The Art of Explanation

Making Your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand

By: Lee LeFever

Narrated by: Tim Andres Pabon

Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

Your guide to becoming an explanation specialist. You've done the hard work. Your product or service works beautifully - but something is missing. People just don't see the big idea - and it's keeping you from being successful. Your idea has an explanation problem. The Art of Explanation is for business people, educators, and influencers who want to improve their explanation skills and start solving explanation problems. Author Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft, a company known around the world for making complex ideas easy to understand through short animated videos. He is your guide to helping audiences fall in love with your ideas, products or services through better explanations in any medium. You will learn to:

• Plan: Learn explanation basics, what causes them to fail and how to diagnose explanation problems.
• Package: Using simple elements, create an explanation strategy that builds confidence and motivates your audience.
• Present: Produce remarkable explanations with visuals and media.

The Art of Explanation is your invitation to become an explanation specialist and see why explanation is now a fundamental skill for professionals.

©2012 Lee LeFever (P)2014 Gildan Media LLC

Great but longer than it needed to be

This was a great book, but it was really much longer than it needed to be.

Introductory exploration of explanation

As Lee Lefever says, there is nothing wrong with starting at ground zero to help you take the maximum possible number of your audience with you. But I kept wanting the content to go conceptually deeper - to go beyond the introductory and to explore really powerful principles. My sense is that the book will serve to start many valuable conversations on the topic at the core of every professional explainer's / lecturer's life: how best to communicate the conceptual models that scaffold the learning process - but it won't necessarily be the source of the most powerful ideas discussed. With that said, there is something that I will likely always be grateful to the author for: the recognition that "explanation" is a potential surrogate for "conceptual model" - I have been looking for a plain English alternative for decades as the latter is a bit of a brain-full in many circumstances. It has made me smile many times since setting forth with the book to realise that this perfectly acceptable candidate has been sitting so near to hand all the time! In summary, I am happy to have read the book but am definitely in search of more.

Some Good Examples

The key elements for effective explanations are:
Purpose: Why should the audience care?
Package: How will it be presented?
Principles: Using simple language, visuals, and metaphors.

There were some good before and after examples to show how a presentation of facts can be turned into a story that the audience could relate to. However, there were some moments where the explanation was more complicated than necessary. For example, to gauge the audience's knowledge of the topic, the author uses the scale from A to Z. Why?? Using the scale from 1 (know nothing) to 10 (expert) would have made more sense.

useful but very technical

Struggled to finish it. There are some really valuable concepts on explanation but Learning about it via the book was long and painful. The scenarios and examples were helpful.

A tool for life

I wish I would read this book before my years in college. Easy to follow and with several examples.

narrator reads like slightly less human HAL3000

Book itself seems alright, but the reader makes it a struggle to listen. Wouldn't recommend.

Wonderful, easily applicable.

Clear concise information that will allow anyone to improve their basic communication methods and give framework for how, what, and why you need to get your message across.

A new way to think

I've now started thinking about the way I explain things - even the simple things that are usually taken for granted. They are usually the things that impacts understanding.

Nice book

Overall book provides several techniques, but some parts are hard to comprehend. Technical places are complex, places like "put a triangle, at the left put a stop sign without stop and at the bottom put three lines - this is browser" are not very impressing.

no beef

it is very repeteive tedious and lacks substance. it's a promotional sales for their services.