Explaining to non-specialists
Explaining a technical notion to someone who does not know it: sizing up the audience, starting from the familiar, choosing an analogy and stating its limits, giving the essentials first, and knowing where simplifying turns into saying something false.
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- 5 topics
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The outline, topic by topic
Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.
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A few cards from the deck
Popularisation: what is it?
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The exercise of making a specialist notion understandable to non-specialists, without betraying its content.
It is measured on the receiving side, not the speaker's: if the audience cannot restate the idea in its own words, the explanation failed, even if it was accurate.
The town hall website went down this morning. Which first sentence do you write to the director-general?
- The site is unavailable until 2 p.m.; no data has been lost.
- This morning at 8:12, the monitoring tool raised an alert on the web server.
- The TLS certificate expired because automatic renewal failed.
- First I would like to recall how our hosting is organised.
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The site is unavailable until 2 p.m.; no data has been lost.
The director wants the effect and the delay, then the state of the data: that is the essential, so it goes first. The alert history and the technical cause come after, for whoever wants them.
To explain to non-specialists, first size up your …, then start from what it ….
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To explain to non-specialists, first size up your audience, then start from what it already knows.
An explanation is not built in a vacuum: the same subject is told differently to a director, to users or to a technical team.
Jargon: what is it?
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Vocabulary belonging to a trade, which its members use without thinking and others do not understand.
It is useful among peers because it is fast, and harmful outside. Words such as “provisioning”, “token” or “in prod” must be replaced or explained in front of non-IT people.
A system administrator explains to receptionists why their account is locked: “The authentication token has expired, it must be re-issued through SSO.” They nod, then call support again. What is the most likely cause?
- The agents did not make the effort to read the procedure provided
- The explanation was too long and too detailed for them
- The jargon was not translated, and nobody checked understanding
- The administrator should have sent the same instruction in writing
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The jargon was not translated, and nobody checked understanding
Nodding is not understanding. The sentence was short but made of words the audience does not know; it should have said “your session has expired, sign in again”, then asked them to repeat the steps.