You're faced with intricate system diagrams. How can you make them clear for non-technical stakeholders?

Certain system diagrams can be overwhelming to look at due to the clutter of system elements involved. To convey such diagrams to a non-technical stakeholder, it would be recommended to , - decrease the clutter of system elements by grouping elements to higher level system components. - Strip-down non-essential elements that do not add value to the high-level understanding. Remember that, objective is to imbibe easy understanding visually that guides through the discussion smoothly.

Details matter. Complexity requires more information to convey understanding so sometimes it will have a lot of information. Break it down if possible, align and group elements logically for your audience and remove details that while important, are not for your audience. MBSE can help greatly with this. Use a good tool and you can create effective views for multiple audiences with much less effort.

Adjust the fidelity to suit the need. Take a higher level view rather than eliminate key elements to simplify views. Use formatting and layout to accentuate what is important for this audience and at this point in time.

The difficulty with prioritisation and making something "key" is that everything else will be "downgraded". It can later turn out, that an important point was missed. Therefore you and your organisation need a strong resilience to failure. In my experience especially larger corporate organisations struggle with this point.

Layering information is a great technique for technical presentations. It allows to establish easy understanding of the concepts for most of the listeners at a greater pace. Most importantly it also gives a sense of detail that required to be provided in the first interactions and subsequent meetings based on the degree of engagement received from the stakeholders.

Pick up the people where they are. This need a lot of empathy. Make sure to verify that you are understood. Warning sign: No one has questions or criticism. This is almost a 100% sign that no one understood or cared what you were talking abuot.

Interestingly, when you try to provide an example for your SE concepts, you will see the differences in each others understanding. This can be a hard process to align. For this reason you will find a lot of corporate development processes theoretically described, but not enhanced with examples.

No questions means "only questions". It is important to note that when you do not get any engagement, most probably, no one followed you. Make sure your SE concepts are universally understood. We do not want SE to be a little Silo or Island that operates on its own. We see that happen way too commonly.

Don’t underestimate the value of explaining a complex diagram step by step. If the real “story” being told by the diagram (or the system it represents) is inherently complex, simplifying and abstracting the visual representation can lead to misinterpretations and missed insight by a non-technical audience. Remember that improving communication is a feature of diagrams, even complex ones. If the diagram is complex because it truly needs to be, explain it; you may find that the complexity ends up being beneficial after the audience grasps the initial key principles.