30 grams of saturated fat.

And they were outraged. And this is incredible. We're going to tell the public and they're not going to believe it. They're going to stop eating movie popcorn. So they came out with this message. And as you might guess, nobody cared because it didn't mean very much. So 30 grams, is that a lot? I guess it's bad. How bad? They needed to make it more relatable. And so they went back, they hired some folks. And now they came out with movie popcorn has more saturated fat.

than a bacon and eggs breakfast, a hamburger and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings combined. Wow. Yeah. Incredible. And so now people are outraged. Now New York Times, CNN, ABC, everybody's talking about this. Movie popcorn sales plummet, and the industry is forced to change their ingredients. Absolutely. Very, very powerful example. So in reflection, I think we're taking away some very specific elements

skills that people can use to make complex technical and scientific information more accessible. We're talking about things like chunking information together, using analogies, making data relatable and contextualizing it. And begin by really understanding your audience and what's the most important things that you need to communicate. And finally, connect first

relate to the audience, use emotion to get things started, and that will help you as you go through your complex information. And before we go, I always like to ask three questions of everybody who helps with this podcast. You mind if I give you our top three questions? Go for it. All right. So number one, if you were to capture the best communication advice you've ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would that advice be?

It would be connect, then lead. For everyone listening, there's actually a great article in Harvard Business Review with the same title. But this idea, you have to connect with the audience first. You have to tap into what they care about, make your message relatable, and then you can take them where you want them to go. But that connection first is crucial. Absolutely. And we certainly talked about that earlier. Let me ask you question number two. Who's a communicator that you really admire and why?

I love Brene Brown. Again, for anyone listening, she has an amazing special on Netflix right now called Call to Courage. But she does so many of the things that we teach in our class that I share with my clients in terms of storytelling, making content accessible and relatable.

Her style is just so natural, authentic, very conversational, beautiful delivery, just very engaging to watch. So I think she's a great role model for anyone who's trying to up their communication game. Absolutely. She's very, very impressive. And number three, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I would say it's asking yourself the following three questions, which is, who is my audience?

What is my message? And then how can I bring that message to life through stories and analogies? Wonderful. I absolutely agree that that recipe leads to great success. Well, Lauren, it's been a pleasure to chat with you in this modality. I know we work together a lot in a bunch of different ways. Thank you for sharing your insight on how to make complex information more accessible. And I hope that everybody is taking away some very specific tools that can help you in any situation.

When you have some really complex information that you need to get across to your audiences. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Produced by Stanford University Graduate School of Business. For more information and episodes, visit gsb.stanford.edu or subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts.

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