Albert Einstein: "If You Can't Explain it to Six-Year-Old, You Don't Understand it Yourself"

How to apply Albert Einstein’s quote to product presentation

Knowing presentation content

Einstein is attributed to saying this quote. It applies well to complex tasks like product innovation, where much uncertainty exists in discovering what customers truly want and need. I argue that most uncertainties in business can be broken down into bite-sized topics that are easy to comprehend and explain to others. We all have endured ineffective presentations where the speaker goes overboard on incongruent content to make his/her point while failing to address the basic questions on most peoples’ minds.

It is important that you understand your subject matter before you start speaking.

Content is central to any presentation. Your content must be accurate, factual, and well-organized before you start adding any kinds of bells and whistles along with it. In an ideal world, you would have a thorough knowledge of your subject matter before you start to present, but we all know that doesn’t happen every time. Our clients and supervisors give us assignments just outside our comfort zones, or we change jobs and have to learn new product lines, or a new issue comes up that we have to quickly learn, digest, and be able to explain to someone else.

In the field of product innovation, we need to anticipate and address fundamental questions in “plain speak.” While there is no absolute list of authoritative questions to ask, your short list includes: who is the customer, what is their point of view / discovered need, what is the idea we intend to exploit, how will the product we develop to be used to create value, how will the product be sold … to whom, who will buy it and why, what are the risks of failure, what is the idea’s economic value, etc.? The goal is to understand the subject well enough to CLEARLY articulate the background, challenge, alternatives, approach, and value proposition of what’s being proposed.

Getting back to explaining things to a six-year-old, I argue that even the most complex subjects can be interpreted and described in simple terms while being able to speak to the complexities if asked for clarification. Too often I have seen people fall into rat holes with too much detailed description, only to confuse the other sides at the expense of losing sight of the big picture. Relevant examples and analogies of like situations can be useful when explaining otherwise complicated subjects.

Memorization VS Understanding

As someone who was active in Toastmasters (public speaking) for several years, I am awed by the power of a carefully worded and easy-to-comprehend speech. One of the most effective speeches of all time, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, was only 701 words. Of those, 505 were words of one syllable and 122 had two syllables. Clearly, Lincoln was able to clearly communicate the essence of a complex agenda. He undoubtedly rolled up very involved details into discussion topics intended for the general audience, even six-year-olds. I suspect that if our16th President was in the office today with PowerPoint at his disposal, he would stick with his “honest Abe” style of communicating in simple terms.

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