Dmitry Grozoubinski is simply one of the best expert communicators out there. Empathetic, funny, intelligent and deeply knowledgable in his field, there is a reason he has long been top of lists for media outlets in need of a trade expert. His thinking on how to approach complexity, clarity and framing a topic has been inspirational for communicators everywhere - myself included.
Soon to be published, his book Why Politicians Lie About Trade is an absolute pleasure for anyone, expert or not, who wants to understand the current conversations around international trade. I already got a sneak preview - definitely worth the pre-order.
And for those in Brussels, good news: Dmitry will be coming here to launch the book in early June - so book your meetings and speaking engagements now, as he'll no doubt be in high demand.
Earning Attention
Living in the digital age means standing submerged in a rushing river of information filled with swirling baubles vying for our attention and engagement. Even as you’re reading this, there are a million alternatives just a brush of your fingers or a click of your mouse away. I am not entitled to your attention, and I am competing for it with all the entertainment, information and pageantry an inventive human species can conjure.
I spent much of the last few years being asked to explain the implications of Brexit and other trade news developments to an audience of lay people in two and a half minutes. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it goes something like this:
Your phone rings.
“Hi, it’s Billy Underpaid at the BBC. Are you free to go on the air in an hour and explain what leaving the European Union might mean for British businesses?”
“I… I… could try but the issue is so broad and you really shou…”
“Fantastic! The segment will be eighty seven long and you’ll be joined by a cranky Lord who thinks we should nuke Brussels and the rapper JME. Is Skype ok?”
Now that’s obviously hyperbole because JME has better things to do with his time, but it’s not too far from the truth. For those of us who work on technical issues of relevance but not always of interest to the general public the windows we get to inform are rare and vanishingly small - even on issues that dominate headlines or impact lives.
Nor is this the unique province of experts and commentators. Writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or a personal biography when creating an online dating profile are both exercises in summarising immense complexity. Boiling down who you are as an employee, or a potential romantic interest to a page or just a few sentences is hard enough, and doing so in a manner that will stand out and capture attention isn’t easy.
Whether operating in the spotlight or writing a report for an audience of one, we owe it to ourselves and our professional pride to hold our own by communicating in a manner that is competitive in this fiercely contested attention economy.
Five pieces of useful advice
In daring to offer you some suggestions on how to accessibly communicate complexity, I want to focus on strategically empathizing with your audience.
Understanding the audience is the most common piece of advice offered to communicators because it applies irrespective of your personal communication style, your medium or your topic.
However, in my experience not everyone takes the time to explain exactly what doing so entails. Like ‘project confidence’ or ‘be yourself’, ‘understand your audience’ can be so vague a piece of advice as to be useless. Let me try and put a little meat on those bones.
When presenting or writing something as broad as trade policy for a specific audience, I ask myself:
1. Where are the obvious places this intersects with their work or interests?
Not only do I focus on these areas, but I make it a point to flag I’ll be doing so very early. I need to give them the comfort that their time won’t be wasted, and the reassurance I’ve thought about their needs or wants.
A mistake I often see here is a failure to consider what someone’s work actually entails. Just because someone is a doctor doesn’t mean they’re fascinated by the inner workings of the World Health Organization. What does the average member of the audience actually do at their desk on a given day, and where does your field touch on it?
How could something in your world directly impact a decision they have to make, a risk they have to mitigate or offer an opportunity they might seize? What do they need to know about how it shapes the decisions or actions of their interlocutors?
2. What are the unintuitive places?
These are areas I know I want to cover, but on which I can’t take the attention of my audience for granted. In fact, it’s safest here to assume a default position of disinterest.
Unlike in the obvious points of intersection where I can launch straight into the substance, here my first task will be a sales job: “here’s why this is relevant and here’s why you should care.”
It is always safest to think of each opening line as the sales pitch for enough of your reader’s attention to get through the rest of the paragraph, and this is especially critical on subjects where the paragraph’s value is not necessarily intuitive to the average audience member.
3. What is the right level and correct focus in terms of breadth versus depth?
Imagine you are giving a series of talks to several different audiences about a large lake.
You are an expert on this particular lake, and can recite facts and statistics about every fish and plant in it, about the water at its various depths, about its currents and eddies. Except very few audiences need anything like that level of breadth or detail.
A tourist going for a swim might need a broad overview of the lake, some detail on the currents in the top strata and would probably be interested in that shark.
A treasure hunter will need a huge amount of detail on the prize in the bottom left hand corner and what they’ll need to navigate down to it, while having very little interest in the rest of the lake.
Your mission as a communicator is to identify and focus on the complexity your audience wants and needs, while signposting that additional complexity exists beyond that and giving them an appreciation for why.
4. What are analogies that will resonate?
Humans are experiential creatures, instinctively reaching for the familiar as a lens through which to process the new. Making a concerted effort to craft analogies based in your audience's world, rather than your own, can be invaluable.
Importantly, you do not have to have an intricate understanding of their field to do this, if you caveat appropriately and display adequate humility.
When speaking or writing for a specific business like say a winery I will often say something like, “To massively oversimplify, and I’m speaking as a novice here just for the sake of illustration, let’s say you’re shipping wine and…”
Another alternative is to compare things in your field to near ubiquitous and common human experiences, be they going through airport security or filling in a tax return.
I personally tend to make analogies and examples deliberately somewhat hyperbolic, because an extreme example can often help demonstrate a point more clearly, but your own mileage will vary.
5. What are the intuitive objections and reservations?
Have you ever been watching a movie and identified a glaring plot hole? A, “wait, you all have cellphones just call someone” moment that shatters your suspension of disbelief and only becomes more grating with every passing moment it’s not addressed?
Anticipating the places your audience will instinctively have doubts or counterarguments and addressing them before they can become a festering boil of skepticism is critical.
This is true even for presentation style communication with a Q&A component. The last thing you want is for your audience to have spent the entire run-time of your talk preparing to pounce on you with what they perceive to be a chink in your arguments armour, or to give the perception that you needed that obvious counterargument pointed out to you before you dealt with it.
Simple is not stupid, important is not essential
With some rare exceptions like being a movie star or a member of SEAL Team 6, if you are an expert on something, chances are you find it more inherently fascinating than the average member of the audience. Identifying the parts of your knowledge that will strike a chord with the specific readership is critical, but so is crafting a narrative about the importance of things they may not realize impact them.
All of the tips above come down to respecting your audience, respecting their time, and meeting them where they are.
It inevitably involves some assumptions, and you won’t always get them right, but an audience that can tell you’ve made the effort will be far more forgiving than one that feels like you’ve made no effort at all to understand them.
All this takes practice, refinement and humility. However, across hundreds of talks, written pieces, lectures and media appearances, and despite recurring stress dreams wherein my audience denounces me as a fraud, I have never had a bad experience applying these principles. I hope you find them good food for thought!
Okay, but where do I find this pageantry?