How To Easily Communicate Complexity - Part 1

One of the most important skills that people in B2B tech want, is to explain complexity so it's easily understood yet without dumbing it down. Instead, it’s a torturous process for many sellers and technical subject matter experts, especially when putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

To help make the process less stressful, I’ve put together my top 20 tips to communicate complexity when you need to educate, inform or persuade a buyer audience of the value of your solution or service.

I’ve separated the 20 tips into two articles, and today we’ll cover the first 10, which are:

1.??????Start with POW (Purpose, Outcome, Who)

2.??????Take a structured approach

3.??????Try the TEEL method

4.??????Write as simply as possible

5.??????Remove redundancies

6.??????Minimise Zombie nouns

7.??????Mostly use Active Voice

8.??????Use linking words

9.??????Mix it up with Indented lists

10.??Use headings with abandon

Some of these will sound familiar, but key is to apply all of them. Read on to find out more.

1.?????Start With POW (Purpose, Outcome, Who)

Before you think of putting your message together (or rehashing/rewriting boilerplate), reflect on POW. Doing so will have your complex message received, accepted and understood.

So, take 10 minutes or an hour to think through the following:

Purpose: What’s my objective? Is it to win over a hostile or disinterested audience? Is it to educate my audience about an innovation? Is it to position my team as uniquely capable? Or is it to position my company as the ideal technology partner? And so on. The important thing is to nut out your objective. It grounds your central premise and helps you not get into the weeds of your speciality area.

Outcome: What would you like your audience to think, feel and do once they've read your proposal or listened to your presentation? For example, you want them to feel excited and insatiably curious about your unique solution which means you’re not going to talk about all of the solution features. You’ll only present the most exciting/groundbreaking aspect of it.

Next, how do you want them to think? You want the buyer to think, “Oh my goodness, this solves way more problems than we envisaged.” This means you’ll be communicating business value in a specific way instead of listing a bunch of fluffy benefit statements.

And what would you like the buyer audience to do? Regardless of how things pan out, you decide what that is, and you might want them to circumvent procurement and go straight to their board to review your offer. Holding that thought, how might that change what you craft in terms of the complexity of your solution?

Who: You should probably think about your audience first (but it didn’t provide me with an elegant acronym :-) ). Is your audience technical or non-technical? If technical, how familiar are they with your topic? Is your audience senior executives that look at the big picture? Or is your audience department heads that look after user interests? And so on. Taking the time to imagine how your audience would like you to communicate with them, depending on what matters to them and their role, will help you craft a clear message, no matter how complex the topic.

2.?????Take A Structured Approach

Clarity of message largely depends on how you structure a communication piece. To be easily understood, have a beginning, middle and end. The beginning (introduction) introduces your central theme or idea and summarises key points. The middle bit (your body) provides specifics that expound on the main idea and includes supporting details like examples, use cases, stories, etc. The end bit (conclusion) often, but not always, summarises key points in the body though it always restates the central theme.

Including narrative structure in my list might seem fundamental, but you have no idea how many presentations and executive summaries I’ve reviewed that have little to no structure. The writer is not allowing the audience to understand their complex topic because their story is all over the place. And while I can see a couple of brilliant ideas in the mess, the entire thing is confusing! By the way, if your audience is confused and doesn’t understand what you're talking about, assume it's not because they're dumber than you; you’ve just not presented a logical, straightforward argument. One idea must link to the next idea, and so on. Some of the tips below also help with this.

3.?????Try The TEEL Method

The TEEL method was introduced to me by a former colleague and is used for essay writing at university. It's an excellent method to follow if you’re writing long-form copy when completing a tender or RFP response. Here it is:

4. Write As Simply As Possible

While big words are fine, work to adopt everyday language if you want to be easily understood. You’ll also be respected as someone that can explain complexity.

Here are some examples of simple words (from Susan McKerihan’s book, Clear and Concise) you can use instead of more inflated words:

• extra, more, other instead of ‘additional’
• recommend, tell instead of ‘advice’
• aware of instead of ‘cognisant of’
• find out, prove, set up instead of ‘establish’
• use instead of ‘utilise’
• help instead of ‘facilitate’

5.?????Remove Redundancies

There's no room for bloated text in a world of noise x 10. One way to fix this is to get rid of words that repeat the meaning of another word. See examples:

Here is a longer list of redundancies you can avoid.

6.??????Minimise Zombie Nouns

What we’re talking about are nominalisations: nouns made from other parts of speech, usually by adding a suffix to an adjective, verb or noun. So ‘develop’ becomes ‘development’ and ‘optimise’ becomes ‘optimisation’.

While nominalisations effectively communicate complexity, using too many sucks the lifeblood out of adjectives and active verbs, turning them into Zombie Nouns. What ends up happening is your written piece or presentation sends people to sleep.

The over-use of nominalisations is rife in B2B IT, so I dare you to watch this funny video from Helen Sword below. If you do, it will temper your lust for nominalisations.

To help you further, read the next tip.

7.?????Mostly Use Active Voice

If you want your writing to be clear, direct and reader-friendly, mostly use the active voice. Active voice gives a piece of writing more vitality and impact. Here is an excellent example, again, from Susan McKerihan’s book Clear & Concise:

Passive sentence: “The suitability of the risk-screen tool will be evaluated by analysis of the degree to which it enables the need for post-acute services to be accurately predicted”.

Better: “We will evaluate the risk-screening tool’s suitability by analysing how accurately it predicts the need for post-acute services”.

Note that active voice also includes a subject – ‘We’ (the doer) - which is important. If your technical team is executing complex processes to simplify business for your customer, explain this complex process in terms of who will do what. Easier for your buyer audience to digest and more personal and human to boot!

8.?????Use Linking Words

A common problem people struggle with when explaining complex ideas in a large document is not connecting ideas from one paragraph to the next. Linking words can help with this. Here are some examples:

9.?????Mix It Up With Indented Lists

Creating lists is useful as they help us break down complex components into separate parts, making it easier for our audience (especially if non-technical or not familiar with the technology we’re covering) to digest our message without getting heartburn. Put the following into an indented list:

• A method, system or process
• Product features
• Benefits

One thing that creates confusion is when a writer says something like, “Our seven steps to…” but then creates a bulleted list. (I see this common mistake often). It might seem small, but it can throw your reader off because they’re expecting a numbered list.

10.?Use Headings with Abandon

Similar to indented lists, headings do a fantastic job of helping us communicate complexity because they:

• can provide a high-level view of our main topic
• emphasise a feature or benefit
• summarise our technical capability
• introduce new topics – a signpost that says, “Look what’s coming next!”
• separate complex components for readers
• allow time-poor readers to scan material.

Rule of thumb: A heading or sub-heading is a good idea after every three paragraphs.

Conclusion

There you have it—the first 10 tips (of my top 20) to help us communicate complexity. Key is to follow a logical and structured approach tapping into POW (Purpose, Outcome, Who) and using linking words. If we want our audience to understand our complex thoughts, substitute overblown words for simple, everyday words. Also, minimise passive voice and Zombie nouns because they deaden language, thus weakening clarity. Finally, go with well-placed bulleted or numbered lists and headings to make it clear we’re taking our audience somewhere and not leading them astray into the tangled mess of our twisty thought processes.

Stay tuned for next week’s article where I cover another 10 tips to easily communicate complexity.

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