"If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better."
Johan Cruijff got away with it. Indeed, he was known for his intriguing statements. But unfortunately that does not apply to everyone. In fact, it seems like more and more trainers and speakers are making their stories so difficult that you have to at least have a degree in the subject in order to understand them. The frontrunner in this regard is Thierry Baudet who, during his first speech had to be reminded by the Speaker of the House of Representatives that plain Dutch is spoken in the House of Representatives, not Latin.
I have just come from yet another presentation on what I find a fascinating subject: vitality. Call me a professional idiot, but I find the question of how to keep yourself vital in these hectic times, especially how to ensure vitality within your team, immensely interesting. So in recent years I have consumed everything in this field and, just like today, visit many a conference with this theme.
My biggest (and immediately simplest) insight is that you shouldn't talk too much about vitality. You have to experience vitality. It is of limited use to explain exactly what happens in our brains or why we get tired of multitasking.
In an effort to be as complete as possible and spread deep-rooted knowledge, many a speaker tires his or her audience with so many facts and scientific underpinnings that half the audience is completely lost after 15 minutes. Often supported by a powerpoint presentation with so much text that the audience doesn't know whether to read or listen. There is sprinkling of expensive terms and difficult graphs that make it appear that the speaker is very knowledgeable. But you've lost me. And a lot of others around me too by the looks of it.
Afterwards, no one wants to be known. You hear the conversations around you, "What did you think? Yes, very interesting though." It is clear from the immediately following hushed conversation that both audience members actually have no idea what exactly the message was.
Not just from the stage, even digitally, you are regularly deluged with vocabulary challenges designed more to demonstrate the sender's knowledge than to elicit a response from the receiver.
An experience of my own: not long ago, a reader responded via LinkedIn to my column on the Tony Robinsson syndrome. In this, I make the case that you should actively use the momentum after a workout (new things learned) or after a vacation (new energy). That you should avoid falling into the daily grind. His response: "If you are authentically-autonomous, you only have to beware of nothing."
Well I must confess that I had to look up the term authentic-autonomist for a while. Fortunately I am not the only one, as the explanation of Peter Henk Steenhuis in the Allegiance. The piece of prose may have sounded interesting, but it didn't become clear to me how exactly it related to my column or what reaction was expected?
Of course, it's great if you have a lot of knowledge about a subject, that you've spent years studying it and have mastered all the jargon and expensive terms. But if your name isn't Johan Cruijff, make sure your audience just understands what you're talking about.
