So Much To Say, So Little Time

Developing expertise in our work is fulfilling, and when customers and colleagues call on us it feels gratifying. As we spend time in a domain, we come to see all the nuance and detail. But expertise also comes with a hidden cost: we are inclined to share all that detail with others who don’t need or understand it. If we don’t disrupt this dynamic, it hinders us from effectively making use of our expertise. The 4Practices of Precision Answering offer a helpful path toward making our expertise useful.

Have you ever met someone who is passionately in pursuit of a hobby or an idea and asked them to explain it to you? I recently did this with a physicist in relation to the Higgs boson, and it ended up being a 3-hour lecture! When we feel passionately about a topic, we can launch into an explanation that seems perfectly reasonable and on target (i.e., to the physicist) but loses others (like me!) along the way.

Sometimes we are holding onto a notion that experts are seen as experts when they give long, detailed explanations. Sometimes a highly-justified opinion is designed to protect our standing as an expert. Sometimes we confuse credibility with how much we say, not how well we share what we know in ways others can understand.

The adage “we teach the way we were taught” may help us understand how we get into long explanations. We gained expertise over time, moving deeper into the concept in ways that become invisible to us. If we don’t practice giving concise answers, we will usually explain something the way we most recently learned it.

Regardless of what propels us, detailed explanations are often overwhelming. At work, where people are often moving quickly between tasks, the inability to grasp detail is especially acute. To help someone understand an issue in our domain of expertise, we may need to adjust our level of detail and temper our tendency to teach.

Moving From The Tree To The Grove

We can understand things at many levels. The metaphor of “can’t see the forest for the trees” indicates an inability to get to the bigger picture because of a focus on detail. When sharing expertise, it can often be helpful to shift from the tree to the grove. The 4Practices of Precision Answering help us articulate this higher-altitude view of our work.

Let’s try a technical example. Imagine you really need an answer to a technical question, so you ask a colleague who is an expert: “How does lift help an airplane fly?” and get this answer: (find this quote and read more about lift if you are curious!).

“To understand lift you need only Newton’s three laws and something called the Coanda effect. The Coanda effect is just the tendency of air or any even slightly viscous fluid to stick to a surface it is flowing over, and thus to follow the surface as it bends. As air follows the upper surface of a wing, it gets bent downward – because the surface is curved but also because the leading edge is tilted up (especially when ascending) at what is called the angle of attack. The air that is bent downward pulls on the air above it, distending it and creating a low-pressure zone.

To bend the air downward, the wing has to exert a force on it (that’s Newton’s first law). That action inevitably elicits an equal and opposite reaction (Newton’s third law). By means of the low-pressure zone above the wing and the higher pressure below it, the air exerts an upward force on the wing: That’s lift. The size of the force is equal to the mass of air the wing has diverted downward multiplied by the acceleration of that air (Newton’s second law). A pilot can increase the lift by flying faster (adding power) or by increasing the angle of attack (pulling back on the stick); either way the wing diverts more air down and behind the plane.”

Whoa! Not quite my 3-hour lecture on the Higgs boson, but pretty overwhelming if you are busy and just stopped by the cubicle to find a simple answer to a complex question. How could an expert answer this question without overwhelming the curious learner?

The 4Practices of Precision Answering suggest that we need to:

• Listen carefully to the question, gauging the level of detail needed to answer it accurately but not over-explain.
• Start with the essence of the answer.
• Distill the key points at the level of detail we’ve chosen.
• Qualify by asking if the person needs additional information instead of deluging them with detail.

Someone using Precision Answering to share expertise in a more distilled manner, might give this sort of answer to the question: “How does lift help an airplane fly?”

“To understand lift, you need to know three main things [CORE BULLET STRUCTURE]:

1. First, there is a theory that some of the air moving across the top of the wing “sticks” to its surface following the shape of the wing. Not all physicists agree on this. [QUALIFY]
2. As the plane begins to move, the air flowing over the top of the wing starts moving faster than the air sliding underneath, which creates a low-pressure zone above the wings.
3. The faster the air moves, the less pressure it exerts on the wing. So now the air pressure down into the top of the wing is becoming less than the air pressure up into the bottom of the wing. That’s what creates lift. [DISTILL]

I’ve given you a high-level view here. What other questions do you have that will help you understand lift?”

Ok, now I can sink my teeth into the idea and figure out what I need to know, instead of sinking in confusion with too much detail.

When We Explain Well, We Learn Too

While knowledge work today is often complex, we can still answer questions with a level of clarity that neither oversimplifies nor overwhelms. In fact, developing the capacity to distill our answers often helps us deepen our own understanding of our work. When we force ourselves to draw out the key ideas lurking in our detailed knowledge, we develop new insights. We might learn as much about the work as the other person does! Instead of believing, “My work is complex; I can’t give a short answer,” we might come to see this as our new workplace reality: “My work is complex, so for people to understand it, I need to distill it into a few key points.”

THIS MONTH’S PRACTICE

PRACTICE 1
When someone asks you a question and you feel the natural tendency to answer at your deepest level of detailed understanding, catch yourself and pause. Think of moving from the tree to the grove. How can you describe your work from this slightly higher view or bigger vantage point? What do you notice when you shift to a bigger picture? Does the conversation flow more easily? Do you find people asking good follow-up questions?

PRACTICE 2
When someone begins to answer a question with more detail than you need, politely reframe your question in a way that points toward a bigger-picture perspective. Try asking something like:

• “Could you explain it to me in a way that I could explain to someone else?”
• “Could you give me the main points first so I can digest them?”
• “I feel like I’m looking at the forest, but you are down in the trees. Could you give me the view from a thousand feet?”

What do you notice when you try to direct explanations in ways that are more useful? Can you find ways of asking for expertise in ways that help others appreciate the chance to teach you in ways you understand?

---