Do you have a ready toolkit to help you communicate your special know-how to the people you live and work with?
How do you communicate something that is “above” someone else’s head, or, conversely, how do you help someone who is speaking “above your level” to come back to Earth and talk to you at ground level?
Just before that start of this holiday season (I include Halloween as a holiday…), I gave a talk at the 86th Annual International Conference for the Association of Business Communication. The talk looked at two ways expertise can be communicated to non-experts and was delivered to a room of experts in business communication.
So, I thought it would be fun to take that talk to another level, and look at how I might teach how to communicate expertise to an audience of newsletter readers.
First off: a useful term from rhetoric: translation. We often think of translation as the work done to make sensible one language’s words with those of another. However:
Translation also occurs when one person speaks the language of an expert to an audience who speaks the language of non-expert.
And let me be clear from the get-go: I take as an assumption that we all have expertise. I’m an expert in rhetoric, as designated by a PhD. But I’m also an expert in how to make a good omelet (to which I have no official designation, alas)🍳.
In order to communicate my expertise, whether concerning rhetorical theory or how long is too long for the eggs to sit in the pan—I need to be able to package my knowledge in a way that make sense to other people.
Providing your listeners with rhetorical structure can be useful way to communicate your expertise to outsiders.
In the rest of this post, I’ll offer one of the rhetorical structures I presented in my conference talk for use in your life. These tools, borrowed from the world of management consulting, are called “MECE” & “Bucketing.”
MECE + Bucketing
When you build a house, you need a structure before you can start filling in the rooms. Likewise, when communicating something complex, drawing on structure can help you sort out your material in a way that helps others see the relationship between those parts, and in doing so, move your listener closer to understanding the concept you’re trying to communicate.
MECE, an acronym, pronounced me-see, means Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. Used in conjunction with “bucketing,” a way of categorizing and generating content, MECE is a powerful way to group and categorize what you’re trying to say without overlap. The image below (taken from myconsultingoffer.org) visualizes what is ME and what is CE in MECE.
When components of an idea overlap, the listener is like to be confused because they do not have a clear sense of how things relate.
Bucketing a complex concept or idea you have and communicating those categories to your audience can help you communicate your expertise. If I were try and tell you how to make a grand omelet, I might communicate the steps to you across four MECE categories: ingredients, appliances, cooking, and serving.
A non-egg business example of MECE might include someone who is trying to propose a new product or service. They would communicate this propose by starting with the nature of the proposal:
“Here is how my proposed new product or service could return a
profit
”
The person could describe this idea by providing a long, disconnected narration of how they came up with the idea and what makes up the idea. Or, they could describe their idea in MECE buckets the breaks down the proposed product or services potential:
Revenue
(the first MECE bucket)
The revenue MECE bucket is then broken down for the listener in terms of
price
andvolume
(sub-groups of the first MECE bucket)
The proposer could then offer a second bucket to cover what didn’t fit into the first:
Costs
(the second MECE bucket)
The second bucket (costs) is then broken down for the colleagues in terms of
fixed
andvariable
(sub-groups of the second MECE bucket)
Each of these categories is mutually exclusive of the next, and together, each of these categories collectively exhaust the ways in which that product’s profitability might be understood. In this way, the proposer of an idea, the one with the expertise on that idea, communicated to his or her listeners a way to understand that idea by providing sub-parts that are exclusive of one another while still offering coverage of the expert idea trying to be communicated.
Written as formula, here’s the classic breakdown of profit that our proposer used to communicate their new idea:
P = R - C
R = price + volume
C = fixed + variable
If you are “being MECE,” that means you are breaking down a complex problem into categories that are distinct from one another while also covering all your bases.
The next time you have to do the difficult work of translating your expertise to others you might considering taking a moment to plan out what sub-parts make up that idea before you talk about it to your listener.
An additional benefit to using MECE + Bucketing is that it forces you to consider the conceptual categories that make up whatever is you’re trying to explain to your colleague in the first place (whether omelets, profits, or anything in between).
The added benefit to using MECE + bucketing as a structure to communicate is that it helps you facilitate rhetorical invention: a fancy way of saying that it helps you generate information.
By making categories (especially ones that you might otherwise overlook) you are compelled to fill them with information. Such information might just help your listener understand what it is you’re trying to tell them.
Whether in your professional or personal life, try out MECE buckets to identify, name, and order the various components of a big idea, proposal, or problem you have when you communicate it to your colleagues.
Communicating a big idea when accompanied with some rhetorical structure will not only show them how deep your knowledge goes, but give them an opportunity to ask questions and learn from that depth of knowledge. In showing your colleagues what you mean and inviting them to share that vision, you can help foster productive conflicts that center on the content of what is being said and not just the pedigree of who’s saying it.
It would be interesting to see how this is related to a more inclusive notion of "framing" that gives us the chosen or "invented" larger picture that would be especially significant in a argument. (To the Expert: "Now let me think a minute: I didn't get what that "collectively exhaustive" figure was trying to say or how it affected the MECE figure.) And isn't price affected by the volume produced or sold?.. Did you like my qualifier? LF