Do you need to communicate complicated information to your team or to your boss? Information on situations that aren’t straightforward, like team dynamics, financial risks, or product dependencies?
These audiences – your boss, your team, your stakeholders – over-simplify what they hear. They demand conclusions, get impatient, make snap judgements. When humans listen, they take shortcuts.
So what do you do? Do you write down everything in painful detail so your audience can’t miss the nuances? Do you ask your listeners to repeat back to you what they’ve understood? (Sometimes this works well with your own team, but good luck getting your boss to do it!)
There are ways to communicate subtle points efficiently and clearly; you just have to work at it. The following example shows
how you don’t need to cheat and over-simplify
how your writing process can clear your own thoughts
how reworking your words pays off
how (finite) verbs make your message actionable
The example is from an area you may or may not be involved in: user experience design. But it’s the communication point that I hope comes through – carrying a complex message clearly.
Scenario
Let’s say you’ve been asked to do a short presentation tomorrow. A group of engineers, your colleagues, is having an offsite meeting. There’s a ten-minute presentation slot at the beginning, a kind of keynote, to kick off the event on a high note. But the manager who was due to speak first has fallen sick and cannot be reached. And now the presentation is on your shoulders.
There is always a debate in your organization about how many features to build. Customers constantly suggest new features, and your engineers are eager to build them, but your design colleagues keep talking about simple mental models and that kind of thing. You think – if the customers couldn’t handle the features, they wouldn’t ask for them!
You know that your engineering colleagues need some kind of response to Design, though, so you look through the Design books on the shelf for ideas for the presentation.
One book jumps out – “Living With Complexity”, by Don Norman, who you know is a big name in design. It sounds right on point. You look at the first chapter and read:
