Why Simplicity is So Complex

The world is moving to all things simple. I have seen the word “simple” everywhere from magazine headlines to brand names. In almost every aspect of life, people are trying to make everything simple. It is more than just a new trend or marketing buzzword. Simple breaks things down to the core and makes it easy for others to understand.

Why the need for simple? Simplicity ensures you can share your knowledge with others without impediments. This challenge to convey the complex happens every day in business as technical professions struggle to communicate with their clients. It leads to costly miscommunications with coworkers and clients, missed opportunities from failed bid presentations, and a general feeling of frustration caused by this language barrier.

Simplicity is complex because business professionals feel the need to explain everything they know in great detail. When striving to explain a topic simply, you must select certain parts of the topic without diving in depth. The selected portions of the topic may feel vague to the speaker, however, because the listener doesn’t have the same knowledge base, it’s all of the information the listener’s brain can handle and comprehend. When explaining something simply, you may even feel like you are doing a disservice because you are not doing your due diligence for not going in depth. It is a complicated push/pull feeling because you want to talk for hours in detail, but you can’t.

Many professionals feel like when simplifying you are watering it down, but in fact you are proving that you know your topic that much more. The feeling of “watering it down” comes from the refusal of not explaining in depth. Speakers who strive to explain with simplicity are selecting only the points that are necessary to make the topic make since without any lagniappe.

Your audience needs a basic, foundational understanding that you can build on over time with multiple conversations. It might sound overly simplistic, you wouldn’t speak to a room full of Ph. Ds in your field the same way you would speak to a kindergartner during Career Day, yet many professionals do this to their clients routinely.

I know this from my experience and my background is a unique to say the least. For five years, I worked as the outreach educator for the zoo in New Orleans. In essence, my job was to bring the zoo experience to the public ranging from preschoolers to high school students to senior citizens, and literally, everything in between. I had to vary what I said in my presentations based on the audience, not the other way around. Most professionals make this mistake where they expect the audience to adapt to them.

Before working at the zoo, I volunteered there in high school. All volunteers had to go through continuing education to re-certify animal handling skills as well as presentation skills about every animal. Back then, the supervisor in charge of recertification, wouldn’t give you a checkmark just for completing a presentation to just anybody. She forced each presenter to explain the complex animal biology to young children. If those young children understood you and learned something, then you passed. Little did I know then the reason behind this requirement to talk to children and the importance it would play later in my life.  

Kids have an elementary understanding of the world; in order to make sense of it, adults must be able to explain even the most complex things in a way that makes sense to them. This is the test we would have to pass when recertifying.

When I started working at the zoo, now as an adult, the task of explaining the complexities of animal biology and animal behavior became constant. I found myself remembering my supervisor’s advice and challenging myself to find new ways to help a 3-year-old to understand these complexities. It took me awhile and I got better. I learned a lot by doing and trying new things. What I realized was the importance and challenge of simplifying the complex.

You may have heard before that you don’t truly master something until you can teach it. In order to teach others, you must know a topic to a degree past basic understanding. Understanding a topic and being able to teach it are two different things; the latter requires expertise beyond “oh that makes sense”.

I come from a world that forces you to simplify, and I come to believe in this adage of needing to deeply understand in order to teach others. Experts are not those that speak over their clients and audiences heads with jargon, acronyms, and complex terminology. Instead, experts are those that can simplify the complex and break it down to the audience’s level.

In business, potential clients are seeking out those they like, not just who is capable of doing the work. They can find multiple people capable of solving their problems, however, not every service provider can make them feel comfortable throughout the process. The professionals that simplify their language and complex world put their clients at easy and win the most business

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Speak Simple is a dynamic presentation coaching company based in New Orleans that assists technical professionals to improve their presentations and help them to better connect with their clients. 

Erica’s company, Speak Simple, works with professionals, in particular, technical professionals like engineers, doctors, constructors, marketers, and technology experts to ensure they are understood by their prospects and clients and win more work through presentations using her proprietary S-I-M-P-L-E training method.

Erica Olson – President & Founder