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  At some point in your career, you are likely to give a presentation to an audience that is non-technical in orientation. The group may consist of executives, students, or members of a community organization. As you structure your ideas, you may find it difficult to communicate them in simple, lay terms. You cannot seem to escape the language of engineering. You find it a daunting hurdle to translate the technical information you take for granted as an expert into everyday language. You may resort to detailed explanations and esoteric examples, hoping this data will compensate for the lack of a compelling, easy-to-follow story. Yet the essence of your ideas still remains locked away in your mind, inaccessible to most of the world's population beyond the inner circle of other technical professionals. Your presentation lacks the quality of being interesting and comprehensible to ordinary people.

Maybe you're already found yourself in that situation.


The Wrong Way

How do you communicate to non-technical audiences? Perhaps you fall into one or more of the following circumstances:

 

You provide too much detail.

As a result, the audience loses patience: eyes wander; people get fidgety; facial expressions go blank; the room goes into a permanent silence; people stop taking notes; and nobody raises his hand with any questions.

 

Your humor is ineffective or taken the wrong way.

The ice is never broken: your joke receives no laughter, perhaps just a polite chuckle, possibly even stony silence; the presentation flows awkwardly; there are no moments of interpersonal buzz throughout the room; people don't turn to each other to acknowledge the joke, which can indicate that they are relating to it from their own perspective (which may differ dramatically from yours), or that they may be offended by your joke.

 

Your visuals are unnoticed.

Your visual aids do not assist you: facial expressions go blank; people stop taking notes; nobody is even looking up at the screen. You are relying too much on flowcharts, schematics, or graphs to illustrate what you cannot say effectively in words.

 

The pacing of your presentation is uneven.

You either find yourself getting stuck in one section of your presentation or suddenly rushing through another section. You find that there isn’t enough time left on the clock or that you are finishing with too much time.  In some cases, people may stop you to clarify a point because they didn’t get it, which cuts into your speaking time.

 

You find yourself having to be redundant to get the point across.

You keep describing the same thing and still people don’t get it. You try making the point three different ways, but there is continuing confusion. Although you repeat it again and again, people seem annoyed at your persistence.

 

Your audience is focused only on one point, not the whole.

 

You keep trying to move on, but people keep asking questions and referring back to another topic previously covered. They only seem interested in extracting information about this topic.  You have not planned enough content in that category.  You can’t go any further to answer their questions.

 

There is no follow-up.

At the end of the presentation, nobody requests more information.  They disregard the literature, exhibits, or activities you provided. They seem content to move on. Nobody even asks questions or tries to engage you further.

 

The media quoted the least interesting part of your speech, or focused on what you tought was a minor misstep.

The recent interview you gave for a technical magazine seemed dry in the published version of the article. They didn't even quote the ideas you felt were critical. Worse yet, you think they manipulated your words in ways that don't reflect your ideas or that they gave the impression that you were not respectful of members of diverse communities.

  In an age when technology is the dominant force of change, and complexity is often a measure of innovation, engineers are increasingly faced with the challenge of communicating their ideas to audiences who are outside their scope of knowledge and who come from communities who have not been well represented among engineers, so they have few community leaders from your discipline. Today, it is more important than ever for engineers to be able to communicate effectively to a variety of audiences. Consider these situations.
Sales and Marketing: If you are presenting a product or entrepreneurial idea to potential clients or business partners, you must be able to communicate its benefits, its functionality, and its economic potential. You must be able to find a common ground with their needs and interests, and make a compelling case to gain their business and support.
Public Awareness: If you are presenting your idea or research to the news media, you must be able to communicate its benefits for the marketplace, as well as the positive role it will play in society at large. You must be able to expand public knowledge and tap into the conscience and imagination of mainstream audiences.
Education: If you are an instructor or professor and your objective is to teach technical information, you must be able to communicate complex ideas in clear, memorable, and easy-to-understand ways. Whether it's for children or graduate students, you must be able to translate technical concepts into the language and culture of their experience, and to help them make connections with their own interests and experiences so that they can situate complex ideas in their own lives and communities.
Funding Sources: If you are seeking financial resources such as grants and endowments, you must be able to communicate how the contributor's support will facilitate your endeavor, and most importantly, how it will prove worthy in terms of social, educational, or environmental objectives.
Lawmakers: If you are trying influence public policy or create changes in legislation that will advance the fields of engineering and science, you must be able to communicate the issues that make the world a better place to live. You must capture the attention of lawmakers and make a sound case for your argument.

 
Effective communication educates, motivates, and transforms people. It requires craftsmanship and creativity to accomplish those ends.

This course will help you develop the skills required to communicate effectively to people without technical training. From gauging your audience to preparing that perfect sound byte for the media, you will learn how to incorporate powerful analogies, draw upon appropriate case examples, pose provocative questions, and use memorable visual aids and exhibits to engage your audience. You will learn how to design a well-organized presentation using pacing, humor, and redundancy to reinforce your messages. You will be able to create speeches, presentations, and written materials that relate both the technical and universal significance of all your objectives. And, you will be able to do so for a wide range of people from diverse communities.

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