
How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand? - ricg
http://blog.asmartbear.com/non-technical-communication.html
======
lutusp
> How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand?

This is unbelievably presumptuous, narcissistic and smacks of technological
elitism. You don't know whether or not the client can understand -- all you
know is you're unwilling to explain it to him.

If you don't want to get along with clients, if you're willing to take the
risk of alienating them, take this article's advice and tell your customers,
"You can't do that, and you also can't understand why -- trust me."

If you do want to get along with your clients as well as grow your business,
try this instead: "Well, our system can't do that at the moment, but I
appreciate your making this suggestion for future improvements."

Maybe it's a polite lie -- so what? You've empowered the client, made him feel
as though you care about his needs. You've avoided opening an emotional exit
door the client my well choose to walk through.

~~~
tomjen3
>This is unbelievably presumptuous, narcissistic and smacks of technological
elitism

>In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied
to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they
were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for
a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent",
"improper", and "unamerican" have been. (From what you can't say).

Mayhaps you can apply those labels, but you skipped the crucial part -- is it
true?

~~~
lutusp
>> This is unbelievably presumptuous, narcissistic and smacks of technological
elitism

> Mayhaps you can apply those labels, but you skipped the crucial part -- is
> it true?

As to "presumptuous", the author assumes _a priori_ that the client _can't_
understand an issue, not _doesn't_ understand it but might comprehend an
offered explanation. That's how presumption is defined -- an assumption in
advance of any effort to gather facts.

As to "narcissistic", well, yes, absolutely. The author places himself and his
peers in an elite, entitled group, qualified to gauge the limited
understanding of lesser beings and pass judgment on them, rather than try to
explain something that might help his clients and his business.

As to "elitism", yes again -- the author sees himself and his associates as
belonging to an anointed, superior technological priesthood, able to say to
the unwashed masses "trust me" with a straight face.

Any questions?

~~~
tomjen3
Yes, one.

Is the original statement true?

------
bunderbunder
_How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand?_

You don't. You explain by analogy.

If you can't come up with a good analogy, it's probably for one of two
reasons: Perhaps you don't really understand it all that well yourself, in
which case you should find somebody who understands it better to do the
explaining. Or perhaps you just have a hard time coming up with analogies in
general, in which case you should find someone with better communication
skills to do the explaining.

~~~
jerf
Now, try an experiment next you do that. Explain by a completely inapplicable
analogy, one that is logically coherent but does not apply to the problem at
hand.

You win if your listener calls BS. I win if they don't.

You're probably not explaining anywhere near as much as you think. You're just
making soothing noises until they are no longer willing to pursue the matter.
You might as well be honest about that fact with both yourself and the client,
as suggested in the blog post.

~~~
bunderbunder
All you're really demonstrating by that thought experiment is that when
there's a huge knowledge gap, the more knowledgeable person is well-positioned
to get away with spewing a whole mess of BS.

That is obviously true. But it's also obviously nowhere close to being an
appropriate (or even smart) way to conduct one's business relationships.

~~~
VLM
You do not have a "business relationship" if there is a huge knowledge gap. If
there's no meeting of the minds, no way to evaluate each other, no way to
sensibly compete in a free market, you're well along the path of a
provider/consumer relationship or pure faith or at best something like
feudalism or lifetime sharecropping.

A good analogy is asking about the business relationship between a parishioner
and a priest. Its the wrong tinted glasses to look at the relationship. That
doesn't mean it has to be a bad relationship, and no value judgement of
inferiority. Its just evaluating the relationship via inappropriate criteria.

~~~
r00fus
Tread lightly, this attitude is dangerous. There are really customers/managers
who are not technical that instead rely on your previous words and commitments
to gauge what's possible and what is getting done.

These people act dumber than they are, so they can extract more information
with which to evaluate your character and disposition.

~~~
VLM
Again, that's not a business relationship, that is quite literally exactly how
feudalism worked. Your liege lord was not an expert on your plot of lands
agronomy prospects or the physical state of your knights, so he had to trust
you.

Its possible some of the confusion is state based vs action based. If you
define business relationship by state, then absolutely anything that happens
in a cube farm while wearing a tie is a business relationship, from a free
market to blackmail to slavery to blind faith. If you define business
relationship by action as a theoretical ideal of how roughly equal
participants in a competitive market in a rule of law system treat each other,
you get a completely different analysis.

------
run4yourlives
I would love to know the specifics behind this post, because it seems so very,
very, wrong.

One of the comments nails it best: unless you are breaking the laws of
physics, you can make software do pretty much anything... the real question is
whether that is a net benefit.

 _"They want to use our software or customize things in ways that are
technically impossible"_

What the hell does that even mean? Perhaps the reason the tech can't
communicate to the non-techy is that he can't communicate, period. Does it
mean they're using the software for something it wasn't intended to be used
for? Are they looking for a feature that isn't coded? Are they looking for
support for something you aren't interested in supporting?

Not much is 'technically impossible' when it comes to businesses and software
these days. What there are in abundance however are a lot of misguided
applications.

~~~
ucee054
_Not much is 'technically impossible' when it comes to businesses and software
these days._

Try doing IP multicast on the public Internet.

What, you can't, because the ISPs have disabled it?

Next time try not talking out of your ass.

~~~
zalzane
Using IP multicast is a solution to a problem; and I'm pretty sure the parent
comment meant that he could solve any problem given enough time, money, and
resources.

It's not like you _have_ to use IP multicast to solve certain classes of
broadcasting problems, it's just more helpful.

~~~
ucee054
"It's not like you _have_ to use IP multicast to solve certain classes of
broadcasting problems"

Then why did NATO get their own dedicated lines to multicast on? Why don't
they run their 100,000 simultaneous user systems without multicast and save
that expense?

But OK, we'll pretend you're right about that one. What if someone asks for a
job shop scheduler for predictably giving optimal schedules for 300 machines
interactively? NP completeness is no problem, right?

Or what if someone asks for an in software modulator for the entire radio
spectrum? The non-existence of the necessary hardware is again no problem,
right?

Or how about when users asks for just plain contradictory requirements huh?
Never happened to you? Because these ones are not just physically impossible
but also logically impossible.

The fact is that some things are constrained by engineering. It is also a fact
that some non-technical types in positions of authority push back when told
"no" because of technical constraints, and ask "Why not?". Attempting to give
them a reason is a trap, because they are asking the question as an opening
negotiating ploy.

Because these idiots in their ignorance think an engineering constraint is a
negotiable item.

I feel very sorry for the engineer in the original post because it sounds like
he's stuck in such a rut.

And it's simply infuriating to hear somebody respond to that plight with the
nonsense that "in IT anything is possible".

------
jpdoctor
> _You’re going to have to trust your doctor._

Good god this is bad advice, especially in the US which is nowhere near the
top in world rankings for quantitative medical performance like longevity or
infant mortality.

The first thing you do is get multiple opinions. Without any further info, you
have a 25% chance that you are relying on some clown who was in the bottom 25%
of his class. I swear many of those guys are just throwing around treatments
to collect $$.

~~~
ScottBurson
Agreed. And contrary to what the OP said, it is entirely possible to educate
oneself about a specific medical condition, given only some basic knowledge
about biology and biochemistry. There are plenty of resources out there.
Coming up with possible alternative diagnoses for one's symptoms is a bit
harder -- that's really what you're relying on the doctor's expertise for --
but even that can be done.

------
gruseom
It's a dangerous habit to call or think of anyone as "a non-technical person".
Life is not binary; people do not come in discrete categories; these are
merely labels we impose on ourselves and others, and once you stick a label on
someone it's hard to see them otherwise. You're bound to the judgement you've
made and will tend to block out any information that contradicts it – such as
the fact that they can understand things, if clearly communicated.

------
snuze
This reminds me of Richard Feynman answering a question about magnets.

 _I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms
of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in
terms of anything else that you're more familiar with._

Transcript:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_wh...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_why_questions/)
Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM>

------
burke
Wrong question.

If you can't simplify or analogize enough to explain something technical, you
don't understand it well enough yourself.

Sometimes I'll tell people "It's kind of abstract and will take a while to
explain. Do you still care?"

------
analyst74
Different people are looking for different answers, and a non-technical person
rarely wants a detailed technical answer.

"Will I be able to do X?"

"No, because that's technically impossible." or

"No, our product doesn't support that feature yet." or

"Well, you could, but it's not a documented feature, and you risk losing
everything you did during next upgrade." or

"Yes, but it will take several more months of development and associated
cost."

Generally, the asker will be satisfied at this point, because now they
understand enough of the problem to make an informed decision.

------
dean
I deny the premise of the OP's doctor analogy. Given a rare liver disease, and
the amount of information available on the internet, and access to doctors to
ask questions to, a motivated learner could become quite proficient in
understanding how the liver works and how it is affected by a specific
disease. The patient does not have to become a doctor to do this. A doctor has
to learn many, many things to become a doctor. Whereas the liver disease
sufferer only has to learn about one thing. It is easily possible for a lay
person to learn enough about their condition to have a meaningful "technical"
conversation about it with their doctor.

~~~
quasque
That would only work if the learner is so motivated that they spend months
poring over medical and biology textbooks to understand enough background, and
then learn how to read scientific papers and interpret studies for statistical
significance, to get up to date on the latest research. And of course they
also must have the aptitude to do all that, to get to the point where they can
start meaningfully questioning the doctor's recommended course of action.

Otherwise, they're still just going to have to trust the doctor.

------
Millennium
You don't. You start by explaining from a high level, working your way down to
lower levels as requested until the client comes to their own conclusion that
they can't understand. This takes longer, but keeps you from being the bad
guy.

------
websitescenes
The best approach that I have found, at least when making websites or creating
a CMS, is to really dumb it down. Don't think about how you would like it to
be, because it will almost always be too complex. Beyond making software super
intuitive, make sure it's extensible enough to adapt to customer needs. Pretty
much anything is possible but if your client is consistently asking for stupid
things then I think it's time to find a new client.

------
jchung
The key failure of this post is that it uses the wrong analogy. You may want
your client to think of you as a doctor, but right now they think of you as a
magician.

------
EA
Don't say: "Do you understand?" or "Do you know what I mean?" Instead say:
"Did I explain that well?" or "Am I making myself clear?"

------
heathlilley
Kobayashi Maru

If you can't find a solution, change the problem.

I have had great success in re-working the requirement when something
seemingly impossible has been proposed by a user. IMHO, this is because what
makes something impossible is usually an additional (and often negotiable)
requirement.

Sure there are still times when this won't work either, but it should help
reduce that number.

------
davidmcb
The premise is predictably arrogant and self-serving. It simply means that YOU
lack the intellectual capacity, emotional intelligence, and command of
language to produce a coherent explanation for that person. IOW - it's YOUR
failure, NOT THEIR'S.

------
alxndr
Post doesn't even try to answer the original question.

> ...how do I basically tell [the customer] “You can’t understand this. You
> have to trust me” without sounding like a prick?

The post concludes with "you have to tell the customer to trust you".

------
kvprashant
If you can't convince them, confuse them eh?

