Preface
Chances are that you explained something recently—why dinner tastes the way it does, why you were late for a meeting, what an article means to your company. We explain so many different things so frequently that we take the art of explanation for granted. This is a tragedy because a great explanation can make our ideas come to life, invite people to care and be motivated to learn more. However, we lose the opportunity to do this unless we recognize that explanation is an essential skill we can learn and master.
Imagine the potential that better explanations have for both your personal and professional interactions. What if your boss, accountant, team member, or mother could suddenly explain ideas in a more understandable way? What if they could put themselves in your shoes and make their ideas clear in a way that acknowledged your perspective? That is the goal of this book. I want to help you and the people around you become better explainers because we desperately need better explanations. Although this book is primarily aimed at professionals, it is meant for everyone, and intended to make the world a more understandable place in which to live and work.
The Art of Explanation is built on my years of experience in creating explanations for organizations and educators. My company, Common Craft, is known around the world for making complex ideas easy to understand in the the form of short videos. Through projects with companies such as Google, LEGO, Intel, and Ford Motor Company and the creation of our own library of video explanations, we have been students of explanation for many years. We have experimented and studied the explanation process and seen what is possible. Our videos have been viewed more than 50 million times online, and no other brand is better known for explanations (http://commoncraft.com/videos).
This book, however, is not a series of case studies and exercises or an academic exploration of “the science of explanation.” More than anything, it is a manifesto based on our experiences as professional explainers. We believe deeply in the power of explanation and see this book as an invitation to recognize that power by looking at explanation from a new perspective. When you do, you will see that it represents an unexplored part of your communications, a skill you can understand, practice, and improve.
The various ideas, approaches, and models I provide in these pages are secondary to a simple, higher-level goal: to make explanation a priority. This means thinking about how you explain ideas and how you can put explanations to work to accomplish your goals. It requires that you use explanation as a strategy in problem solving. You must also introduce others to the idea that explanations can create positive change.
It is this overarching perspective that matters because, as the title suggests, explanation is an art. Although there are tools, tactics and ideas that help, we all explain differently, and that is the beauty of it. Explanations do not follow a set of specific steps and rules. They are effective because of the perspective and intent of the explainer. Looking at a problem through the lens of explanation can reveal challenges that may not have been visible before. When the intent is to create an explanation to address these challenges, we all have the potential to use the ideas in this book to build explanations in our own way.
Many of these ideas and concepts are introduced via short, fictional stories of individuals who discover the challenges and potential of explanation in various situations. These stories reflect what we believe is one of the most powerful aspects of explanation: presenting ideas from a person's or group's perspective. They also serve as an antidote to endless bullet points and lists, and provide you with an entertaining way to absorb and remember ideas.
Multiple examples of our own explanations are included, all of which have corresponding video scripts or links to videos on our website. These scripts give concrete examples of our approach to specific explanation problems that have a record of success and are a model for your own explanations.
The book is organized into three parts that align with the basic process of creating explanations–Plan, Package, and Present:
This part of the book is meant to build a solid foundation for the idea of explanation. To create successful explanations, we need to answer such basic questions as:
The answers to these questions help us see that an explanation answers a specific kind of question—one that challenges us in many ways. We look at the factors that cause explanations to fail and where they originate.
The last chapter of this part introduces the idea of explanation problems and provides a simple model to plan and introduce explanations. We'll see how one startup company discovered an explanation problem and used the Explanation Scale to explore it and address it.
This part of the book moves from planning to production. After becoming familiar with the basics of explanations and explanation problems, we dive into ideas and strategies that can help to solve them. The big idea is to think about an explanation as a way to package ideas into a form that makes them more understandable. Elements of packaging include:
The chapters in this section introduce specific strategies and examples that present complex ideas in a way that accounts for the audience's needs. They refer to the Explanation Scale and discuss how to create “stepping stones” to better understanding. These chapters also explore concepts such as constraints and simplification as ways to approach packaging.
Explanations are not meant to sit on a shelf—they are meant to be shared. Therefore, this part will examine how we put explanations to work in organizations, and will explore the various media that can give explanations power to reach your audience.
The essential points from the first two parts are put to work here in a story about an organization that discovers the power of packaging ideas into explanations. Other chapters discuss the potential of combining explanations with a communication strategy that amplifies the impact of an explanation by making it sharable inside and outside an organization. We close the book with a forward-looking chapter entitled “Your Life as an Explainer” that describes real world examples to show how explanation skills can benefit your company, career, and even your profession.
The Art of Explanation is for anyone who wants their ideas, products, and services to be easy to understand. However, it is more than that; it is a perspective. If we can improve explanations even a little, the positive potential for ourselves, our organizations, and the people around us could be tremendous. I invite you to take the first step.