Explain it Like I’m 5 Years Old
It is often said that there are no stupid questions.
We all know this isn’t really true. Of course, we have all heard questions that are breathtakingly stupid. And many of us have asked these questions. I know I have.
Any fan of the movie Dumb and Dumber recalls the scene where Jeff Daniels’ character asks a woman at a gas station if both of the skis strapped to the top of her car belonged to her.
OK, maybe I haven’t asked a question quite that stupid, but I’ve come pretty close.
As an interviewer, you need to get the smart-stupid framing out of your head. It is better to think about how a question serves your audience. And that audience could be sitting right in front of you at an event. Or they might listen at the gym later on Spotify.
I’m Afraid to Ask
Whenever I interview someone I try to keep in mind that person in the audience who thinks they are supposed to understand a specific business term or concept but in reality they have no idea what it means. They feel anxiety every time it is mentioned. Yet they are afraid to ask someone to explain it to them. After all, I am already supposed to know what it means.
Of course, you can turn to Google for an explanation. This can work but often yields a definition that leaves us just as confused as we were before.
Let’s all have the grace to admit that we’ve been there. At least once if not repeatedly.
Pretend I’m Just a Kid
I am that person all the time. But I am not afraid to ask. It's actually my job to do so. And it is incredibly liberating.
It is not uncommon when conducting an on-stage fireside chat or doing a podcast interview for me to interrupt and request a definition for a term most of us have heard, most of us understand (at least kind of), but at least some listening have little or no idea what it means.
Ostensibly I do this to benefit the audience. And this is true. Yet sometimes it is also to aid my own understanding.
Here are a few examples of when I did this for a combination of my own and the audience’s benefit.
Product Market What?
In April of this year, I was on stage at a conference interviewing David Shim. He is a serial tech founder who is currently working on the future of work startup Read.ai.
The term “product-market fit” came up. I knew that this meant when the market comes to you to buy your product, but couldn’t really spout off a concise definition. And I felt that I was missing something in my understanding of the term. And I assumed at least one audience member would struggle to define it. So I asked David to oblige us with his definition.
Here is what David said.
“Product-market fit is where you don’t have to convince people to buy it {your product}, they find it.”
OK, I was pretty close but he had a much better grasp of what this means than I did.
Recently I asked Houssam Kayal, the chief revenue officer of FOO (no relation to the band) to explain embedded finance on a recent BIG5D Podcast, which I host and produce for BigFive Digital.
Thankfully Houssam cheerfully obliged. You can listen to his response here.
So in the end I would like us all to normalize letting our guard down and admitting that sometimes we don’t have a solid grasp on terms we think everyone else understands.
And if you are ever in the position of interviewing someone, remember you are doing this for the audience. So even if you understand everything (or think you do), your audience likely will not.
