IV — The practice of making simple

The most powerful audio-visual tool

Simplicity is not precision, and not “The truth”

To use the power of simplicity, do not confuse it with bare precision. Precision is intricate, built on advanced knowledge, fine distinctions and subtle jargon known to few. Precision looks simple only to the expert. If you want to confuse people without fail, flood them with all the rigorously precise data and facts you know.

This involuntary error is what cognitive psychologists call the curse of knowledge: once you know something well, you cannot easily remember how it is not knowing it, and you systematically misjudge what other people know. ²³ Experts who have not learned to "think people" suffer this curse acutely and become their own worst translators. Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, devoted a substantial chapter to it; the diagnosis is the same. ²⁴

A strange sort of truth told is that which is not understood by its receiver. Precision is not truth, as Matisse wrote so resoundingly. ²⁵ Art — that lie which makes us realise the truth, as Picasso put it — has the power to make people understand, to make theirs that which counts, instead of snowing them with expert details. ²⁶ Quality simplification need not be precise, but it must be honest and intelligent: you explain loyally what you understood, not what you did not. It must also be inspired. Making things understandable is talent, an art, and a craft, learnable with some work and experience.

A tactical cycle for wielding the power to make simple

If you apply what has been said so far, making things simple appears as a cycle of things you do and things you refrain from doing—the turning of a small wheel made of observation, words, pointing, metaphor, patience and purpose. These devices apply whenever you are called to help somebody understand something they need to make their own and use. Their usage should be left with your public to continue the cycle by themselves. Turning the wheel requires know-how and effort. It carries weight, because it changes the organisational culture. The order matters. First the assessment; then, and only then, the simplification and the application of the results.

For memory, I group the cycle’s checkpoints in four movements.

1. Prepare yourself

Start from where the listener’s mind is. Find out what people already know, the words they are familiar with, and the references they trust and understand. In this way you will know where their minds are and what they are made of. Consider that to change minds you will have to start where they are, not from your distant higher level and certainly not in general, from an ivory-tower. Prepare your examples accordingly, to fit the context and the occasion. ²⁷

Helping people requires empathy. There is no substitute. You must imagine yourself in the listener’s place, walk in their shoes for a while. Mere words do not teach, they must be felt. ²⁸

The Zen anthology Zenrin Kushū puts it bluntly:

Words do not make a man understand; you must get the man to understand them. ²⁹

This is the secret formula from the grimoire of masterful teaching.

Establish your tactics: "What does this occasion remind me of? Have I seen something like it before, and what did I learn then that counts now? Does this request or event have a recognisable shape familiar to me? Can I reframe or redefine it with an auspicious name, or a convenient form to help a change?"

2. Show and translate

Do not begin with the knowledge you explain. Apply the secret formula. Speak from their point of view, not yours. Start here, feet on the ground. This is not easy but can be learned with exercise.

Use metaphor and stories. They help people figure new and unknown things in terms of what they already know, advancing by the intuitive logic of narration. Michael Dahlstrom’s work on narrative in science communication confirms what storytellers have always known: narrative is not a decoration placed on explanation; it is a distinct cognitive route to it. ³⁰, ³¹

Display, point and demonstrate. Do it beyond explaining, by example, gesture, demonstrative action, and showing how to do—or how to refrain from doing. The strongest method of demonstration I found is to include a role-play whenever it is allowed by the context and the time available. This is the means by which your participants live the subject and the problems, in a safe simulation, under the pretext of a kind of game. This allows producing awareness and solutions for problems and future scenarios one could not address directly in an organisation.

The most powerful audio-visual tool is the finger that points. The mystery word for it is ostensive definition, as Wittgenstein analysed it: meaning learned not by definition in words but by being shown an instance. ³² A good simplifier never loses the finger.

Count on surprise, the newness you teach may shock. Or your inventive way of teaching may upset. Avoid surprise when it would only confuse—or, if you must surprise with newness, allow time for the surprise-state to cool.

This emotional surge takes time. I have observed it to last seconds or minutes for individuals in everyday circumstances, and much longer in interpersonal and group situations: time multiplied by the number of people involved and by the dimension or strangeness of the event. Groups often show response patterns similar to those of individuals, but more slowly and less rationally; the larger the group, the slower the waking from the sway of newness, confusion and hostility. While some individuals wake to reason, the group may pull them back down. Finally, after a necessary cooling spell, people become able again to judge as well as they can. Now, they can listen to facts and reason, to best interest, practicality or justice. By then, surprise has become what its substance is in fact—a problem or an opportunity.

Present few things at a time. Three, five and seven are not merely symbolic figures; they are also amounts that can fit attention, memory and processing. George Miller’s classic study proposed the “magical number seven, plus or minus two”; Nelson Cowan later refined the estimate downward, closer to four. ³³ The architectural lesson is the same: consider the mind’s holding capacity, or lose the listener.

3. Let understanding become theirs

Pull; do not push. Instead of telling people what they must understand and do, offer a suggestive example and let them conclude from it. Say, “This reminds me of … a similar case.” The pull approach enables listeners to draw their own conclusion and therefore to act on it.

Keep silent often and observe. Ask and listen. Do not interrupt. This leaves space for the other to think and participate. And for you to have feedback which adjusts your progress.

Invite people to contribute to what they learn. Encourage questions. Where suitable, encourage them to learn from themselves and from one another. Organise debriefing from their own experiences. Ask them to narrate their own case examples. Help them put their heads together to interpret and explain and show one another what they know and do. Let them ask you for help instead of pushing your knowledge at them: let the guest ask for the salt.

Do not cook for them; help prepare a Stone Soup, as in the old story:

A hungry traveller arrives at a wealthy household. The farmers shut their doors and refuse charity. Instead of arguing, the traveller claims to be a royal master cook who needs only a cauldron of hot water to make a magical stone soup. Intrigued, the farmers let him in and provide the water. As the stone boils, the traveller casually mentions that the soup would be even better with a touch of salt. Vegetables and herbs follow. The curious household gladly contributes its own ingredients, even meat. In the end, everyone shares a delicious feast. ³⁴

If needed, add your grain of salt and turn the brew at the right moments. Add what people missed or do not know—without boring everybody with basics. It may even happen that you do not need to speak at all, and people appear to do things by themselves. ³⁵

Serve the simple soup hot. Provide it in a large bowl, with redundancy and time, and let people serve themselves with their own ladles. Do not try to feed them with a funnel. You can take the horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. Accept that some of your precious brew will be spilt, go cold, or be wasted. ³⁶

Repeat and test ownership. Start by saying what you will say, to create focus and proper expectation. Then say or show what you want to convey. Encourage questions to discover what was not understood. Ask, if you can, to be told back what you said. End by saying again what you said. The ultimate proof of success is when your audience begins using, altering, even contradicting—in short, doing things—because they now own what you gave them. ³⁷

A hand-out helps in guise of ultimate repetition, provide one even for a short presentation, for a long event it prevents oblivion after all the effort you made. Another secret tool, carry a book with you on the subject, show it and mention it in the hand-out.

4. Enable action and departure

Do not take over the problem. Facilitate interpersonal relationships and group dynamics when this is needed and when you are qualified to do it. Edgar Schein, in his lifelong work on process consultation, identified the proper goal of an honest helping relationship: not to take over the client’s problem, but to leave the client more able to handle it. ³⁸

Remember that you make things simple in order to empower. When easier to understand, they also become simpler to live with—to choose, decide, and finally solve problems. When people find a thing too complicated to do anything about it, your work is to help them grasp it, show what they can do and how they can do it, and, better, prove that they can by helping them begin.³⁹

I summarised this many years ago, for experts becoming consultants, as the advisor’s haiku:

A good specialist can explain with precision.

He can explain things as complicated as they exactly are.

A good consultant can explain with simplicity.

He can explain how doable things are. ⁴⁰

While you listen to an expert explaining a problem, the normal urge is to delegate it back to the specialist: “Do it for me; it is too complicated.” The true advisor leaves you able to do it yourself. As I love to paraphrase Lao Tzu: when a fine consultant has done his work, the people will say, “We did it alone.”

When closure and action are required, switch to intervention mode and counsel top-down. Go from what to do toward why to do it, from the essential conclusion to the proofs.

Start with your advice: the problem or opportunity; what to do; when; for what purpose; and with what expected value and outcome. As the need arises, give more of the causes, proofs, arguments, explanations and data requested by the listener’s critical thinking. Let people know what observable outcome and benefit should follow from acting, and what disadvantage or danger may follow from not acting. Knowledge that makes sense is for the benefit of people. Always end with the first next step.

This is a rhetoric in action. It differs strikingly from the discourse of standard scientific method, which favours logical induction or deduction. The discourse of action is often abductive: reasoning toward the best workable hypothesis under uncertainty, when neither all the facts nor all the rules are available. Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished abduction from deduction and induction as the third, practically important form of inference—the one by which discoverers move forward in surprising situations when the data are incomplete and they need the best explanation conceivable to them. ⁴¹ Consultants and other change agents abduce constantly, whether they have heard the word or not.

The four-phase cycle is, at heart, an abductive practice in service of another person’s judgement and action. Barbara Minto, who codified the top-down architecture for business communication, called this the pyramid principle: the answer first, the reasons after, the data on request. ⁴²

Before leaving ensure continuity. Clarify the necessary. Who will do what? Who carries it after I am gone? What happens when I am not there to be asked? And then the wheel will turn again, in other hands: the first thing they will have to do in their turn is to find out where the people’s mind is…