A good explanation is an art form, if a slightly mysterious one.
We can all recognize a great explanation, yet picking apart the intricacies of how it is done remains elusive. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I’ll try and come at the topic from a few angles and see if we can’t sniff out some of the key ingredients.
If I’ve made you think of the kitchen already, we’re on the right track; often a good explanation will translate the language of something mystifying into day-to-day parlance, like thinking of a well-made explanation as a simple recipe to follow. But sometimes, with the best intentions, we lose our would-be chefs along the way; what on earth is “parlance”? And why can’t I find it next to the knives, chopping boards and mixing bowls? Jargon tends to slip into our explanations, especially if we want to appear clever. The wrong ingredient can completely derail a dish or crash an explanation.
On top of that, as anyone who has tried to explain something to a child will know, there is a limited time window to hold and keep someone’s attention, especially in our over-stimulated world. Increasingly, it also seems we have less and less spare time to listen.
Even more troublingly, what if you don’t know enough about what it is you’re trying to explain? What if you scrabble around, making things up and muddying the soup?
Leaving the cooking metaphors to the side for the time being, good explanations do not have to be perplexing. Any time we set out to deliver a good explanation, we should have one goal in mind. As Chris Anderson, curator of TED puts it, “Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners.”
We have another, related metaphor: construction. Structures are built with a plan, on top of firm foundations, and a solid explanation should do the same thing.
This is well recognised by great thinkers, and the phrase, “Standing on the shoulders of giants” has been knocking around for centuries. In one of its most quoted forms, it is attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, and has even found its way on to the rim of the British £2 coin. He preceded it with, “If I have seen further”; it is only through the help of others and with a solid base that we are able to see, understand and learn.
Back to explanations. A good explainer seems a natural, they are confident and sure of what they are saying. This cuts to the heart of the mystery; where does this confidence come from?
But the confidence is only one part of the whole; good explainers use a number of strategies to communicate their message. They present with confidence, yes, but they also interact. We are inherently social creatures and when it feels like we are involved in constructing the explanation it will be that much more effective. Additionally, good explainers use concrete, simple-to-grasp examples to make it illustrate the idea at hand and make it relevant to their audience.
I found myself, one humid lesson after lunch, trying to convince a group of tired students to a short story about an encounter with a lion on the plains of the savannah. We were practising using short sentences to up the pace of the piece (no comments on my own occasionally rambling sentence length, please) and I was building, or rebuilding if you will, my own passion for a punchy action scene. But first we had to get some building blocks for the meat of the story. We looked up facts about lions. One stood out. An adult male lion’s roar can be heard from 5.5 miles away. That sounded impressive to me, but I could see from the drooping eyelids and pens of the class that I would have to sell this fact more convincingly.
Internet to the rescue again, I checked the distance to Confucius Temple. It was 7 miles, but desperate times called for desperate measures, so I told the students to imagine being stood on the playground and hearing, somewhere in the distance, the woofing thump of the 250kg king of the jungle. Then I made them visualise (auralise?) that noise coming from almost as far away as Confucius Temple.
It certainly helped. Discussions started about how far that was, how loud the lion must be, how impressive it was and even whether they still felt safe or not. We discussed the ear-splitting effect of hearing it close up. Playing a live recording of a lion’s roar sealed the deal. Students were off and writing!
While this was by no means the perfect explanation, it helped to make real something abstract.
It gave my audience an ‘in’ and put it in to their day-to-day experience. They were then able to build the knowledge with me, and act on my explanation with tangible results (and some great short stories of coming face-to-face with big cats!). Or perhaps they were just taking pity on me sweating at the front of the room, attempting to drum up some engagement on a steamy June afternoon.
At any rate, I hope we’ve sussed out some key elements of good explanations. Knowing what it is you’re explaining well enough to break it down, having credibility and authority, being clear and concise and giving examples are part of it. Translating the explanation into something your audience can grasp through metaphor helps. Storytelling, an art as old as humanity itself, sells the explanation on an emotional level. And failing all that, grabbing attention with a lion’s roar is sure at least to be memorable!
