Lee LeFever discusses the importance of explanation and provides tips for being an effective explainer. Explanations help lower the cost of understanding for others and should use context, storytelling, connections to familiar concepts, and start simply before providing more details. Effective explanations meet people where they are in their understanding and bring them along to higher levels of comprehension. Explaners should look for problems in need of solutions and find ways to make their explanations remarkable.
69. Be Remarkable
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Your standing at an intersection and a car pulls up, the window rolls down and the person politely asks for directions to the high school. You smile, knowing that you went that school and know exactly where it is. So you proceed to provide directions that will surely help. It all looks so clear in your mind. You’re driven it 1000 times. The person in the car jots everything down and all appears well. You go on about your business, but then you see it. The same car, obviously lost, going the wrong direction. What happened? You assumed they had everything they needed! Why didn’t the directions work?
I’m sure that many of you, back in the days before Google Maps, actually had to provide driving directions to someone else. I know, it sounds barbaric! But really, this simple act of giving driving directions highlights one of the most fundamental ideas that makes explanations work. The great ones have it, the bad ones don’t.In a word, it’s empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. Think about that. The route may be crystal clear in your mind - you know it better than anyone. But your version of the drive isn’t what matters. You have to think about it from the perspective of someone who is doing it for the first time - and this is where the rubber hits the road. Great driving directions account for the perspective a driver in a foreign land. The poor ones reflect the experience of someone who knows it well. This is perhaps the biggest reason explanations fail - we have a hard time empathizing with our audience and imagining what our explanations sound like to them.
This is called the curse of knowledge, which was made famous by Chip and Dan Heath in the book Made to Stick. It says that the more we know about something, the harder it is to imagine what it’s like not to know. Your directions failed because you knew it so well. Thinking back you realize that you don’t actually know the names of the roads or what order they come in. You haven’t had to rely on street signs in years. This is the curse of knowledge - you do or say something so much you lose sight of what it’s like not to know. This is why understanding explanation is important. It’s a remedy for the curse. By thinking about and planning an explanation we can account for the curse and create an experience that works - that gives people confidence that they can get from A to B and beyond.
The problem is, we rarely take a step back and think about how we explain ideas. Our explanations just happen. For many, they’re like brushing our teeth or using a computer – we explain ideas so often that the potential for improvement never really occurs to us. Of course, in the technical communication world, explanation is an inherent part of the process. But even there, my bet is that the skill of explanation is rarely called out as a specific goal. By taking a step back and thinking about explanation as a skill, you’ll see that it’s essential in so many part so our lives. If everyone could improve just a little, it could make a huge difference, especially in the future.
Here’s something I noticed in the process of writing the art of explanation – I started to notice every time some form of the word “explain” came up. I asked myself – what do they mean? Why did they choose that word? What is their goal? This showed me just how much we rely on explanations. Here’s what I mean…
Before getting there, let’s talk a bit about what an explanation is. If you pay attention, you’ll see that most explanations can boiled down to answering a single question - “why?” Why does this make sense? Why should I care? Why does this matter? It’s a fundamental part of how we make sense of the world and make things more understandable. Explanations answer the question - why?This is one of things I think makes explanation unique. As opposed to focusing on how to do something, explanation focuses on why it makes sense to do something. In this way, it’s a motivator and something has the potential to make people care. But it’s not enough to simply answer the why question. How you answer the question matters. Here’s one way to think about it... The best explanations increase understanding. That’s what we all want, right, to understand something.
But understanding comes with a cost. You invest time and energy in understanding something new. If you want to understand photosynthesis, you have to invest time and energy. If you want to understand quantum physics, you have to invest a LOT of time and energy. There is a cost to understanding any idea and your goal as an explainer is to lower that cost, to make learning it easier and more attractive than ever before.
In most cases, this happens by planning an explanation and taking everything you know and packaging it into an explanation. It’s the repackaging that represents the art of explanation. It all relates to planning an explanation that lowers the cost of understanding and answers a fundamental question - why?
Now you may be wondering – how does one come to be a specialist in something like explanation? There aren’t degree or certifications – yet. For me, it came from being entrepreneurial and working to solve a problem over many years – my story highlights the big idea behind everything we do.
In 2004, I had just founded Common Craft, which was a consultancy at the time. I was invited to a small conference in Silicon Valley and a tech CEO was speaking about the trends he saw in tech. At one point he mentioned RSS – which stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a technology that make it easy to subscribe to a website. A gentleman I the crowd raised his hand and asked a question – he said “What is RSS?”The CEO responded with words I’ll never forget. “RSS is an XML-based content syndication format” After that, the gentleman’s hand went down and the presenter moved on. But my mind raced. For the first time, I noticed a problem that plagues every industry, but especially technology. Valuable ideas like RSS, wikis and blogs were just starting to make waves. They were often free, pretty easy to use and could positively impact peoples’ lives. But adoption was slow and I saw the reason why – it was explanation. No one was able to explain these ideas in a way that the mainstream could understand. The geeks were doing the explaining – and they had a hard time overcoming the curse of knowledge. I knew we could do better and wrote a few blog posts that were my first explanations.
But things changed in 2006 when YouTube took off. We saw the potential and wanted to create media that solved a problem, so we started making short, animated video with explanation as the goal – our first video was RSS in Plain English. Since then, we’ve done nothing but focus on this opportunity. We’ve been hired to explain all kinds of products and ideas, built our own library of videos and even helped with Zombie survival. We were the first company to focus on explanation as a product and skill and since 2007, our videos have been viewed over 50 million times online.
And through it all, one big idea remains – explanation is a fundamental skill that everyone can improve. By simply thinking about explanation, we can become more understandable. It’s what we’ve practiced for years and it’s what we want everyone to see – you can be a better explainer.
In fact, I think explanation has a lot in common with design and that explanations are essentially designed communications. By taking the time to understand our audience and make choice in how we present ideas, we are essentially designing communications.
Think about it this way. We are ALL designers. Design, in some form is a part of everything we do. You could say that cavemen designed campfires. When we make a sandwich or sushi, we’re designing.
The same is true with explanation. We are all explainers. At work, at home , in conversations, we explain ideas all the time.
But there’s also a big difference. Design and design thinking for the last 50 years or so has become a profession. People started to understand good design and good designers. Design become an really important part of business and culture.
So you can see that design may have started with campfires, but through focus and attention, it become a profession with experts and guidelines. This hasn’t happened with explanations. We’re still explaining ideas in pretty much the same way we always have. And this it’s a shame. I’m here to say that it’s time to think about the possibilities of explainers being the next designers.
And through it all, one big idea remains – explanation is a fundamental skill that everyone can improve. By simply thinking about explanation, we can become more understandable. It’s what we’ve practiced for years and it’s what we want everyone to see – you can be a better explainer.
As I’ve said before, explanation is one of these things we do all the time. We never think about it, much less plan one. In the process of making Common Craft videos, we developed a really simple model that helped us think through the explanation and plan it around an audience’s needs. We call it the Explanation Scale. It’s a simple scale from A to Z that represents levels of understanding of a specific subject. The “A” end of the scale relates to less understanding, the “Z” is more understanding.
The idea is to plot the audience and specific ideas on the scale so that you can talk through a strategy for explaining an idea. The main goal is to move the audience down it – toward the Z end of the scale, toward more understanding.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that you’re an executive at a company and you’ve just come out of a planning session. The company is going in a new direction and it’s your job to explain the change to your direct reports. You realize that this is a chance to put your explanation skills to work, so you take a step back and think about how to make it more understandable.
You start by quickly drawing the explanation scale. Your first step is to plot the audience’s current level of understanding on the scale. Maybe a couple of colleagues help.You decide that, for this subject, the audience is at about “G” on the scale. They understand a little, but have a lot to learn. Next you consider how much you want them to understand. With “Z” being complete understanding, you figure they need to be at about “V” – they don’t need to know everything. So, the goal of the explanation is to move them from “G” to “V”. Of course, the next question is - how?
Before getting into the nitty gritty, let’s add an idea to the scale. A good rule of thumb in explanation is to focus on a couple of question in a particular order. They are “why” and “how” – as in – why should I care? Why does this make sense? And “how does it work?” or “how do I use this?” It’s a balance - here’s how that looks on the scale. If you plot someone on the “A” side, your explanation should focus on the “Why” more than “How”. The idea is new to them and they may struggle to understand in the beginning. If you plot someone on the “Z”, they have a good level of understanding and are likely to be more focused on “how” and the details of how it works.You can see that the scale helps us think through the big structure of our explanation – the balance of why and how.In the beginning of an explanation, the “why” matters most. We need the audience to be engaged and see why they should care.
Here’s another way you can think about it. The balance of why vs. how also relates to details. You might think about the scale going from big ideas to details, in that order. Too many details in the beginning, at the A end of the scale may cause your message to get lost.
So now we have a structure and a basic plan in place. We believe the audience is starting at G. The question becomes – how will we get them down the scale? In this situation, our priority is creating and sustaining confidence. Without it, our explanation will fail.
I like to think about it in terms of stepping stones. Explaining our subject means offering the audience small, achievable steps down the scale. Let’s talk about those stepping stones…13 minutes
By starting this way, we can do something very important – offer the audience an easy first step that helps them feel confident that you’re going to make it easy.
Think about how I started this talk – it was an example of giving driving directions that hopefully helped you see a big point about explanation. This was my way of inviting you in and offering you an easy first step. I wanted you to feel confident that I’m talking about something that interests you in a way that’s understandable. If I had started with a definition of explanation and how philosophers defined it in the renaissance, I may have lost you right off the bat.My goal in everything is to build and keep your confidence.
The question is: how? How do you build context and agreement? A couple of ideas:Offer a few statements that are not controversial and are designed to cause heads to nod. I call these “we can all agree” statements. We can all agree that the weather has been cold lately. We can all agree that computers are important for businesses. These statements frame the subject matter.Next we can take this simple idea and apply it to a big picture idea or problem.
This is building context – a time to focus on the environment where ideas before talking about the ideas themselves. Here’s one way to look at it - Talk about the forest first, on the A side, then talk about the trees. By starting with the forest, we can help the trees become even more useful.
Let’s consider an explanation about software security. The forest of this idea may be the prevalence of computers in business and how important they are to success – anything that threatens that success needs attention.
The trees are the specific issues and resolutions. By focusing on the big picture first, we can ensure that the trees can make as much sense as possible.
Recently I became familiar with someone’s work whom I now consider the godfather of video education and explanation. His name was Henry Jamison Handy – known as Jam Handy. Along with being an Olympic swimmer, he created 1000s of videos in the his lifetime, many of which were educational.
In 1937, his company worked with Chevrolet to create a video about the differential gear. Now, if you’re like most people, this sounds amazingly boring and dry. If you look at a diagram it looks really complicated. But Mr. Handy created a video that explained the differential gear in a remarkably effective way. Rather than dive right into the mechanics of the gear himself, he took time to build context and agreement. Let’s take a look…
You can see that this video spends a bit of time not focusing on the gear – but why it makes sense that the gear exists. This is the forest – the why. Once he can help people see why it’s needed, the more technical side has more meaning.
The explanation didn’t stop there. He used a simple model, starting with tinker toys to explain the mechanics, while slowly building complexity. Just an amazing explanation.
So we have our first stepping stone on the scale – context.
One of the most effective ways I’ve found to relate an explanation is through a story – and before going to much further, I want to take a step back and talk about our approach to story, because everyone looks at it a little differently.
Some of you may have notions about stories that are like the stories we read in book and watch on TV. These stories have compelling characters and follow a hero’s inspiring journey. We love to read and experience these kinds of stories, but creating them can be intimidating. Most of us want to leave these kinds of stories to the professionals.
Fortunately, stories come in many flavors and in the context of an explanation, they can be very simple. In fact most stories in explanations follow the same basic outline:Meet Bob, he’s like youBob has a problem, he feels badNow he found a solution and feels goodDon’t you want to feel like Bob?It’s really simple. We don’t need to know Bob’s back-story or what motivates him. We don’t need plot twists or exotic locations. These kinds of stories really only need to show a person trying something new and experiencing a change in perspective.
By wrapping our ideas in a story we can accomplish a couple of things:First, we can offer the audience a change to empathize with our character. We want them to see themselves in the character and imagine what it feels like to solve the same problem. We want them to say “I know that feeling!” so the solution appears obvious.
Second, we can offer an example that relates to the real world. Stories have a way of taking ideas and facts and bringing them down to earth in a way that feels natural. This helps us move from fact-telling to storytelling. Here’s an example…
Now we’re moving more towards the middle with Story on the scale.
Another key to making an idea easy to understand is to connect it to an something that the audience already understands.
A famous example of this relates to the 1979 movie Aliens starring Sigourney Weaver. Just a few year before, the movie Jaws had been a smash hit and everyone knew about it.
The story goes that Aliens was pitched to studios using three simple words – Jaws in Space.This is a connection. Everyone knew Jaws and could imagine what a movie with a similar plot could become in the context of space.
Often, the best way to make a connection is through an analogy – a comparison between two things that shows something in common. The basic idea is to say that if you understand X, then understanding Y is easy. If you understand the how the alphabet combines to make words, then understanding computer programming is not that different – it’s a language.
Recently I was listening to one of favorite radio shows and podcasts – The American Life, hosted by Ira Glass. This episode was called Back to School and it included an interview with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who had done really interesting research about the impact of being poor on brain development. During the interview, she explained the big idea using a connection that blew me away.I want to play part of the story, but first a bit of context… In the discussion, she talked about the problems that poor children have in school and the possible reasons why. But in addition to all the bad things that are likely to happen to them as adults, there's also the effect that long-term stress has on them when they're still kids, especially on their brains and their ability to learn.Nadine Burke HarrisIf you look on the molecular level, you're walking through the forest and you see a bear, right? So you can either fight the bear or run from the bear. That's kind of your fight or flight system. Right?Ira GlassRight.Nadine Burke HarrisAnd your body releases a ton of adrenalin, right? Which is your short-term stress hormone, and something else called cortisol, which tends to be more of a long-term stress hormone. And this dilates your pupils, gets your heart beating fast. Your skin gets cold and clammy. That's because you're shunting blood from anywhere that isn't absolutely necessary to the muscles that you need to be able to run from that bear.The other thing that it does-- now, you can imagine that if you're about to fight a bear, you need some gumption to fight that bear, right? So it kind of shuts off the thinking portion of your brain, right? That executive function cognitive part. And it turns on the real primal aggression and the things that you need to be able to think that you're going to go into a fight with a bear and come out on the winning side.Ira GlassYeah.Nadine Burke HarrisAnd that's really good if you're in a forest and there's a bear. The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night. Right? And for a lot of these kids, what happens is that this system, this fight or flight response, which is an emergency response in your body, it's activated over and over and over again. And so that's what we were seeing in the kids that I was caring for.Isn’t that an amazing explanation? By connecting the experience and physical changes that come with fighting a bear (something we can image) to the real world life of a child, we can see the child’s development from a new perspective. So good.
Now we’re moving more towards the middle with Story on the scale.
If you’re like most people, you have a job your parents don’t understand very well. Let’s say you’re technical writer and now that you’ve learned about explanation, you’re going to help them see it differently. Being a technical writer, you already have a head start, but let’s take a look at explaining your job using the ideas we just discussed.The first step is to take a few minutes and write down what you want them to know. By writing out the big points an explanation, you’ll see it from a new perspective and start to find ways to make it better. You won’t end up reading it aloud - the goal is to get your thoughts organized.
Maybe you can start with context and agreement - how can you make their heads nod and see the forest of technical writing first?You could start by taking about the rising complexity in the world. New products, new ideas. People feel anxious and need help understanding how to use all these new things. The companies that are making all the new products see this anxiety as a problem. They solve this problem by creating websites and documents designed to help. You work for a company that is motivated to help their customers by creating these materials.
Maybe you can start with context and agreement - how can you make their heads nod and see the forest of technical writing first?You could start by taking about the rising complexity in the world. New products, new ideas. People feel anxious and need help understanding how to use all these new things. The companies that are making all the new products see this anxiety as a problem. They solve this problem by creating websites and documents designed to help. You work for a company that is motivated to help their customers by creating these materials.
Next you can make a connection to something that is familiar to them. Invite them to think about a new car that comes off the factory floor. Cars are complicated and the company doesn’t want to take calls from owners wondering how to check the oil. So they create an owners manual that covers most of the bases. And for something like an owners manual, the content has to be understandable, well organized and easy to use. Technical writing is one of the jobs that makes this happen.
You could use a quick story to highlight a real world situation that you experienced. Maybe a software company you worked for created a new product and soon found out that people did know how to use it. Initially, the support team was flooded with calls from customers ask very basic questions. Within a few months a team of technical writers created knowledge base on the website that not only gave customers a self service option, but gave the support team documentation for future calls.Technical writing saved the day.
Here we see again that a few basic ideas can transform something like your job into an explanation that can help people feel confident and see an idea from a new perspective.
Let’s take a look at an example of how my company explained a product using some of these ideas in a short video.My company Common Craft has been creating explanations since 2007 and I want to use a well-known video to walk through a few points that make explanations work. About 3.5 years ago the founders of Dropbox approached us about making a video that explains the product. After diving in, it became clear that Dropbox had a real explanation problem. The tool itself was very simple and it once you see it work, the value was clear, but it was a very difficult thing to introduce. Getting people from nothing to the aha! moment was a challenge because few people had ever imagined a product like it.
The explanation first minute of the video. Here’s how we open the video :You know how it feels to forget something like a wallet, phone or keys. It feels like a part of your life is missing, along with the things you need. In the real world you have to plan ahead to prevent problems. This builds Agreement and Context. By starting with an example that everyone has experienced, we can provide them an easy first step. Everyone knows the feeling of forgetting your wallet and it sucks. We’ve invited them to think about the world in terms of a problem that’s familiar and evokes emotion.
Next we simply Connect to this real world feeling to the big idea of Dropbox. But these days the important stuff we keep on computers and phones can be there for you, wherever you are. Files saved on one computer can now be saved on all your computers and phones automatically. This is the big idea behind dropbox.
But that’s not enough. We also need to see it in action and to do that, we’ll share a story about someone who uses it successfully. We want the audience to empathize with our character Josh and feel his pain. The best way to do that is to build context and talk about the problem. Let’s meet Josh, who is preparing for a big trip to Africa. Right now all of his trip info is spread across his desktop, laptop and phone. He wants to bring it all with him and is tired of having to email files to himself. Then a friend told him about dropbox, which creates a new kind of folder on his computers.Can’t you feel his pain?By seeing the world through Josh’s eyes, we can see ourselves solving similar problems. Again, this is empathy and it’s the key to engaging explanations. The rest of the video explains how Josh uses the basic features to be happy and productive. You can watch it at Dropbox.com
Record of success. When the video appeared on the Dropbox home page in 2009, Dropbox had 2 million users. Today, they have over 100 million and the video remains. In fact, Dropbox says it is viewed over 30k times a day and over 30 million in total. It’s surely one of the best-known product explanations on the Web.From my perspective, it works because it’s designed to educate. It’s a very soft sell with a priority on building confidence. But I also use this video because the same points relate to your own explanations. I also think it can serve to highlight a slight difference from technical communication in that it’s designed to relate big ideas and emotions as the priority and focus.Whether you’re a marketer, professional communicator or product manager or parent, the same ideas apply.
This leads to a big point that I think has contributed to people knowing about our work at Common Craft. We happened to discover an effective format very early in the YouTube age. By using a simple animated video with cute paper cut-outs, we were able to attract more attention than if we had used a more traditional means of explanation like a talking head. And I think this is where a lot of potential lies. We have more media choices now than ever before. You have an opportunity to not only explain an idea, but to use media to attract attention, make it sharable and perhaps, live forever.
Here’s an example I love. My favorite podcast is called Radiolab, by WNYC. Being a radio show it has to operate within some real constraints. For example, radio is not so good with visuals. But that didn’t stop them from doing an entire show on color – and this where they found a remarkable way to use media.
Here’s an example I love. My favorite podcast is called Radiolab, by WNYC. Being a radio show it has to operate within some real constraints. For example, radio is not so good with visuals. But that didn’t stop them from doing an entire show on color – and this where they found a remarkable way to use media.
This was their remarkable idea – to use a chorus to to represent colors. They assigned each color a note. Like this… (play rainbow).Then, the question was – what do other animals see when they look at a rainbow? By using media and a remarkable idea, they made the idea of color different.
For example, a dog can only see the colors blue and green. Here’s how that sounds. They go through a few examples that get more and more complex. Here’s a quick recap.
Soon we discover that there is an animal that can see 50% more colors than any other animal. It’s the mantis shrimp.Here’s how the chorus handles that:Again – a fun example of how media can be used to bring an idea to life and make an explanation memorable and remarkable.
Soon we discover that there is an animal that can see 50% more colors than any other animal. It’s the mantis shrimp.Here’s how the chorus handles that:Again – a fun example of how media can be used to bring an idea to life and make an explanation memorable and remarkable.
And that’s one of the big points I want to make. We live in a world with more media options than ever before. Professional communicators have new options in educating and informing. Under it all is great writing and explanation, but we now have new ways to make ideas interesting and useful. It’s what helped Common Craft become a brand that’s known for communication.
One of the things that I’m most proud of lately is inspiring young people to create their own video explanations using the same methods we use.
If you search YouTube for “Common Craft Style” you’ll find over 1000 videos made by students and teachers in classrooms. These are activities that teach writing, communication and media skills, skills that could creating a new generation of technical communicators.
I also think simple and affordable tools have huge potential in creating videos without a studio or complicated tools. Using PowerPoint animations and tools like Screenflow and Camtasia have every you need to create Common Craft Style videos.
And online tools like GoAnimate provide really rich tools for creating animated videos using nothing but a website.
Now, lets talk about your work. I want you to leave here today with some ideas for explaining your job to relatives. But really, I want you to consider how explanations can help you professionally.Once you start noticing explanations, you’ll see that they are a thread that touches nearly everything. Every presentation, every meeting, every design involves communication that could be improved with improved explanation skills. As I said in the beginning, it’s something we do so much, most of us never think about it.
So this is my challenge to you: Start to notice explanations at work. Look for evidence of the Curse of Knowledge. When an explanation doesn’t work, when people lose confidence, think about why. You’ll start to see the incredible opportunities to improve.Next, pick a subject and start working on your own explanations. I highly encourage you to sit down and pretend you’re writing a script for a video on the subject. Think about coming to agreement, building context, making connections and telling stories. Most of all, think about your audience and what will make them feel confident and motivated to keep learning.
