By David Thill
How to bring clarity and understanding to even the most complex topics
Editor’s note: Whether selling a product, training hospital staff, or presenting to the board of directors, the quality of the presentation matters just as much as the content. Chris Anderson, president of TED – the nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading innovative ideas, and sponsor of worldwide TED conferences – recently published the book Ted Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. In this continuing series, we offer some of Anderson’s main ideas to help make your next presentation an effective one.
Many of the best TED Talks leave audiences with the gift of understanding – “the upgrading of a worldview to better reflect reality” – writes TED President Chris Anderson in his 2016 book TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.
And the way for the speaker to achieve this understanding is through expert explanation. But for any expert on a subject, providing expert explanation can be more challenging than it seems.
The curse of knowledge
The “curse of knowledge” – a term originally coined by music composer Robin Hogarth – is the idea that “we find it hard to remember what it feels like not to know something that we ourselves know well,” says Anderson. Overcoming this curse is vital for a speaker to help an audience understand the topic at hand.
Attention to clarity in explanation comes down to details as seemingly minuscule as sentence linkage, “where the curse of knowledge [often] strikes hardest,” Anderson writes. “Every sentence is understandable, but the speaker forgets to show how they link together.”
He offers an example, in which the speaker might say something like this:
Chimpanzees have vastly greater strength than humans. Humans learned how to use tools to amplify their natural strength. Of course, chimpanzees also use tools.
“And an audience is left confused,” says Anderson. The speaker’s point is unclear because their sentences don’t connect. By contrast, here is another example of how the speaker might make their intention clear:
Although chimpanzees have vastly greater strength than humans, humans are much better tool users. And those tools have amplified human’s natural strength far beyond that of chimpanzees’.
In other words, precise wording – including the use of phrases such as “Although…” “Let’s build on that…” “So, in summary…” – and sequencing of sentences are important to building understanding in an audience.
At the same time, notes Anderson, a speaker shouldn’t insult their audience’s intelligence. “[T]he best explainers say just enough to let people feel like they’re coming up with the idea for themselves. Their strategy is to bring in the new concept and describe its shape just enough so that the prepared minds of the audience can snap it into place for themselves.”
This is not easy, and his advice – as is the case throughout the book – is that speakers recruit trusted friends and colleagues, including people new to the topic, who will give honest feedback. Important questions to ask those test audiences are, “Did that make sense? Was anything confusing?”
At TED, speakers are advised to follow a basic guideline, attributed to Einstein: “Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.”
Building excitement
“If you can explain something well, you can use that ability to create real excitement in your audience,” writes Anderson. As an example, he uses molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler’s 2009 TED Talk, which focused on how bacteria communicate with each other.
Bassler made a smart choice at the beginning of her talk by making the topic relevant to her audience:
I know you guys think of yourself as humans, and this is sort of how I think of you. There’s about a trillion human cells that make each one of us who we are…but you have ten trillion bacterial cells in you or on you at any moment in your life….These bacteria are not passive riders, they are incredibly important; they keep us alive.
Next, Bassler piqued her audience’s curiosity:
The question we had is how could they do anything at all? I mean, they’re incredibly small….And so it seemed to us that they are just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals.
From there, Bassler went on to explain the ways bacteria act together to multiply and impact our bodies. Knowing this, her team was able to figure out that a key strategy to fight bacteria is not to kill them, but rather, as Anderson puts it, to cut off their communication channels.
And finally, Bassler expanded her ideas for even broader implications:
We think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works…if we can figure them out in these primitive organisms, the hope is that they will be applied to other human diseases and human behaviors as well.
She was able to introduce a complex scientific concept to a non-expert audience by building each new component on the previous one and explaining the ideas effectively, observes Anderson.
“And when you’ve explained something special, excitement and inspiration will follow close behind.”