You understand it when you can explain it

I’m a fan of Jan Schultink’s Slides That Stick blog. It’s full of practical tips for making better PowerPoint presentations. (The business world needs better PowerPoint presentations.)

While browsing his slides from a recent lecture* he did at the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel, one slide stood out for me.

When I sit through a complex, buzzword-filled explanation and leave feeling just as ignorant and unenlightened as I did before, I often wonder if the problem is my ignorance or the speaker’s inability to communicate. Sometimes, I wonder if the speaker is inarticulate because they don’t fully understand the subject either.

We teach what we seek to learn

I think I’m reasonably good at explaining things. People have told me many times that they have never understood some subject or other until I explained it. That’s a wonderful thing to hear, and it always makes me feel good.

But I also know that some of my explanations are complete bullshit. If I’m honest with myself, I know that those are the times when I don’t fully understand the subject and I try to piece together an explanation as I go along. I tend to over-complicate things I don’t fully understand, and I end up confusing rather than educating people. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Explaining something you don’t fully understand is a bad idea if you’re dishonest about what you actually know. But if you’re forthright about your grasp of the subject, articulating your thoughts can help you identify the gaps in your understanding and sometimes discover new insights.

Expert storytellers

The ability to articulate complex ideas in simple terms that everyone can understand is a good measure of expertise. It demonstrates both understanding and communications skill. You can understand something without being able to explain it, but you can’t explain something you don’t understand.

The best-known experts are people who can summarize arcane topics in terms everyone can understand. People like Richard Feynman and Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling tell stories and make analogies that bring science and mathematics to life. They tell stories to make the essential points meaningful.

Good storytellers know how to tailor their message to their audience. They use plain language to get the essential points across, then connect those points to illustrate the idea. The details and texture don’t matter until the basic ideas take shape. At that point, details add color and help fill in the gaps in our understanding, but they’re not helpful until we have a basic understanding.

Okay… the analogy needs work. Maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about and am sharing my thoughts to help identify the gaps in my understanding. Perhaps I’ve even gained some new insights.

Either way, I’ll share a few examples of good expert storytellers over the next few days.

1. * If you read Jan’s blog, most of the examples should be familiar. He notes that these slides are a perfect example of why presentation slides don’t stand their own without the presenter. The slides are not the presentation. They’re the visual support for the presentation. [↩]