Good Explanations Require Vulnerability
when the map is not the territory, don't quibble about the difference
A few weeks ago I read the post “Sometimes You Have to S#1t the Nest” on The American Peasant.
Summary: the internet will ruin your writing, because the internet is filled with people who love to call out any minor inaccuracy or omission they can find. You start trying to head them off by addressing every single quibble you can think of. So your writing turns into legalese, and your central point is buried under all the caveats.
It occurred to me that this also happens at the office. But it doesn’t have to!
Maps
A good explanation enables the recipient to make informed decisions without wasting their time on irrelevant details. The second part of that sentence is just as important as the first.
Imagine you need to find your way to a restaurant in an unfamiliar city. You walk up to the desk at your hotel and ask for help. The concierge draws a line on a napkin with the words “here” and “there” written on either end. They hand you the napkin and say “follow that line, you’ll get there.” You step outside and get lost at the first street corner because you don’t have enough detail.
On the other extreme, imagine the concierge offers to take you on a walking tour. They walk you up and down every single street in the city over the next six months, explaining who owns every building and what’s on the menu at every restaurant. Ridiculous! You might have learned the city, but you had to move there to do it.
If you’re going to make it to your dinner reservation, there’s a balance to strike.
Explanation quality
I think of progress towards that balance in three levels:
Bad explanations
Correct explanations
Good explanations
Bad explanations don’t have the right details for the audience or are outright incorrect, usually because the person providing them is a poor communicator or doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Correct explanations aren’t wrong, but they are too detailed to be useful. The map is the size of the city. The recipient still can’t make informed decisions because they are bewildered by the detail. If you’re an expert but you can only explain things to other experts, I’m talking about you.
Good explanations are empowering. They have enough detail in the right areas for the recipient to understand what’s happening and make good decisions. But they aren’t so large that they’re difficult to grasp in a reasonable amount of time.
Vulnerability
I see a lot of engineers get stuck on giving correct explanations. They don’t get past level 2. And I think that happens because good explanations are necessarily incorrect. You have to skip details and oversimplify. It makes you easy prey for quibblers.
This is particularly relevant in the context of career progression. If you’re a junior employee and you give a good (not merely correct!) explanation, senior people around you might assume you’re oversimplifying because you don’t know the details in the first place. Then they might give you a lecture, quibbling about the edge cases you omitted. Getting lectured is frustrating and it’s important to prove you understand how things work, so junior employees often learn to explain everything at level 2, as a defense mechanism.
If you’re a knowledgeable senior employee, living at level 2 can be perversely empowering. You can confuse everyone around you while being technically correct. The maps you provide are too big to be useful; therefore everyone needs you to lead the way. You look like the smartest, most necessary person in the room. And your senior status means people won’t question whether you’re giving them useful maps. Instead they will assume they’re too stupid to understand the territory.
Living with vulnerability
So how do we avoid junior people tying themselves in knots whenever they’re talking about their work? How do we avoid senior people becoming single-points-of-failure surrounded by disempowered teammates. Human nature being what it is, I think the answer is simple in concept but difficult in execution.
For people in junior positions, it’s about recognizing when senior employees are nitpicking vs. when they are providing important structural feedback. It’s about tolerating lectures, and finding the value in them even when they are frustrating. Most people have to pay tuition to get half an hour’s instruction from someone with 15 years of experience, so try to appreciate the opportunity, even when it’s grating! And it’s especially about fighting the urge to preemptively defend yourself from quibblers. You have to accept that you will always be vulnerable to nitpicking.
For people in senior positions, it’s about recognizing when junior employees are trying to cut to the chase on a topic they do understand vs. when they are trying to bullshit their way through a topic they don’t. When they’re cutting to the chase, keep the quibbling to a minimum! And it’s about measuring how effective your explanations actually are; when you explained something to your team, did they understand, and take independent action based on what they learned? Or did they nod along and then circle back next week asking you what to do about it?
It’s about giving each other some grace and living with vulnerability.