The KISS-Plus Formula for Dynamite Presentations

Whenever you're talking or writing to people who don't share your expertees, it's best to follow the advice of the country politician who always 'put the grass down where the goats can get at it.'

Sounds simple enough, but while we all know the KISS Principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), knowing it and putting it into practice are very different things. That is especially true when you need to communicate technical information to non-technical audiences. In my twenty-plus years of consulting with speakers from business, government and the professions, I've found that the best way to 'keep it simple' is by using analogies.

If you're an engineer needing to make the point that, due to attenutation rates your company needs to establish a network of antennas to ensure quality cellular telephone service, you'll make your point better if you compare the antenna system to sprinkling the lawn. You want to set your sprinklers in a pattern that gets the grass uniformly wet, without either gaps or saturation.

If regulations put your company at a competitive disadvantage, you might put Lance Armstrong on the starting line for the Tour de France. The other bicycle riders have a clear road in front of them. Lance is in a separate lane festooned with potholes and other obsticles. Fair? Of course not.

The FAA can provide endless statistics on the subject, but when they want to tell us how safe it is to fly we'll get the point better if they quote the MIT professor who says you can take a flight every day for nineteen thousand years before you would be statistically likely to be in a fatal accident. Now, that's safe.

The best single example of the impact of analogies on the communication process happened with the announcement that scientists had been able to map ninety-seven precent of the nearly 3.2 billion bits of chemical information found in every human cell. Most of us would have been only vaguely interested except for one amazing occurance. It tuned out that the same scientists who had conducted the Human Genome Project were actually able to talk about it in nonscientific terms the rest of us could understand. It was a breakthrough almost as astounding as the sceintific achievement itself. Dr. Francis Collins, who headed the project said:

'The genome is sort of like the United States and each cromosome is a different state. What
we've been able to do is to lay out where, in fact, are the major landmarks, the mountain
ranges, the major cities and a few of the smaller towns.'

The only biology I can remember from my high school days involved disecting a frog, so I wasn't ready for a scientific explanation, but once the map analogy was in place, I got it. The grass was down where this goat could get at it.

Finding the best analogy to explain your point may not be easy, but if you want your listeners or readers to really understand, it will certainly be worth the effort.