We hear a lot about design these days. Apple products are probably the most popular examples. The idea is that Apple became one of the most valuable companies in the world, in part, because they focus on the design of their products.
But what does that mean, really? What do organizations who focus on design do differently?
Recently the TV show 60 Minutes featured the design company IDEO, which was founded by David Kelley. At multiple points in the interview, Kelley mentions an idea that is at the core of design and design thinking. The word is empathy.
The central tenet of design thinking, according to Kelley, isn't one of aesthetic or utility, but of empathy and human observation. "Be empathetic," Kelley explained to CBS' Charlie Rose. "Try to understand what people really value." Doing that, he says, will lay the foundation for more intuitive designs.
This got me thinking. When I talk about the most fundamental ideas that make explanations work, I use very similar language. To make something easy to understand, you must empathize. Put yourself in the audience’s shoes and try to understand how your communication sounds to them. Only by empathizing can you create an explanation that works.
Could it be that explanation and design have a lot more in common? I think so, and here’s one way to look at it.
We are all designers. If you’ve ever made a paper airplane, taken a photo or built a fire, you’ve designed something. You had a goal and you made decisions about how to accomplish that goal using a specific medium. We are all designers.
Likewise, we are all explainers. Every day we communicate ideas with the goal to help people understand. We explain why traffic was bad, why the CEO made a decision, why people sneeze more at springtime. We are all explainers.
Now, being a designer or explainer does not necessarily mean we are good at it. The rubber hits the road, in both cases, when we learn about quality and what goes into a good design or explanation. The goal is not simply to have done it, but to have done it well. And that’s where we find the big difference between the two.
Design thinking has developed over many years. It is a profession and a focus of attention and care. People study it, practice it and refine it over a lifetime. Some individuals have a talent for it and apply it to products we use every day. As a culture, we’re learning to appreciate good design and the designers who make it happen.
Unfortunately, this is not currently the case with explanation. While technical writers, teachers and journalists are often amazing explainers, we don't often think about these professions through the lens of explanation. We know they are great teachers, for example, but we don't necessarily point out explanation as a skill that makes them especially great. To me, this is like saying that an iPod is a useful gadget without recognizing that design is the element that makes it so useful.
My point is this: Communicators have an opportunity to think about the role of explanation like we think about the role of design. It's a skill that can be defined, developed, practiced and put to work in solving problems. Over time, we may see that a focus on explanation develops into something akin to design, where explainers emerge and inspire others to think differently about making ideas easy to understand.
It's possible that one key to explanation is applying design thinking to communication. By learning to empathize with our audience and understanding their needs, we can design communications that solve specific problems. The more this is the focus, the more we'll see that great explanations can become a new goal for professionals - something we can use to create change.
The next time you’re communicating something complex - remember - you’re a designer, too.
Here's the 60 Minutes segment about David Kelley and IDEO:
NOTE: If you're interested in learning in-depth about the skill of explanation and how to make Common Craft Style videos, check out our online courses at the Explainer Academy.
1. ‘Know what the students know’ when planning your explanation: All great teachers have an excellent knowledge of their students. This knowledge is paramount in pitching the explanation just right. Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ is key here – the explanation should be matched to the audience: not too complex as to be unintelligible to the students, but not too simple or unchallenging so as to bore the students and prove uninteresting. By knowing your students you can adapt your language to draw upon their prior knowledge before activating links to the new knowledge that you wish them to learn.
3. Make explanations simple, but not simpler. [...] Convey a core message: Effective explanations therefore do need to have the power of compressed language. A good proverb, like “people who live in glass houses should not throw stones” has an enduring power. It generates ideas, sparks connections and combines both easily digestible language and memorable imagery. [...] I would argue that most extended explanations can be compressed into such a memorable statement – what acts as the core message of our explanation.
4. Engage their hearts and minds: [...] As most charity advertisements will attest, individual stories that spark empathy and interest prove much more memorable than mass scale problems or abstract concepts.
5. ‘Paint the picture’ – use analogies, metaphors and images: Cognitive science has proven that analogies and metaphors are crucial to language, thinking and memorising knowledge (see here). [...] By using imagery and metaphors that evoke mental images, students can make mental hooks into what they already know and better organise their new knowledge.
6. Tell compelling stories: Memorable personal stories brings History and facts alive; dry statistics become enlivened when in the context of a story. 64% of students achieving A grades in exams is interesting, but not nearly as memorable as stories of individual students toiling and overcomes tough circumstances to gain an A grade.
Some of you will notice that these are many of the same points I cover in The Art of Explanation. It's great to see others out there thinking along the same lines. Perhaps it's not a surprise though. Explanation isn't a new discovery, it's as old as language itself, we're just starting to think differently about how to do it better.
Marketing genius and author Seth Godin recently wrote about the use of analogy in educating others and frames an idea that's near and dear to my heart:
Marketing, like all forms of art, requires us to learn to see. To see what's working and to transplant it, change it and amplify it.
We don't teach this, but we should. We don't push people to practice the act of learning by analogy, because it's way easier to just give them a manual and help them avoid thinking for themselves.
The opportunity is to find the similarities and get ever better at letting others go first--not with what you've got, but with something you can learn from.
So true. I also think about this in terms of "why" vs. "how". It's sometimes too easy to provide the manual and a set of steps to help someone learn something new. And it can work. But it can also represent a missed opportunity. By framing ideas at a higher level and using analogies, we can discuss the "why" first and show people a new way to think about the idea; why an idea makes sense, why it matters. This can become an invitation to care - and that's what we all want - for people to care about our ideas.
I felt the how-why disconnect when learning math. I was so focused on the "how", I never saw the reasoning behind the solutions and formulas - math appeared to be a set of steps you memorize - the "how". I never developed a higher level sense of "why" for most math problems - and my grades reflected this kind of learning. What I needed was for someone to step away from the specifics and build a foundation, perhaps by using analogies, so that I could learn to see math from a different perspective first.
Jason Kottke pointed me to a passage from the Kurt Vonnegut novel Bluebeard, where he outlines the three types of specialists that are needed for success in a revolution. Remarkably, one is an explainer.
Here’s the passage:
Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening teams with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius -- a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."
The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be."
The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of sh*t as a Christmas turkey."
Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top -- Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia's, Christ being the one in Christianity's.
He says that if you can't get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.
Of course, revolutions come in all shapes and sizes. Maybe your revolution is a new project at work or a marketing team that will change the positioning of a product. Whatever you want to do, consider Vonnegut's advice and find an explainer that translate the big ideas to everyone else.
NOTE: If you're interested in learning in-depth about the skill of explanation and how to make Common Craft Style videos, check out our online courses at the Explainer Academy.
About 6 months ago, my first book was published: The Art of Explanation. Being my first, I didn’t know what to expect from the process, the reviews, the sales, the marketing. Thankfully I found my way through and now have some information on how it’s been received.
First, let me start by offering a HUGE thanks to all the people who have purchased the book. You rock. I wish I could thank you more personally. I hope it has helped you think differently about how you communicate.
So how IS the book doing?
A few factors helped me get some sense of how the book has been received since it was published:
First is Amazon’s Best Seller’s Rank. This rank changes hourly and ranks all books on Amazon based on sales. The Art of Explanation has consistently ranked in the top 5000 books and has reached into the top 1000 a couple of times that I’ve seen. It is often in the top 20 of all business communication books.
Second are reviews on Amazon. Some will tell you that reviews don’t matter, but for me, they really do. They are a very public representation of the experience. To date, the book has been reviewed 48 times on Amazon.com and has an average score of 4.6 out of 5 stars.
As a professional presenter and demonstrator I figured I knew it all. This book schooled me and changed my perspective of every client interaction. Now I am more effective at getting my message across.
Teachers, Sales Leaders and Sales Engineers - read this.
And of course, they aren’t all positive. Here’s a 1 star review:
I found this book infuriatingly wordy.
Part 1: Plan has four chapters, the first three all seem to be an attempt to explain what explanation is, and ironically the book lost my interest right here. The fourth chapter - Planning Your Explanations talks about 'explanation problems' and introduces the 'explanation scale' and tells a long and involved story about 'Andre' who "... graduated from Stanford University a few years ago with a degree in computer science and is now focused on the company he started that he hopes will change the world." but it does little to help me think through how to plan an explanation of my product. There are useful questions buried within the text but they take up half a Kindle page of a 18 Kindle page chapter. [...]
On the whole, I think the negative reviews have merit and are helpful. Sure, they sting a little, but as I’ve said multiple times recently - you can’t publish a book without being judged.
I’m also happy that the book is being translated into a number of languages. They are: Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Hungarian, so far. I understand it will be a while before they’re available, but I’m excited about their releases all the same.
I also recently learned that the book is on it’s third printing. Book industry people tell me that this is an important milestone.
So to answer the question - I think the book is doing better than expected. Of course, in book terms it’s still very early and it may take a year or more to have a true feel for how it’s doing.
Again, a big thanks to each of you who have read it, and for those who would like to learn more, here are some purchase options.
This short video shares the basic steps to animating Common Craft Cut-outs using PowerPoint. It is part of series focused on helping you make Common Craft Style videos and presentations using common tools.
Note: the "custom animation" functionality used below may appear differently in various versions of PowerPoint, but the basic ideas should be consistent across versions and in tools like Keynote. Watch:
