The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand

Chapter 5

Packaging Ideas

You have learned so far that explanation problems prevent people from understanding one another's ideas. Using the explanation scale, you learned to picture people who lack understanding on the “A” end of the scale. You know you need ways to move them closer to the “Z” end with confidence.

The second part of this book is dedicated to packaging ideas into explanations that can help you move people across the scale with ease. Many of these tactics were identified through making Common Craft videos, which we see as 3-minute packages of ideas. In creating more than 100 video explanations for companies and educators, we have analyzed and refined the main factors that make ideas easy to understand.

The idea of packaging works because packages have limits. Only so many things can fit into a package, and this is true with explanations as well. By packaging ideas into explanations, we define the package's contents by what we include or exclude. This gives our explanation form, shape, and limits. The idea is to identify an explanation problem and build a package that will solve it through explanation.

Below is the explanation scale that Andre's team used to visualize the reach of their current explanations. It highlighted a large group of potential customers on the “A” end of the scale who were left out because the curse of knowledge prevented Andre's team from accounting ...