Explain Yourself....

The phrase "Explain yourself" is one that in the wrong context can send shivers down my spine.  It brings back memories of the Dean of Discipline in my secondary school, probing the extent of a fellow pupil's misdemeanour to help define the punishment. 

In our professional context, though, it's something we probably do every day.  And I'm thinking about it tonight as I just finished the draft of an article, and I'm hoping I got it right.  From simply coaching a member of staff in a new concept, through to detailed justification of the results of our work, explaining is one of those skills that sets apart a consulting engineer from a good design engineer. 

But like any skill, it can be improved.  I'm not sure exactly why I first stumbled on Lee Lefever's book "The Art of Explanation", but once I bought it, it's been a significant contribution to how I approach explaining, and even to how I explain explaining. 

One of the best bits of the book is an A-Z scale of explanation.  As illustrated here, we do often live in a bubble where we expect that everyone else knows what we know.  On an A-Z, we're maybe at W or X, and a lot of our peers are in a similar place.  But not everyone is.

I remember after 3 years in chemical engineering being a bit amazed that some of the arts students we met didn't know what Reynold's number was, as it was in at least one lecture we had per week, or even at times one a day.  For us, it was like someone not knowing that "A" was a letter, or even what an alphabet was.  But normal people did live outside our bubble, and Re was not a big part of their life.  What I now do is ask people on the scale where they are, and try to tailor my explanation accordingly. 

Do check out the book, and see if it helps.  My copy is on loan to another good explainer I know, but I've got the Kindle version on the iPad for emergencies.

[And by the way, Reynolds number is an expression of the ratio of inertial forces (how easily things flow) and viscous forces (how difficult other things make it to flow), and is a fundamental concept across chemical engineering.  Actually, maybe I'm a little outside that bubble now, and could use someone else's explanation.  Still remember the formula, though.]

Learning and Exploring without wikis.

My daughter's homework the other weekend was to create an A-Z of Europe, but without countries or capital cities.  The instructions suggested composers, landmarks, rivers, etc.  She asked me to go onto the computer to do it, but to be honest, I couldn't see how you even start such a task on the computer, apart from of course copying someone else's A-Z.

So, at 5pm on a Saturday, we were off to WH Smith down the village for a book on Europe.  No such luck, so we came back with a school atlas, and a Dorling Kindersley Child's Encyclopedia.  We wiped clean the whiteboard, and by six o'clock we only had 3 letters to go, K, Q, and Y.

What I had was a very strong memory of my own childhood, and flicking through Childcraft, Children's Britannica, and various children's encyclopedias of science and nature.  My daughter was quickly skimming through the book, dismissing anything that wasn't about Europe, but with a few "cool"'s, a few "look at this Dad", and longer than she strictly needed to at the horses section.  She had a good look through all of it, and has brought it into school for further reading.

It reminded me that the first instinct of the current generation to go to the internet for everything may not always be the best.  That a large colourful book can hold it's own fascination, and add a few facts in along the way.  And that you can complete a homework research task without a computer.

(And by the way, we used "Lakes of Killarney", "Quimper" in Britanny and "Yves Saint Laurent" to finish the list.  Sibelius was our random composer, although she's more familiar with Swedish House Mafia.)