How to speak so people will listen
Engineers use a language full of technical slang, buzzwords and acronyms that is only intelligible for other engineers or related web lifeforms. Sometimes we need to go out of our bubble and speak with regular people. Regular people is characterized because they don’t care how things work but how they can use them..
Only a handful of us are able to speak with regular people being respected as equals. Some are media whores, you can recognize them because they have thousands of followers on Twitter. There are some real scientists and engineers that enjoy explaining technical concepts but most of us suffer when we are speaking about technical stuff to people that lacks basic technical background.
Dilbert
Why do we need to speak with them?
You may need to explain your sales drones the magic that make your product different. It’s amazing that sales people know all the trendy buzzwords but they don’t have a clue of what they meant at a technical level.
You may need to explain your C-level people why your coders have been the last 3 months rewriting the entire architecture of the product without any visible improvement.
It’s clear that eventually you will need to speak with them.
The problems
There are three problems when discussing technology with regular people. The first one is that we can’t use our acronym based jargon but just plain language. The second problem is that we need to picture complex abstract concepts with something easy to understand. The third problem is the short attention span regular people have when listening technology.
There is no point in using acronyms the people doesn’t know about. There are lots of new ones created every day. For similar reasons you can’t use buzzwords, even the ones that have been forever on the web.
As everything is interconnected you may feel tempted to explain how something works explaining the related technology it’s based on. This is a double edge sword, people may understand you better but you will may need to explain the big bang theory and progress from there. By the time you reach your main topic everybody will be dreaming of donuts and you will be preaching in the desert.
The solution: Imagination land.
What you need to do is create a magic world where there aren’t acronyms and the technology is simple and accessible.
In this world, Internet works like the road system. Cars are Internet packets. Each car has a driver that knows their destination. There are two car brands, TCP and UDP. Both cars can go elsewhere on the Internet. They can even go off road to reach obscure destinations like this blog.
TCP cars are women’s favourites. Women always plan in advance their routes. They often get lost on the road but when they finally arrive at the destination the rest of the family is still waiting for them because they are only ones that know how to cook.
UDP cars are normally driven by males. Men don’t like planning. They get into the car and reach their destinations following traffic signals. Lots of drivers get lost but it doesn’t matter because nobody is really waiting for them at home.
On the other hand VPNs are intercity trains. There are already fixed established paths and you are not expected to go off road. Trains are streams of information. Train cars contain data, and on the locomotive is the driver, who knows where the train is headed and has the special key to open each train car.
A web server is a bakery where customers wait in line. Some years ago the bakeries had only a few cakes to choose but now all of the bakeries accept personalized orders. Behind the bakery there are big factories where lots of machines are cooking those cakes following personalized recipes. The factories are often interconnected so the product of one factory can be an ingredient on the next one. There are also giant storage places managed by third companies where all the ingredients (information) of the world is logically stored.
A firewall is the muscular guy at the entrance of popular spots. People in line are the network packets. If a network packet look suspicious the big guy will not let him in because he is not wearing today’s correct shoes. Once the disco is full the big guy act as traffic container and don’t let anybody to pass unless it’s a VoIP packet.
Spread the fun
Using this imaginary world make our world accessible to anybody. It’s easier and fun to explain, the people don’t lose their attention span, they don’t get lost under thousands of mysterious acronyms and they leave the room with an smile and a general picture of how things work.
If they are interested in the topic they will ask questions. That’s the moment in which you can switch to technical jargon language. You will saturate their attention span in minutes, they will get lost and they will not ask again. You ego will be intact.