“Talk to me as if I was a 5-year-old”

… and the essence behind communicating technology

Communicating technology is not as difficult nor as easy as one may think.

As we live in a more global, digitised world, there are many new startups being founded every minute, and many of them will achieve the phase in which they will need to do some PR about their solutions. Some of them are more understandable — e.g. micro-mobility platforms, remote doctors’ appointments app, among others -, as they solve a problem of our daily lives. So, despite the technology behind them, everyone understands what they do. It’s not so easy when you’re talking about deep tech, industry 4.0, crypto, blockchain, and all those jargon that makes people’s eyebrows frown.

It seems like rocket science, but it does not need to be.

As I started my job in PR in an internship at a university’s press office, my main job was to disclose the scientific investigation that was being developed in its several faculties. Cool right? Very, and pretty challenging as well. From Social Sciences to Neurosciences, from Chemistry to Psychology, I met with dozens of investigators that are top of their field, and it felt overwhelming and exciting — I discovered that it was possible to have a job in which I could actually learn and do something different every single day.

And do you know what all these 1 to 1 (well, 1 to 2, as I always went with my mentor) meetings had in common? They all started with the same sentence: “Well doctor, explain to me what your research does, and talk to me as if I was a 5-year-old”.

Why? You may think… The answer to this question is the essence behind the communication of technology.

• i. If you (yes, you) don’t understand what the researcher is saying, you won’t be able to explain it to any other person — nor write a press release or article about it.
• ii. If you (yes, you) don’t understand it, the journalist — that is not specialized in any area — won’t understand it either. It may end up in two ways: he/she writes about it but the result ends up with some incorrections; he/she does not understand how it is important for his/her readers, thus does not write something about it at all. In both cases, you’ve done your job wrong, and we do not want that to happen.
• iii. If you (yes, you) don’t understand it and don’t give any feedback to the researcher and help him/her work on his/her messaging, then you are blocking the opportunity of this solution to reach a bigger audience and have a bigger impact on people’s lives.

I could continue with this, but I think these three reasons already make my case. So, having this in mind, now we must understand how to do this right and help both researchers / founders and journalists have great interaction and create all the conditions to generate a relevant output for everyone. Here are my two cents:

• i. Start by asking what the solution is and what it does [remember the interviewee that you are a 5-year-old, you have no idea what is AI or smartphones] — try to reach one complete and clear sentence. If you get it, it may end up being the tag line for it;
• ii. Did you understand? No. Ask again but now request for an example or comparison. I always remember a client that described their solution as the pacemaker for transformers and motors in factories. As a pacemaker does with a person’s heart, the solution also monitored and foresaw when the transformers and motors were going to breakdown and allowed managers to stop the production to do maintenance and avoid huge losses by stopping the production for several days, or by affecting the quality of the product;

[If you continue to not understand it, repeat the first two steps, and keep asking the same thing in different ways, or validate what you think you understood]

• iii. Did you understand? Yes. (GOOD!) Move forward to the next question — the purpose and the impact on a sector / society / other. This is very helpful to build the pitch and the press release. It is relevant how it does it, but what it does and how one can see it is the deal-breaker with the journalist and the reader;
• iv. By now, you should already have the storytelling drafted in your mind. Complete the gaps with additional information: how long did it take to develop the solution, how many people were involved, what are the next steps, are there already any use-cases, etc;
• v. Go home, write your ideas — sooner than later, the memory does not last that long — and improve your pitch on the next morning;
• vi. Remember an important thing — always validate everything with the spokesperson. Sometimes, confidential information slips out.

Of course, it may also require that you write down some words that you didn’t understand and didn’t have the courage to ask for the 10th time, so you can then google them when you leave the meeting, but it is part of the job!

In the end, the main conclusion is that in a fast-paced world, in which there are new inventions being created every second, if we don’t have the humility and the curiosity of a 5-year-old child, then we should probably be doing something very different than PR… For me and The Square team, I think we will continue behaving like this for a long time. 😊