Sesame Street Simple

Keeping things simple is not about dumbing down.
Bob Sutton writes:

...if a message is too complicated understand, it is also means that the implications for action are impossible to understand as well.

He's writing about the way executives in large organisations communicate:

...although executives who talk about many ideas and complex ideas will be viewed as smarter -- wiser and more effective executives pick just a few simple messages and repeat them over and over again until people throughout the organization internalise them and use them to guide action.

We pay teachers to dumb things down...
It's not only in large organisations where this is true.

• We pay experts to pay attention and to brainstorm; they're connoisseurs of the complex.
• We pay teachers to synthesise and summarise.
• You can fulfil the role of both 'expert' and 'teacher'. But not at the same time.

Anybody who's ever taught knows the feeling(and the point of this blog is that everybody is a teacher, no exceptions). You feel you're not doing the subject justice.

Here's a brief guide for how to act when you feel this way. Should you take learners on a tour of the twists and turns or, as AG Lafley, CEO at Procter & Gamble says, keep it Sesame Street Simple?

Instructions: Use the flowchart to work out how to present your message and where you're going to add value. [Click it to make it larger]

The most important point here is not that you can't help learners appreciate and understand the complexities. But you can't do it while standing at the front of a class or a lecture hall. Or while chairing a meeting or 'supervising' an employee.

More on what I mean by experiential in future posts. But, in the meantime, I'd appreciate all your thoughts. What do you think 'experiential' means? Experiential Schmechschmeriential? Or experiential = explorential?