That moment in an interview
We interview a lot of subject matter experts—people who know a great deal about niche topics. In almost every conversation, we reach a point where the expert wants to communicate a specialized process. But then she suddenly realizes her technical language will be meaningless to our audience. Maybe she can tell by the look on my face. That’s when she says something like, “Think of it this way.”
I look forward to that moment. That’s when the expert has chosen a critical piece of how they work and decided to reveal an important part of their story. They have chosen to unwrap something that had been enfolded in mystery because of their technical, expert-to-expert language.
In a recent call about manufacturing solar cells, our subject matter expert reached for a panini press (not literally) to explain a complicated detail that made a huge difference in how long a solar cell can last. I perked up because I am always hungry and because I could suddenly visualize the entire process. Putting the ingredients in a panini press and pressing down for a time, and out comes a (very) tasty sandwich. And out comes a solar panel that resists moisture ingress, which can degrade the cell inside. That’s a metaphor that is easily transported to our shared audience.
People once used their memory to invent
Scholar Mary Carruthers, in her book The Craft of Thought, wrote about how people living in the Middle Ages (400-1200 A.D.) prioritized the use of their memory.[i] They used memory differently than we do today.
The mediaevalist education system (at least for monks in monasteries) encouraged the creation of “memory houses” that a student could mentally walk through and stock with images. Repetition was a big part of how they trained their memory.
Remembering made these students better speakers because they had immediate access to images they had labored over, layered with meaning, and then stored in their memory houses. They could move those images around to gather, collect, and, especially, to “recollect” into coherent new thoughts. Memory was not just for recitation. It was for inventing brand-new things on the fly as people talked.
Eventually, they could saunter through their memory house, stop before an image, and unfold that image to release vast amounts of information. The point was not to remember essays and doctrines word-for-word, though that could be one result. Instead, the point was to have those thoughts immediately accessible for storytelling and sermons and to pull into conversation.
Maybe their use of memory is prescient for where culture is headed: Carruthers’ book is looking more applicable every day as we reach for video clips and memes in our spare moments.
Pull in reluctant experts
“Pull into conversation” is key for today, too. Directors, managers, and bosses interested in finding new routes around impenetrable problems quiver with joy at the thought of such potent conversations (and if they don’t, they should).
But this is no manipulative ploy to get cooperation and engagement from otherwise dulled employees. Aiming toward potent conversations is treating people like people, giving them the information they need, and seeing how they respond. Breaking out of corporate speak and expert-to-expert lingo to share a personal connection to the topic is a beginning point. The best metaphors come from our personal experience.
Carruthers makes the point that these medievalists may have been illiterate in the sense that they did not read. But they were far from illiterate in the sense that they did not think. In fact, maintaining images and stories in one’s memory house and reciting those things to others was a big pastime.
Telling personal stories is again a growing effort.
Given the rise of podcasts and our growing love of oral storytelling, the images we create carry lots of information. Advertising has known this for years, which explains why reasoned recitations of benefits always migrate toward to images of happy, hip people living a full life with whatever product they are touting.
Even more to the point, the medievalists moved those images around in their minds and thought with them. The same thing happens today when our knowledgeable teammate plants a strong and personal metaphor like a seed in our minds. Those seeds sprout into something brand new.
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[i] Carruthers, M. J. (1998). The craft of thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200. Cambridge University Press.