Prototyping with your mouth

Last week: writing as a way to figure out what you think. This week: how expertise gets in your way.

ELI5 (“Explain it like I’m five”) is one of the greatest things the internet has ever invented. Experts write simple explanations to burning questions, like:

“Why do humans need to eat many different kinds of foods to get their vitamins etc, but large animals like cows only need grass to survive?” (answer below!)

Although it has the faint whiff of being patronising (literally: “talk to me like I’m a kid”), it solves a problem we all struggle with every day: we get lost in the details of our own work. ELI5 acts like a noise filter: “Can you abstract away the details so I can understand the big picture quickly?” Turn 100 words into 10. Detail into abstraction. Mess to message.

In the early days of leading a team, I’d often find myself asking:

“Help me understand what you’re working on.”

There would often be a long reply, littered with terminology I wasn’t familiar with yet; I had to work really hard to follow it. They’d pull up really cool-looking slides, jumping straight into really small details they’d been working on. Scott Jensen told me he calls this “prototyping with your mouth”. Figuring out what you’re trying to say as you’re saying it; a transcription of the unfiltered noise in your head.

How does this happen?

Your mind is a network of neurons. As you work on something over time, many new ones are formed; connections bridged. Your understanding grows stronger and stronger, more nuanced, more detailed. It’s unconscious and non-linear.

At the same time, there’s an opposing force at play: the curse of knowledge. The more you learn, the further away you are from knowing nothing. You forget which details you take for granted; you’ve drawn conclusions based on facts you’ve now internalised. The same thing happens when you learn a physical skill: a good skater can’t explain all the nuance involved in pulling off an ollie, it’s muscle-memory. It’s like your brain is doing a super-charged journey between “oh what’s this?” to “that’s just the way we do things here”, and eventually “isn’t that obvious?” No. No it isn’t.

The is also why AI isn’t a great solution to the problem. Sure, if you want a one-off, concise summary, it’s faster to get one with your favourite flavour of LLM. But if you do that, and then you’re in a meeting with someone like me asking you to explain, you’re… lost. And now, if we become seeing-eye-humans for AI, we won’t even have the details to confuse people with.

I caught up with someone I coached during the pandemic recently, and when I asked him what was most helpful back then, he said:

“You told me: in meetings, talk less, summarise more.”

Turning the unfiltered mess into a well-ordered message is hard at first, but it does get easier over time. Great communicators do it on the fly, but they weren’t born that way. Writing habits like ‘ELI5’ help you stretch those abstraction muscles, but the first test is to observe the effects. Here’s something you can try:

Explain what you’re doing to someone outside your field, and ask them to raise their hand whenever they stop following what you’re saying.

Whatever details you just said that lost them? Now you know where the problem is.

The next Get Your Story Straight workshop: London, 13th November.

The ELI5 answer, courtesy of a reddit user:

"...species typically evolve the ability to make vitamins that they can't get easily in their diet. For example, humans make vitamin D because there aren't many food sources of it, but we can't make vitamin C, but can find it in food. But other species can make their own vitamin C."

Get Your Story Straight

Prototyping with your mouth

The artefact is an afterthought

Short trips to presentation heaven and presentation hell.

Less doing, more describing.