If you do want to improve your explaining chops then you need to start with the one thing that every explanation has: A plan. Since every explanation is a package of transportable facts that you are trying to copy into the head of your listener, every single explanation is built according to some plan. The plan may be well thought out or just cobbled together but there will be a plan. A carefully planned explanation is like a Leonardo da Vinci drawing or a Dutch masters' paintings, enjoyable and functional.

Even if you don’t consciously plan your explanation, it will still have a plan, what I think of as the default plan. Instead of laying out the important ideas and facts in a logical sequence, with the default plan you take more of a stream of consciousness approach.

If you are a software developer and you are called on to explain the system you are working on, you might start with the last feature you worked on. Or the first. Of the part of the system you like the best. Or the least. Or the part that was going to be so cool but was cancelled. Or the part that always seizes up in production. All of which may be interesting — and possibly entertaining — but is probably not going to jell into an effective explanation. Like a Picasso painting, all of the parts may or may not be there, but what is certain is that they will be jumbled together into a hard to decipher whole.

As I say, you need a plan.

So if you want to avoid the Picasso style explanation you need to do a little bit of planning. This can be as simple as pausing to take a breath in the hallway before you jump into an explanation of how this thing works. During that breath you might decide to go for the top down layout for you explanation.

Imagine you are working with a developer who is new to your project and the two of you are going to tackle the next development task — perhaps you need to build a login screen. How do you orient your partner? If follow the top-down plan then you start with the big picture:

And then zoom in a bit:

And then finally:

None of this is rocket science — it just requires a bit of planning and thought. You start with the big picture, which provides the context, the setting for for your explanation and then you work down to the details.

I was recently reminded of the value of a top down explanation when I happened to mention at a party that I was in building a 3D printer in my spare time. Instead the oh that’s cool excitement I was expecting, I got a number of blank stairs. It was then that I realized that perhaps not everyone knows what a 3D printer is. No problem, you just need to zoom out a little bit and start with the big picture:

That’s the big picture, and now it’s time to zoom in:

And then everyone can be properly thrilled by my stories of motors and belts. Or at least they won’t be completely confused by them.

While my little tale of 3D printing is a decent top down explanation, my favorite example actually comes from the most famous speech in US political history, the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln delivered that speech at the height of the US Civil War and famously — at least if you are an American — it starts with these words:

Don’t let the archaic language distract you. Lincoln is starting with the big picture by going back to the founding of the United States (for him) 87 years previous.

He then zooms in a bit by focusing on the last few years:

And then finally to this afternoon, right now:

That is the entire history of the US from the beginning to today in a single paragraph. That is a first class top down explanation.

A second way that you can organize an explanation is to reverse the flow of the top-down explanation and go from the details to the bigger picture. So you start in the weeds:

And then work outward:

And finally the big picture:

It doesn’t matter which direction you do it, what does matter is that you connect the messy details, a log in screen for example, to the more global picture. You need to do this because it’s the context that is the critical thing that every good explanation provides. Look at it this way: All I have to do is reach for my browser and I have a billion individual facts at my fingertips. The thing a good explanation provides is how the facts fit together. Not just how a 3D printer works or where the password field should go but what a 3D printer is for and why we are creating the login screen.

So there you have it. You need a plan for your explanations, because if you don’t have a plan you explanation is likely to come out looking like abstract art: Lovely perhaps, but less than informative. So in this article we looked at top down and bottom up explanations. Either start with the big picture and work down to the details or start with the details and work up. The idea is to anchor the details in a context that makes sense to your listener.

Happily, top down and bottom up are not the only items on the explanation plan menu and so in the next couple of articles we will look at process and simple to complex explanations.

 — Russ