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.

There may have been a time when executives routinely read these pre-interview tomes, and there are still circumstances when they’re valuable, but I think that most briefing books in their current form are a waste of time and money.

More relevant briefings

Briefing books perform an important function. They provide subject matter experts with the information they need to prepare for an interview. Very often, however, they’re stuffed full of irrelevant material because… well, just because. Briefing books have to provide lots of information because that’s the way it’s always been done, right? Wrong. They’re only helpful if your executive or client reads them.

Here are a few things you can do to provide more concise and relevant briefing documents.

Send it early. Sending you’re an executive an eight page briefing book thirty minutes before the interview is a good way to ensure that they won’t read it. Whenever possible, provide briefing materials at least 24 hours in advance.

Change the name. Your busy executive doesn’t have time to read a book, so don’t call it a book if you expect them to read it. Just call it a briefing.

Put it in the body of an e-mail. There’s no harm in attaching documents with supplementary information, but put the most important information right in the e-mail where your executive will see it. You can put the information in the meeting invitation as well, but I’d bet that most people look in their calendar to find out when and where they have an interview, but not what it’s about. Learn where your executives look for information and put it there. If you don’t know, ask. They’ll appreciate it.

Keep the essentials. A good briefing book lists the date and time of the interview (remember the time zone*), the reporter’s name and outlet and where the interview will take place. List your contact information too. You know this already. That part isn’t broken.

Provide relevant background. Your executive don’t care that the reporter graduated from the University of Illinois in 1993 or that the outlet was founded in 1971. Stop copying and pasting that crap from Vocus or Cision. Nobody cares. Focus on answering questions provide useful background information. What is the focus of the outlet? Who is the audience? Is it a key publication in our target market? Does the reporter know anything about us or our industry? Does the outlet or the reporter have a history with our company?

Include sample questions. Sometimes reporters will tell you some of the questions they plan to ask. If they do, include them. If they don’t, you should still have a general idea of what the reporter wants to know, so provide a summary of the story’s direction and purpose.

Remember your key message. Your executive should never do an interview without having a clear idea of what they want to see in print. That means having a key message and a few points in support of the message. Don’t provide a dozen messages and expect a perfect quote in the story. It won’t happen. Focus on a few main points. Anticipate tough questions, then outline the best answers for each of them and how to bridge to your message points.

Offer supporting data. Make a quick list of facts and figures relevant to the topic. If there are relevant financial, product, market or customer numbers, include them.

Skip the sample articles. They’re not helpful. Well, not always. If there are recent articles by the reporter or in the outlet that pertain to the company or the topic, include them. But if they haven’t written anything relevant, don’t fake it. You’re wasting everyone’s time and demonstrating that you don’t respect your executive’s time. Can’t give up the sample articles? Provide them as an attachment. That signals that they’re not essential reading.

That’s it. Provide the most important information as concisely as possible in the format your executive or client is most likely to read. Whenever possible, schedule time before the interview to go over it with them and plan the interview. You’ll both go into the interview with greater peace of mind.

1. * Bonus tip: Plan meetings across time zones using TimeandDate.com.

The Online Media from RealWire on Vimeo.

That exercise in feature enhancement failed, but, coincidentally, I wasn’t the only person thinking about the subject. This morning, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang posted “How Companies Respond to the Risks of Personal Brands,” in which he points out that companies have to manage certain risks when they allow their employees to build the personal brands when blogging on behalf of the company.

The risks he cites are real, but in the long run, they’ll be overshadowed by the benefits of humanizing the brand. Your customers want to be heard. They want to deal with a real human being.

Who wants to deal with a faceless mega-corporation?

Over the years, I’ve had to deal with countless angry customers. Furious, enraged customers. When customer service fails, when escalation processes lead to dead-ends and frustration, people desperately reach out to any human being listed on the company’s Web site. Too often, the media relations contact is the only person whose name and contact information is readily available.

Solving their problem is always a priority, but often, the most important thing you can do is to listen and treat them like a person rather than a customer ID number.

The desire to be treated like a person is nothing new. Why do companies think it’s such a risk to let their employees act human?