Three Ways to Simplify Complexity Without “Dumbing It Down”

We live in a world where sound bites rule the airwaves and tweeting contests among political candidates have replaced intelligent public debate. In business, the one-pager rules. Strategic plans are now compressed into placemats and funding requests into short pitch decks

At the same time, the huge challenges we face as a planet—and the solutions needed to address them—defy easy simplification. If it were truly possible to boil climate change issues down into an infographic or blog post, we wouldn’t have anything to worry about.

So how do you communicate innovative ideas and sophisticated information in an environment that shuns the complex?

Don’t “Dumb Down”: Level Up

“Dumbing down” ideas never works because oversimplifying leaves you, the expert, feeling as if you’ve compromised accuracy and misrepresented reality.

From the reader’s perspective, oversimplification also creates discomfort. No one likes feeling they’re being “talked down” to, and empty language can lead to more confusion than comprehension.

The strategic solution is this: communicate, don’t disseminate. To make your ideas heard, the key is to put communication ahead of information. Before you try to make your content clear, make sure it connects with your audience in ways that make it relevant and emotionally resonant.

With this in mind, here are three proven strategies to help you communicate clearly without sacrificing the integrity of your research.

1. Prioritize what your audience cares about most, not what you care about

Yes, this could mean NOT talking about YOUR favourite feature or benefit even if you find it so amazing you think everyone in the world should know about it.

Non-experts, like policymakers and investors, often care little about the nitty-gritty of your data and your methodology. They tend to focus on impact and outcomes, the destination rather than the winding route it’s taking to get there, no matter how scenic you consider the journey.

2. Listen closely to the exact language your audience uses

I’m sure you’ve heard the advice to “speak your audience’s language,” but you can speak their dialect only if you’ve first truly heard it. Don’t just avoid technical language that’s beyond the audience’s scope. Zero on in the specific words, phrases, and metaphors you’ve observed them using, either in writing or in conversation. 

Yes, this means you must find opportunities to observe your audience “in the field,” so to speak. Every time you have a meeting with a stakeholder, note the vocabulary and expressions they use. Every time that stakeholder releases a publication, sends an email, or shows up in the news, pay careful attention to the way they talk about the issues that matter to them.

I’m not a qualitative researcher, but I’m going to risk drawing an analogy here: listening closely to your audience and echoing their language back to them works a bit like a grounded theory approach. Rather than going into an interaction with your audience assuming you know the language they speak, you let that language emerge through your experiences of them.

3. Lead with nontechnical terms and explanations.

When we’re introducing a new concept or solution, our tendency is to start with an unknown term, define it, and then go on to explain it.

Like this: Flexural strength is the ability of a material to resist becoming deformed when weight or pressure is placed on it.

This method is a holdover, I think, from the standard teaching approach of presenting new vocabulary for students to learn in advance of the main lesson.

Communicating with stakeholders is not, however, the same situation as guiding students through a curriculum.

In the classroom, you set the teaching topics, and you expect students to do any catch-up or prep work necessary to engage with those subjects. The burden is on the student to “get up to speed.”

In the boardroom, on the other hand, the topics are often determined by the stakeholders’ backgrounds. The burden is on you to adapt and make your information easy to process.

Here’s a simple shift that goes a long way to making research findings accessible to non-experts. Instead of following the teaching pattern (new vocabulary + definition), flip that structure around.

First, explain what the term means in everyday language. Then offer the scientific or technical term as a label for the concept.

For example, here are a couple of ways you might naturally introduce the concept of flexural strength:

• A material’s ability to resist bending or otherwise changing shape when weight or pressure is placed on it is its flexural strength.
• The ability to resist deformation under weight or pressure (flexural strength)…

Of course, both these backward definitions would be strengthened if you added an example to illustrate the concept. The more visual or concrete you can make your language, the easier it will be for non-experts to grasp your meaning.

When you lead with the nontechnical, you may be surprised to discover just how few technical terms are truly needed for your reader to get the point.

Make Consideration Your Golden Rule

The golden rule of persuasive communication is not “Do to others as you would have done to you.” Rather, it’s “Do to others as they would have done to them.”

Because you’re intimately familiar with the research you’re conveying, your priorities, your language, and your language probably differ dramatically from those of your stakeholders. When you take the time to change some of your natural habits and adapt your research communication practices to the needs of your audience, you instantly score goodwill points.

Never EVER should you feel compelled to “dumb down” your research, squishing it into soundbites that distort meaning.

But when you go to the effort to make your communications more accessible for those outside your research community, people will sit up and take notice

Simply by adopting the three techniques I’ve mentioned, you’ll come across as a thoughtful, considerate communicator, the kind of collaborator people trust and want to work with.

Eager to learn more about how to refine your approach to concise communication? DM me to set up a time to chat.