How to Communicate Technical Ideas to Non Technical Audiences

Hello, hello everyone, and welcome to the session about how to communicate technical information, technical jargon to non-technical audiences. My name is Amber Vanderberg and I am the founder of an international learning and development company called The Pathways Group. Now, we've worked with organizations around the globe. We've worked in over 75 countries to help more than 1 million learners to help improve in their leadership and communication skills.

And I remember a few years ago, I was working with a team in Finland. And after I had finished some work there, I decided to take the opportunity to enter into a cross-country ski half marathon. I went out to the land of Lapland, Finland, and I entered into this race. Now, I'll admit I had never done cross-country skiing before, but I had seen it on TV and I saw some people enjoying the fun and I wanted to enjoy the experience as well. I had downhill skied and had cross-country run. And so I thought, I have some of the transferable skills, let me just apply it in this new way.

And so, first day of the race I came and I found that there were some differences. The skis are different. The way you put on the skis are different. The motions are altered than what I had done in the past. But slowly but surely, step by step or glide by glide, I've made my way through the trail. And in true Finnish fashion, I finished the race. Now, why do I tell you this story? Because I didn't actually use new skills. In fact, I applied some skills I had in the past in a new way and in a new setting. And today, we're not necessarily going to learn new communication skills. In fact, we're going to take some communication skills that you probably already have and just apply them and alter them in a new way to share our technical jargon. Now, in fact, there's three major opportunities as a technical professional for you to communicate and share technical knowledge to a non-technical audience. So your first is with problem solving, right? So working with someone to solve a problem. A second is within collaboration. So you may do some cross departmental collaboration. And then third is with a presentation. So more likely be with your business partners and presenting new ideas. So whenever it comes to delivering some of these ideas, we want to first focus not so much on the delivery, but more on the discovery. So we want to ask, who is our audience? The success of our communication is going to be related to if we know who our audience actually is. And so we can discover who our audience is by asking some questions, making observations, doing some research. The types of questions that we ask is going to be really critical.

And this is where we're going to alter the way we're asking these questions. If I think about how I ask a question to an OpenAI or a chat GPT, I'm going to be very specific. I'm going to say, what is 5 plus 5? And then the answer will be 10. But whenever I'm asking questions to my audience to understand their baseline knowledge, to understand their goals, their organizational setup, I want to ask them these questions in a more open-ended way. And so instead, I'll ask the question this way, what two numbers equal 10? Here, the answer could be 5 and 5. It could be 9 and 1. It could be 7 and 3, so on and so forth. And so whenever I ask questions to my audience to better understand them, I want to make sure I'm asking questions that are open-ended and that provide more insight.

From these types of questions, we're going to learn more about the audience. We may learn about their organizational setup. We're going to talk about how this is important in just a moment. We may learn about the team dynamics. Are they more analytical? Is there conflict within the team? Is this a new team? What is the team dynamics? We may learn about their targets and their goals. What is the scope of this project? What is the purpose? How are we measuring success? And what is priority as we are moving forward, especially if you're problem-solving or in collaboration? And so I want you to think about a few of your favorite questions. The reality is is that we could ask 3,000 different questions to gain this insight, but in the moment, you're really only going to have about two or three. So I want you to take some time and ask. It could be, what brings you here today? What is the goal of us coming in today? Why now? What is the urgency? And so this may give me some insight into who my audience actually is. And it will help me determine my baseline knowledge, right? So baseline knowledge is dependent upon a few things. So here we have a person's competence and competence. And I want to be mindful of this because your baseline knowledge is going to be different. You have to keep in mind I have some people in my family that are impressed that I have a 3D print of a save button. It's a floppy disk. We have some people, we're talking about AI. We're talking about Al, right? So here we have a different baseline knowledge of the technical information. And this is impacted by several things. One is right now in our workplace, we are comprised of digital immigrants and digital natives, meaning I remember a time whenever we did not have a computer in my home. I remember having a pushing the buttons and dialing up on my phone, dialing up on the computer that we had. I had to immigrate to a fully digitally integrated world, whereas there are younger people in my company and in my family that they were born into this fully digitally integrated world. Now, we want to be careful of assumptions that we have here. In fact, Mercer came out with a study just a few weeks ago that pointed out that generational bias or ageism had been felt and experienced by a reported 73% of the workforce.

Now, this was not just one side. This was actually on both sides of the coin of making assumptions based off of someone's younger age or older age. And so here, whenever we think about digital immigrants and digital natives, I want you to think about exposure and usage. So when were they exposed or how long have they been exposed to this digital technology and what is their everyday usage? Let me give you an example. We were working with a company that a majority of their workforce that was of a younger generation had been exposed to the technology at an earlier age. However, in their day to day life, they were out on the field working on the pipelines every single day, and so their usage was very low compared to the people in the office, a majority of the people in the office that were of an older generation who were exposed to the technology at a later point, but were using the technology every single day. Here, we had a different baseline knowledge for our training and a different baseline for our communication and explanations with our team, so we want to keep that in mind.

So you might be thinking, this is great, Amber, but when do I, how do I use jargon? In fact, jargon can be very powerful. They're shortcuts to our communication. So we don't want to take out jargon completely. Imagine if I am a medical surgeon and I am explaining a medical term over and over again to my team while we're in surgery. That wouldn't be good. Here we want these shortcuts of communication so we can collaborate and communicate faster, and so this is really powerful whenever it is understood by everyone. So here's what I want you to think of for your baseline. Use jargon whenever it is understood by all. When it is not understood by all, then take that opportunity to explain one or two, maybe three depending on the relationship and the situation, words at a time. So in this interaction, I've learned two new words. Now if I introduce nine new words, it's going to overwhelm. But here we have an opportunity to be an educator and to help bring people in, while at the same time, if we're collaborating or solving a problem with someone of a different department, we have an opportunity to learn some of their jargon as well. There is a school of thought that using jargon is a way to build credibility. I know a word that you don't. The reality is if we come into a conversation with that mindset, not with a mindset of education and teaching and collaboration, it can actually cause a gap between the two, and it may come off as this, hi, I'm better than you. And that's not the goal. The goal is to work together to move forward. And so again, we want to use jargon with these considerations in mind, taking a complex idea and bringing clarity.

So let's look at these three opportunities and some tools that you may use. So out of collaboration, presentations and problem solving, let's look at problem solving first. We can use comparisons and stories. And so with a comparison and with a story, the ideal story is going to be, we'll say about three to seven sentences long. In reality, it's about three to five sentences long.

So let me give you an example. We were working with a team that wanted to put in more precautions to prevent against a DDOS attack. The challenge was, is that the business partners did not know what a DDOS attack was. And so we do have a visual for what this could look like, but this didn't really paint the picture or help provide that sense of urgency for the business partners to see the value of the investment.

And so we told a story. We said, do you remember a few years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, whenever there was such a high demand, a run on the market for toilet paper, that it disrupted the operations? Now, this picture, this story, this experience is really one sentence long. Really, I said a story. Do you remember whenever there was such a high demand on the market that it interrupted the operations? It interrupted the flow of operations. That is what a DDOS attack is. So it's not a perfect explanation. It does paint the picture, provide that sense of urgency, and it does give an idea of what this could look like.

I'll give you another example. I have a younger sister. My last name is Vanderburg and she's the youngest sister, so we call her Minivan. And Minivan was having trouble with her phone. She had tried several troubleshooting, tried to troubleshoot it in many ways and could not find a solution. And so she went to the phone store and the person at the phone store had the interaction like this. So I want you to listen to how he did this. First he asked a question to understand the audience. He said, when you were younger, did you burn CDs? Obviously not burning CDs like this. And she said, yes. All right, now he's understood. He has a reference point and a baseline point. Next, he said, do you remember how when there was a scratch or a defect on the original disc that no matter how many times you burned the CD, that defect was going to show up on all of the copies? She said yes. Then he responded, that is what is happening to your phone. And so you need to get a new phone because this original has a defect on it, has a scratch. Now, he could have just said, hey, this phone is broken, you need to go get a new phone. More than likely, many of them would have thought, is he just dismissing me? Does he not know what he's talking about? Here, he was able to educate, he was able to give a clear explanation. And that entire interaction was three to four sentences long. It does not have to be a full explanation.

Now, I can then, given the visual, I've given the story, I can then introduce a piece of jargon and introduce some technical knowledge, because I have a story that I can come back to. So your framework for a great analogy is going to look like this. Relatable experience, right? Burning a CD, relatable outcome. There was a scratch, similar experience. This is what's happening to your phone, similar outcome. No matter how many times you try and troubleshoot this, there's still a defect on the original conclusion, you need to get a new phone. So this is a quick framework and an easy framework to use. So again, ideally, it's going to be really more three to seven sentences in length. That means that we need to practice and practice these analogies. So think about some words that you could use here with agile, CI CD, full stack developer, and some of the stories that you may tell to explain some of those words.

So we talked about problem solving and using stories and analogies. What about collaboration? Another tool that we can use whenever we're collaborating with people is to use visual aids. So here we can bring forth a flowchart. We could simplify the flowchart by showing a picture here. We may even show this is where the bottleneck is in the process. So here we're showing strong visuals to give people an idea. Some people may not be auditory learners, they may be more visual learners. And especially if you are in an asynchronous collaborative opportunity, let's say you're in a hybrid team, a remote team, then you may use more visuals than a story, right? Unless you're giving that story. You may use visuals in addition to a story.

So the third opportunity is to give a presentation. So more than likely, you're going to have more opportunity here to prep, to do an audience analysis, understand the audience. And here it's going to be more prepared, whereas a problem solving and collaboration is going to be more in the moment. And so whenever I'm giving a presentation, I do need to understand where I am speaking to in the organizational chart. Let's say I'm here in the org chart. If I am speaking up, meaning to my executives, the leaders, then I want to summarize these ideas. They're getting a lot of information from a lot of places and we really need to focus more on the what and the why. If I'm speaking laterally or down, meaning to my colleagues or reports, then I want to expand. So the what, the why and the how. Because more than likely this is going to impact their day to day lives more directly and likely have some more questions. So I need to be prepared and know when to summarize and when to expand.

Let me give you a quick example of how we may use this. So we talked about using stories, using words, using visuals. We can also use experiences. So I was working with a team that they were aerospace engineers and they came up with a way, a new technology that would detect if there was a fire on an aircraft and extinguish the fire quickly. There's a lot of science, a lot of chemistry that went into this technology. And so they had to make a presentation to the business partners who didn't really know all of the science behind this. And so what they did is they actually took the business partners outside, lit a fire and let the technology go to work so that they could see and experience the tech. Then they were able to have a more rich conversation about what the technology was, some of the science behind it and advocate for the budget and the things that they were advocating for in their presentation. Now I am not suggesting that you include arson in your presentations. I am suggesting that you consider a demo or an experience in some way.

So the greatest mistake in communication is the assumption that it has taken place. So we do want to make sure that we've taken the time to clarify and say, I've shown you a story, I've shown you a visual, I've shown you an experience. I want to walk away not just with a fire in my head, but actually knowing this is the purpose of our communication. And so we may ask some clarifying questions, meaning what can I clarify for you? What questions do you have for me? That's going to be better than, do you have any questions? And then if there is some misunderstanding, we may provide a second example, but we don't want to do more than two. If I've provided so many visuals, then I make it be muddied in a person's mind of what we're actually speaking about.

Let's see here. So this is a great opportunity for us to educate our team here. It does not have to be training. So especially if I'm using written communication, meaning an email or a text, I can actually prepare for especially collaboration or problem solving meeting by saying, hey, there is a baseline assumption that you'll know this. If you don't, hakuna matata, here's a podcast, here's a micro course, here's a link to a YouTube video, a job agent article, a channel that I follow that can give some clear understanding. You do not have to come up with every single story or every single example to explain what this is. Use generative AI, use the resources already available to help with these explanations. And especially with asynchronous communication, this is really valuable.

If you're using this technical jargon in a report, then I may do the same thing. I'm going to, again, you can use generative AI here, you can use your own explanation to say I'm talking about a DDOS attack and then give the full explanation of what that means in the initial part of the report. And then you don't have to give the explanation time and time again.

In fact, legal documents have been doing this for a long time. Whenever I'm speaking about Amber Vandenberg, I'm speaking about the speaker at this event, the owner of the Pathways Group, the person giving a presentation on technical jargon. That's who Amber Vandenberg is. Now, I don't have to give that explanation every single time throughout the report. I can just say Amber Vandenberg moving forward. And so these are some quick ways that we can use this, especially in our asynchronous communication, meaning our emails and our reports. It's a way that we can take this complexity and clarify moving forward.

Now, as I said before, this is an opportunity not just for you to educate and to bring others into the technical conversation, but for you to also learn. You're learning some of their jargon as well. You might think, Amber, this would be a whole lot easier if I was just working with my technical team. But I'm a big believer that if you can achieve your dreams all on your own, you're not dreaming big enough. We want to build something bigger than ourselves, then we have to include more people than yourselves.

So we've gone over a lot of tools and I want to end you with this last story. This is a picture of me whenever I was a football coach or a soccer coach in Bangalore, India for Paris Saint Germain Academy. I coached about a dozen teams, mostly boys with a few girls, ages 6 to about 16. This is a picture of one of my younger teams. I had a player named Achinthya. He was six years old and he was so excited for his first day of football. On his first day, he came running out onto the pitch and he began yelling, pass, pass, pass. And I noticed that Achinthya was yelling pass whenever the other team had the ball. He was yelling pass whenever he was miles away from the action. And he was yelling pass whenever he had the ball. So then he was running with the ball going, pass, pass, pass. And so I looked at him, I said, Achinthya, why are you yelling pass? And he looked up at me and he said, Miss Amber, ma'am, I do not know what it means. I only know it is a football word.

You know, sometimes I hear leaders, I hear organizations sound a little bit like my friend Achinthya. And we start yelling these technical terms, right? We start saying, AI, Agile, CIC, we got this.

We know these are good words. They can lead to big goals. But if we're in the wrong position, if we're miles away from the action, or even if we have the ball and we don't know in which direction we're going, then saying these words are not only ineffective, they're actually detrimental to our overall communication within the team.

But if we first take the time to understand our audience, understand their baseline, bring people into the conversation to educate and move forward, then we'll be in a position to yell pass, to receive the ball, to move forward and to score some really big goals.

I do want to encourage you to use these skills to score some big goals in your team as well. There is a larger course on this on Pluralsight. So it is called Technical Communication for Non-Technical Audiences. So this is a resource for you. And I offer myself as a resource. If you have any questions, I love to celebrate success stories and, of course, be a resource for any challenges as well. Friends, please take these tools, collaborate with others, and score really big goals. Thank you so much.