Increase Your Breadth to Be a More Effective Communicator & Facilitator

Increase Your Breadth of Communication Knowledge and Resources

To communicate and facilitate effectively, aim to understand four times the information you plan to present. This extra breadth doesn't mean overloading your audience with details but equipping you to adapt, answer questions, and engage people more naturally.

Why Breadth Matters

Knowing more about your topic builds your confidence and credibility. You'll be ready if someone asks a question you hadn't prepared for. You’ll explain concepts from multiple angles, making complex ideas clearer for your audience.

Extra breadth especially matters when you do not know the audience well or suspect hidden agendas.

Using Exercises and Props

Increasing your breadth extends to interactive exercises and props. Being over-prepared helps you pivot if the flow of the participants heads in a different direction than expected.

• Interactive exercises give your audience hands-on experience with your topic.

• Visual aids like graphs or diagrams help clarify complex information.

• Stories and analogies make your points relatable.

Reading the Room

Additional breadth will give you better instincts as you adjust your focus based on audience reactions. The goal is to guide the flow naturally and make the group collaboration more interactive.

Increase Your Breadth – Have More than You Show!

Great communicators and facilitators prepare beyond what’s on the agenda or what they intend to present. Increasing your breadth of knowledge and interactive exercises helps you stay flexible, confident, and ready for anything. So, go beyond the basics, and you’ll find yourself a more effective and engaging communicator and facilitator. Make every session memorable for your participants.

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Communicating with FINESSE is the not-for-profit community of technical professionals dedicated to being highly effective communicators and facilitators. Learn more about our publications, webinars, and workshops. Join the community for free.

Using Design of Experiments to Sort Through Randomness (and the perception of “best”)

The Annual Fishing Trip is an unlikely place for Design of Experiments but proves the technique does not have to be overly formal to sort through randomness and bias.

Design of Experiments is a tool for gaining deeper insights into how input factors influence outcomes. Confounding factors can create a false impression of causation or exaggerate or mask the true effect of the primary variables being studied. Asset managers, reliability engineers, data analysts, and other technologists are well served by understanding this technique. Sorting through randomness and not taking “best” on face value are important outcomes.

The Great Fishing Competition

Andy and I had been fishing together for nearly 20 years, including an annual weeklong fishing trip. The debate over who was the better fisherman had surfaced countless times in bars and over beers. We designed a plan based on my experience with the Design of Experiments. We would fish twice per day for a week on the annual fishing trip and isolate one or more confounding factors each day.

What is the Purpose of Design of Experiments?

Design of Experiments (DOE) aims to systematically plan, conduct, and analyze experiments to understand the relationships between inputs and outputs. It helps researchers and practitioners optimize processes, products, and systems.

The goal of the DOE is to:

1. Identify Cause-and-Effect Relationships

2. Optimize Processes and Products

3. Control Variation

4. Test Multiple Factors Simultaneously

5. Minimize Confounding Factors

6. Improve Decision Making

The Full Story of the Great Fishing Competition

 DOE achieves isolation of factors through:

1. Randomization

2. Blocking

3. Factorial Designs

4. Replication

5. Control Groups

   
   

By systematically planning and analyzing experiments, DOE can identify and mitigate the impact of confounding factors, leading to more reliable and valid conclusions.

What Professions Use Design of Experiments The Most?

Engineering, food science, pharmaceuticals, marketing & consumer research, and data analytics are areas where you will commonly find forms of Design of Experiments.

It Is Not Always “Statistical” In Practice

The Great Fishing Competition is a good example of how the Design of Experiments does not have to be statistical to provide definitive insights. In practice, isolating different variables through a few tests can provide enough insight that one thing is not necessarily better than the other.

Andy and I are both pretty good fishermen.

We Are Both Good Fisherman

In the end, there was no clear winner of the Great Fishing Competition. After a tough seven-day battle, a single fish on the last cast of the last day proved to be the difference maker. Andy won the competition by the most weight (pounds) of fish, but I caught a few more and the biggest fish.

Our informal Design of Experiments provided enough information to sort through the randomness and our biases. We are both pretty good fishermen.

With all its unpredictability, the ocean has its own way of deciding who the better fisherman is on any given day.

References:

Wikipedia

The Reliability Handbook

The Great Fishing Competition

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Sign up for monthly updates related to our firm.

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JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE fishbone diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.

Include People in Your Visuals

Visuals that include people have the power to build empathy and humanize complex information

As technical professionals, our discussions often revolve around pumps, pipes, facilities, and manufacturing processes. It’s easy to overlook the human element in these discussions because humans are not the primary focus. However, images that include people have the power to build empathy, humanize complex information, and enhance social media appeal. This means that as technical professionals, we have a significant role in influencing and informing decision makers by including people in our visuals.

Images Help Visualize the Human Impact

Leaders can better gauge their choices' direct influence on employees, customers, or the general public.

Attaching people to the images of technical work is a primary lesson we teach as part of the FINESSE fishbone diagram. The personal element fosters empathy and can prompt more thoughtful, people-centered decision-making.

Images Help Humanize Abstract, Complex Information

Images with people allow decision makers to see themselves in a similar situation. Therefore, human-centered images help to bridge the gap between complex information and real-world applications.

Social Media Has Created a Preference for Images of People

Images with human faces or actions perform better on social media due to their relatability and emotional appeal. Beyond the embedded appeal to decision makers, including people in images make them readily available for the media and the public to consume and re-share your information.

Include People in Your Visuals

Images featuring people build empathy and humanize abstract, complex information. Social media has also embedded an expectation and an interest in people being in our visuals. Using this practice makes the work of technical professionals more effective.

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Founded by JD Solomon, Communicating with FINESSE is a not-for-profit community of technical professionals dedicated to being highly effective communicators and facilitators. Learn more about our publications, webinars, and workshops. Join the community for free.