One of the reasons people fail in communication is because they're stuck inside their own heads.

They can't understand the perspective of their audience.

This is especially true if you have complex information to communicate.

I’m going to give you four simple techniques to allow you to effectively communicate complex information.

 4 Strategies for Effectively Communicating Complex Ideas

I'm a scientist, that's what I do for my full-time job. I'm a college professor and I do research, and I often have to communicate extremely complex information to both scientific and non-scientific audiences.

A couple of weeks ago, a student group invited me to give a talk about scientific communication. I used it as an occasion to give them advice about how I simplify my complex research ideas for audiences that aren't members of my particular scientific specialty, so they can understand what I do and the significance of what I do.

I think these tips are more generally applicable, not just for scientific communication, but any time you have to communicate an unfamiliar idea to an audience, and do it effectively.

 

1. Simplify

Obviously, the main problem with complex information is its complexity. So, we want to simplify. I'm going to give you an example from my own research.

One of the main things I do research on is confusion between drug names. They look and sound alike, and people get confused and get the wrong medicine. I'm going to give you two different ways I just described it in kind of simple terms.

First, I'm going to describe it in complicated, scientific terms:

I can compute the similarity between drug names, and predict the probability that one name will be confused with another. Using similarity and frequency, and severity of harm, I can predict the probability that a particular drug will harm a patient.

So, that's pretty complicated. You're like, "Huh, what?" What do I do?

Here's a simpler way:

People sometimes get the wrong drugs. The reason this happens is because drug names look and sound a lot alike, and pharmacists and doctors, and people confuse them. I do work that helps to prevent that from happening.

So, that's it. The complex way and the simple way.

My advice about simplification is to simplify far beyond when you think you've simplified enough. When I gave this talk in front of an audience, I asked a couple of the audience members to volunteer to talk about their own research. These are an audience of young researchers. I asked them to volunteer to talk about their own research. Each time they described it, it was way, way, way too complicated. But they thought they were simplifying.

We've been talking to ourselves and to other specialists or people who know exactly what we do people in our own industry for so long that we forget that we're using jargon. We can't even imagine what would be like to genuinely simplify and remove the jargon from our own language. That was an example of simplification.

 

2. Focus on Problems

When you're talking about your work or your product or something similar, focus on the problems that it solves or its benefits, and not the features of the product.

Here's an example. If I were to focus on features in describing my research, I might say something like,

I can take two drug names in either the orthographic, or the phonological representation. I can then use a variety of different orthographic and phonological similarity measures, compute a numerical similarity score between those two representations and use that similarity score to predict the probability of confusion. I can then use that probability of confusion, compare it to the actual probability of confusion in the real world and validate my predictive index.

So, that's a description of the features of my system in language that no one could really understand.

Or I could say something like this by focusing on the problem and the benefits:

About 4 million times per year, people walk into pharmacies in the United States and they walk out with the wrong drug. One of the main reasons that this happens is because drug names are so similar that they're confusing. Out of these 4 million errors, a significant number of people get hurt because they take the wrong drug, or because they fail to get the drug that they need. My work helps fewer people get hurt.

That's a simple description focusing on the problem and the benefits. You want to focus on problems and solutions to problems.

 

3. Identify Benefits or Solutions

The problem, in my case, is too many people get hurt because they get the wrong medicine at the pharmacy, or when they're in the hospital, that's the problem. People get hurt because of medication errors. The solution that I'm offering is a method for predicting which names are going to be most confusing and for preventing these errors.

So, the problem is too many people get hurt. The solution that I'm offering is a method for preventing these errors. Forget about all that fancy stuff I said about probability of errors. Nobody cares about that. And nobody understands it. Just focus on the problem and the solution.

Out of these 4 million errors, a significant number of people get hurt because they take the wrong drug, or because they fail to get the drug that they need. My work helps fewer people get hurt.

If somebody says, "Well, how does that work?" You say, "It works great." You don't give them a detailed description of how it works. They don't want it. They won't really understand it even if you give it to them.

 

4. Practice Your Pitch

Practice over and over and over again. Practice it in front of the mirror, practice it with friends, memorize those phrases.

Remember in my previous video I talked about the importance of memorizing phrases. You don't want to be struggling for the right word when you're trying to give the elevator pitch about your work. You want to know exactly what to say. It has to roll easily off the tip of your tongue because you've practiced it so many times. After you've practiced it, what you think, is enough times practice it 10 more times. Practice it on video, practice it in front of the mirror. Just keep practicing it. It needs to be like second nature.

 

Summary

Those were four simple tips for communicating complex information.

1. Simplify what you’re saying.

2. Focus on problems.

3. After you've talked about the problems, talk about the benefits and the solutions to the problem, not the features of your solution.

4. Practice saying what you're going to say so you don't struggle for the right word when the time comes to explain your work.