How to deal with people who are bad at explaining?
4 comments
You already have your solution. You typed it out.
You ask questions. You stop them and circle back to the overview and context. Ask them about the high level. Ask them for the pretty pictures PPT.
If they deviate from what you need, stop them politely and put them back on track with the excuse of "it will help me understand this better so I can provide a solution".
You ask questions. You stop them and circle back to the overview and context. Ask them about the high level. Ask them for the pretty pictures PPT.
If they deviate from what you need, stop them politely and put them back on track with the excuse of "it will help me understand this better so I can provide a solution".
I feel like this only works in small groups. Have you (repeatedly) done this in bigger groups? I feel like that's a great way to make everyone hate you. Although I must say that sometimes I have asked this question, and people seemed thankful because they also didn't understand a thing, but simply didn't dare to ask. This is a bit tricky, because if nobody asks questions, I feel like they all understand and I'm the only dumb one who doesn't get it.
> I feel like that's a great way to make everyone hate you
Maybe. But at least you'd know what the discussion is about. Or ask for notes. I can't say I've been in a meeting where someone asking questions was frowned upon.
You're on the right track.
Maybe. But at least you'd know what the discussion is about. Or ask for notes. I can't say I've been in a meeting where someone asking questions was frowned upon.
You're on the right track.
I am one of those people that is very bad at explaining. Please let me know if you have any additional resources for explaining things better.
Same example of things that I encounter all the time:
- Completely not giving any sort of context. This happens often when I'm pulled into a meeting to talk about feature X, and where the other participants are already knowledgeable about feature X. It would help a lot of they would give me some context on what the feature is about, but at this point it's already a meeting with 10+ people, talking about the finer details so I can't really ask them to start all over from the beginning to explain it.
- Trying to explain things by going into the details instead of talking about the higher level principles. For example by showing me lines of code, instead of showing me schematics of what goes on at a higher level before showing me the nitty-gritty details.
- Not explaining the WHY. Often, people explain all sorts of solutions without even discussing what problem the solution solves.
- Relying on mostly text instead of images. I often have to read walls of text that describe a system. Or I have to listen to someone rambling on about how a system works. But it's very rare that they pull up a quick sketch, some diagrams, some screenshots, or whatever.
This happens in 8~9 out of 10 meetings. It's extremely rare that people explain things in a clear way, and it's starting to exhaust me. These days it often leads to me just mentally checking out and thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch/dinner. How do I deal with this? What are your strategies?