Explain your R&D work to a fifteen-year-old

2 minute read
essays

R&Ders are notorious for using technical jargon. Used appropriately, jargon is a code; an efficient way to compress and communicate complex concepts in just a few words or acronyms. Used inappropriately, jargon becomes a tool to inadvertently or deliberately exclude others from a conversations, or to purposely boast about subject-matter competence at the expense of understanding and collaboration. Unfortunately, its overuse creates barriers to awareness of the value of R&D work to less-technical audiences – such as colleagues and stakeholders in marketing, sales, or management roles.

There is a simple way to avoid jargonization. First, accept that most non-R&D colleagues will never reach the same passion and technical understandings that you have for your work – and that’s OK. Ask yourself: how can you at the very least make them grasp why you are so interested in it? Then, strive to simplify and distill your work to a level of simplicity and manner of communication that a typical fifteen-year-old would be compatible with – not in terms of intelligence, but in terms of attention. This means presupposing a lack of general interest, a fleeting mind, a short attention span, and a rush to grasp the essentials and move on.

To achieve this:

  1. Determine your audience: who are they, and what do they mostly care about? What would put them to sleep and should be avoided?

  2. Establish your primary purpose: are you assisting decision-making by informing, explaining, advocating or persuading, or promoting your work to establish credibility?

  3. Focus on the audience’s benefits: avoid obsessing about your technology’s features; instead, focus on how it impacts the audience’s work/life.

  4. Define your key messages: what are the three key things that you would like them to remember long after the communication is over?

  5. Understand boundary conditions: is the audience already predisposed towards what you are about to tell them? If so, how?

  6. Craft a compelling story: which narrative can create curiosity and avoid provoking unnecessary resistance and disinterest?

  7. Make tangible analogies: how can you link the technological aspects to something that the audience is already familiar with?

  8. Take apart and simplify: which details can you safely disregard without impacting your message or its significance?

  9. Make it visible and tangible: if you can, let the audience examine physical prototypes. At the very least, visualize your insights with clear, clean diagrams, each focusing on a key message and a request.

  10. Identify and exploit paradoxes: which counter-intuitive insights did you reach, and how can you turn them into an “aha moment”? What challenges the audiences’ thinking?

  11. Extrapolate consequences: take your thoughts and insights to their logical conclusions, be they positive, neutral and negative, and ask the audience: “what if?”